Lead Source property - best practices

[KSergieva11]

Hi all,

Do you have any best practices for properly using the property Lead Source? I am trying to outline a plan for better lead management and thought that starting from identifying where the leads come from is a good start.

I know that we can use the property Original Source to ease the process, however, the majority of our leads come from Offline Sources (integrations), so that doesn't really help us in identifying how to target them. 

Any suggestions? Thanks!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @KSergieva11,

Could you share a bit more context about what those integrations are?

Generally, I'd recommend the following:

• Make sure that lead source values do not overlap. I often see companies set up values like 'Social media' and 'Webinar' alongside each other – a contact can be generated via social media as a webinar attendee however. Lead source values should ideally be mutually exclusive.
• Consider copying values from the original source properties and drill-downs over to your lead source property, if that makes sense for what you're trying to achieve. For anything offline sources, consider creating workflows that look at the drill-down properties and also update the lead source accordingly, for example, if a contact has the offline source with a drill-down for ZoomInfo, create a workflow that updates your lead source to ZoomInfo.
• When you set up automation to populate these fields, make sure that workflows check for existing values. The idea of a source property is that it's capturing the first touchpoint, not whatever was last edited into the field.
• Consider locking the edit permissions for this property to make sure that lead sources are not overwritten by users – unless you want users to be able to correct incorrectvalues.

Hope this helps!

[LFagundes4]

Have you tried copying values? I was able to do it when I used HS with Salesforce (as it was technically copying to the Salesforce field), but I cannot copy original source data to a new "Lead Source" field unless the Lead source field has the exact same dropdown selectcions as original source data, i.e. we cannot add Trade Show, which defeats the purpose. Have you encountered this and if so, how did you resolve? I dont want to leave it single line text as at times, a rep will need to fill in lead source (if it came from their prospectign efforts)- this is the solution that HS support offered. Any ideas on how to handle?

[KSergieva11]

Hi @karstenkoehler , I have a follow-up topic on this discussion. What would you suggest we can use to narrow down the lead source? For example, we are going to combine all events into lead source = Events, however, I want to use one more property to narrow down the event name. I can't edit the drill-downs, do you have any suggestions or best practices?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @KSergieva11, you would have to create additional custom properties, specifically for drill-downs your interested in, e.g. lead source "Event" and a drill-down property "Events attended" with multiple checkboxes for each event.

Does that answer your question?

[KSergieva11]

Thank you very much @karstenkoehler , this gives me a starting point! About the integrations - we have 2 integrations - one coming from the customer support management system and the other one is coming from the integration between HubSpot and our website via a third party system. We mainly want to identify those leads as they are the majority.

[karstenkoehler]

@KSergieva11 great! In that case, a workflow that picks those contacts up, based on their drill-down values, could populate a custom lead source property 🙂

Have a great weekend! And let me know should any follow-up questions come up.