Best Practices for Evaluating Offline Leads in HubSpot

[ASobaci]

Hi everyone,

We’re currently managing a mix of online and offline leads in HubSpot. For online leads, we review them manually as sales accepted or non-accepted to analyze and capture similar accepted ones. However, offline leads are harder to manage due to high volume and manual entry.

Manually reviewing every offline lead isn’t feasible, as it could result in thousands of Sales Accepted Leads (SALs), which we want to avoid.

Does anyone have best practices, workflows, or automation strategies for effectively managing offline leads in HubSpot without overwhelming the sales team?

Any advice or examples would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

[ASobaci]

Hi Karsten,

Thank you for your quick response! Let me clarify a bit more about our offline leads and the challenges we're facing.

Online leads are indeed fully engaged contacts, people who have filled out a form or made a request. We already have an automatic scoring system in place to manage and qualify them as MQLs or SQLs.

Offline leads come from a variety of sources such as:

• People we meet at events or trade shows.
• Individuals who call our office to request a demo.
• Potential contacts added for outreach purposes.
• Prospects our sales team engages with on platforms like linkedin.

Our main challenge is twofold:

1. We want to see which sources are contributing to sales through these leads.
2. We want to avoid ending up with thousands of SALs (Sales Accepted Leads) but only a handful of actual opportunities, which would create inefficiencies in our pipeline.

Do you have specific suggestions or best practices for managing such offline leads in HubSpot? 

Thanks again for your input!

Best regards,
Almira

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

@ASobaci thank you for adding this context.

When it comes to the source, I'd recommend working with a custom property that clearly labels contacts from coming from a specific source, e.g. a custom dropdown 'Lead source' property. The default source properties from HubSpot don't offer enough flexilibility for this unfortunately.

When it comes to avoiding thousands of SALs, I would argue that this is mostly a definition problem. You could always assign an earlier lifecycle stage than SAL to these contacts, couldn't you? Is this mostly about not seeing a large number in your pipeline or is this about you not having the tools to prioritize which ones to reach out to first?

The fact that this is a large number of contacts which converts at a lower rate isn't necessarily a bad thing, isn't it? You would still want to work through these contacts. Is this about not having the offline leads drag down the conversion rate of online leads?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @ASobaci,

This depends a lot on who exactly these offline leads are. Who are these contacts, why would they be treated differently from online leads?

If it's purely about the volume, you might want to look into lead scoring so that you can more easily identify the contacts you want to reach out to first: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/scoring/understand-the-lead-scoring-tool

Best regards