How do you differentiate Inbounds/Outbounds - Need your input!

[MGur]

Hello dear Hubspot Community,

In my company, we use HubSpot for both inbound and outbound leads. The way we get inbounds are through the marketing team and they are often through form submissions as when they want do download a content they fill up a form or they fill the contact us form. 

Additionally, we have outbound prospects which we get their info from zoominfo etc. 

So I wanted to ask, how you differentiate betwen cold cold and inbound leads. I would like to automate it as a lifecycle stage process. So, for example, the ones that are created by zoominfo etc will be registered to system as prospects and when they show some sort of engagement, system moves the prospect to the 'lead' stage.  I am actually looking for types of interaction that shows the prospect have some interest. For example; if they open our e-mails, been to our website, or like had a call more than a minute etc. I am not super specific, but I would love to hear your inputs on how do you utilize hubspot while having a clear difference between those two types of leads. Thanks!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @MGur,

Great question – one that lead down a rabbit hole quite quickly.

Generally, have you considered basing your distinction between inbound / outbound on the original source properties? https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/understand-source-properties These are automatically maintained by HubSpot and you would simply have to map each source to whether it's inbound or outbound. This mapping could be done with a new custom property and a workflow that branches based on the original source.

If the original source isn't detailed enough, the drill-downs should give you more options to differentiate. If you're not interested in the first touchpoint but the last, you could work with the latest source.

I'd be careful to assign a contact to inbound based on any form submission during their customer journey, for example, because they might have been generated via outbound activity. Just because they had an inbound touchpoint, doesn't necessarily make them inbound. But that depends on you and which definition you'd like to apply.

Best regards!