Inbound came through one form on the website. Two GTM teams sat behind it — enterprise and mid-market, each with their own AEs and SDRs. Round-robin distributed every submission across all of them in no particular order.
So an AE on mid-market could get a lead with a Gmail address and no other context, and end up Slacking RevOps asking what to do with it. An SDR could get a Chief Customer Access Officer and have to escalate up to enterprise, who'd get to it the next day. Either way, the lead waited for no reason.
Leadership had set up an inbound nurture sequence in HubSpot to keep things warm while routing got sorted. Standard playbook — 3 emails over a week: thanks for your interest, calendar link, case study. Reply rate was 20%, and most of the drop-off happened on email one — a generic “thanks for reaching out” that didn't actually say anything.
Inbound was supposed to be the cheapest channel. Prospects who'd already raised their hand, ACVs running $30K mid-market to $100K-plus enterprise. At their volume, the gap between 20% reply and where inbound should be hitting was high six figures. Leadership was concerned, to say the least.
Every account that came in needed enrichment — the form captured an email and a company name. We had to infer why they reached out in the first place. But we already had an inference engine running on outbound. So we just hadn't pointed it at inbound.
Everything else is the same — the research-based scoring system we'd built for outbound earlier. Signals from the company's website, the tools they used, their public-facing operations, their team structure, scored against the ICP framework leadership and top reps had defined together — now runs on every inbound submission.
When a form lands, the system enriches the contact and the company in the background. Two scores come back: a company fit score from 1 to 100, and a title fit score for the individual. Both feed the routing decision. Senior title and high company fit go to an AE. Junior title or lower company fit goes to an SDR. Mid-market size goes to mid-market. Enterprise size goes to enterprise.
From there, an agent reads the form data, the research, and the company's recent public signals — announcements, funding, hiring, reviews, product launches — and identifies the most likely reason this person submitted. New product that creates customer support load. Recent fundraise that needs to translate into headcount. Bad G2 reviews someone is trying to get ahead of.
Every artifact downstream is based on that reasoning — the routing decision, the rep brief, the email. The first email opens with the prospect's actual situation, connects it to how we'd help, and links to the right rep's calendar. Subsequent emails follow the same logic — case studies pulled from the company's industry, messaging tied to the situation the agent surfaced.
The AE or SDR opens HubSpot before the booked call and finds a research note in the deal record — who this person is, what the company does, what's likely driving the inquiry, what the right talk track is. No prep call. No five-minute scramble before joining.
End-to-end — from form submission to first email out, lead in the right rep's queue, research note in HubSpot — 2 to 3 minutes. No human triage. No texting RevOps.
Nothing changed for the reps. Same HubSpot, same outreach platform, same calendar setup. The system worked around them. If it required a behavior change to work, we'd have designed it wrong.
Every inbound lead now reaches the right rep on the first try, with research already done. The first email lands within minutes, built around why the prospect actually came in.
AE walks into the call already knowing who's on the other side. SDR doesn't get pushed up the org chart by accident.
As the system runs, it captures more. Every submission, every motivation the agent surfaces, every prospect that converts or doesn't, feeds the next one. Scoring sharpens. Patterns emerge — which features pull inbound interest, which industries are buying, which moments in a company's life make them ready to talk.
Those patterns sharpen the outbound scoring, feed the rep brief, and surface in win/loss reviews. Each loop reinforces the others.
Inbound is the cheapest channel you have. Find out where yours is leaking — and what it's costing you.
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