I’d like to know if there are any best practices in terms of automatic lead creation (for the prospecting space) when outreaching to companies/contacts?
Background: even though we have a policy to always create a lead (either from contacts or companies) when cold outreaching to someone, some salespeople don’t stick to that rule so potential leads are excluded in our monthly reporting since they haven’t been created yet - even though an outreach has happened. Therefore, I created a contact based workflow that a lead is created when a call has started. However, I’m facing a few limitations/difficulties:
1. I have two branches that check if a lead or deal is already associated to the contact, only if that’s not the case, a new lead is created (that’s what I want)
2. This doesn’t work when a contact is not yet created/associated to a company and the team makes a call directly to the company phone number (since call triggers are always contact based) - any solution for that?
3. I don’t want a new lead to be created if a lead is already associated to the company. I couldn’t find a filter for that expect a workaround: creating a custom property that checks if a company has a lead associated to it (if yes, that property = 1, if no then = 0). I can use that property as an additional branch in my workflow mentioned in step 2 but I can’t use it as re-enroll criteria so the workflow won’t work properly anymore if a lead is associated to that same company at a later stage.
Great question — automating lead creation in prospecting workflows can get tricky, especially with sales team inconsistencies. Here are a few suggestions based on your challenges:
1. Contact-based triggers:
You’re already on the right track using branches to check for existing leads or deals. For missing leads from direct company calls (where no contact exists), consider training the team to log calls through a contact record as a best practice — HubSpot workflows can’t trigger off company activity alone unless paired with a contact.
2. Calls without contact records:
Since HubSpot doesn’t support company-based call triggers, one workaround is creating a company-based workflow that checks for recent activity (like call logs or notes). You can then pair that with a condition like “no associated lead exists” (using a custom property or integration like Operations Hub custom code) to handle those edge cases.
3. Preventing duplicate leads at the company level:
Your custom property idea is solid. To address the re-enrollment issue, you might use a secondary workflow to update the custom property when a new lead is associated with a company. That way, your main lead creation workflow is simpler and re-enrolls based on the custom property state.
If you’d like help building out this kind of logic across your system, our agency Market Minds Creative specializes in custom HubSpot automation and could help you streamline it.