Case Study

Automating lead assignment for a multi-location Canadian marine broker

Sales Hub • Data Hub

Challenge

A multi-location boat dealer and Canadian marine broker that sells new and pre-owned powerboats and yachts across several showrooms and brands.

The dealer had outgrown a legacy CRM that relied on manual handoffs and simple rules. As the company expanded across regions and manufacturers, three problems emerged:

Complex assignment rules (by geographic location, by boat manufacturer/brand, and by listing owner) weren’t supported by the legacy system. Teams spent too much time triaging and reassigning leads manually.
Leads were slipping through the cracks because there was no robust “no-activity” fail-safe or clear escalation path to management for manual review.
Unclear listing broker insights — the company lacked organization-wide clarity about listing brokers and their sales activities, which made it hard to see which agents were actively selling which boats.

The client engaged No Bounds Digital to replace the legacy process with a HubSpot-based system that would scale with growth and remove manual bottlenecks.

Solution

No Bounds Digital implemented HubSpot and delivered a set of workflow automations, targeted custom workflow actions, and fail-safes that together provided robust, scalable lead routing and qualification.

Automated lead assignment by location and manufacturer

Inbound leads are assigned automatically based on the prospect’s geographic location and the boat manufacturer/brand they’re enquiring about. This preserved brand-level expertise of certain brokers and routed leads to the correct regional team or listing broker instead of relying on manual triage.

Multi-stage “Listing Lead Assignment” workflows with fail-safes and escalation

A family of lead-lifecycle automations (LLA1 → LLA4, etc.) enforces business rules. Initial workflows handle breakdown and qualification and include branches for edge cases where a listing can’t be found or the source is ambiguous; those branches put records into a management triage path. Timer-based countdowns move leads through the assignment funnel; if a lead receives no activity it is redistributed or escalated to a pool or management for manual review, preventing leads from being left unworked.

Day-parted auto-response and sequences

We added a day-parting mechanism so an appropriate auto-response is sent depending on business hours vs. after-hours. A small piece of custom code detects the day part and updates the contact record, and a contact workflow enrolls the contact into the correct sequence (lead workflows cannot directly enroll contacts).

Listing ownership copied and synchronized across objects

Because some assignment actions must originate from contact or standard objects, we implemented a pattern that copies Listing Detail owner → Contact owner → Lead owner where appropriate, so industry contacts and listing owners remain aligned and industry contacts always stay with the assigned listing owner. This removed assignment ambiguity and dramatically reduced broker/agent assignment errors.

Custom coded workflow actions to handle associations

To reliably link HubSpot’s standard objects (leads and contacts) with the dealer’s custom boat listings data, we developed small custom workflow actions to create and maintain associations and surface listing metadata (for example a Lead URL property). Those custom actions ensured records were associated reliably even when the standard workflow UI was insufficient.

Robust inbox & manual lead handling

Conversation-inbox → workflow patterns were designed for Craigslist, voicemail inboxes, and manually created leads (walk-ins, calls, Facebook) so these nonstandard sources flow into the same assignment and escalation paths rather than bypassing the system. The same assignment rules and fail-safes apply across all inbound channels.

Technical Implementation Highlights

Custom workflow code: server-side modules that associate a lead/contact with a boat listing custom object, detect business vs. after hours and set contact properties, and return outputs to HubSpot workflows to enable downstream enrollment and notifications.
Workflows: a set of lead workflows (LLA1–LLA6) handling brand/location branching, timers, reminders, and management escalation, plus companion contact workflows to copy owners and enroll people into sequences.
Owner copy pattern: using the contact object as the bridge to reliably set lead ownership from listing data ensured the listing broker is visible and correct across the system.

Results

After rollout the dealer saw operational improvements:

Faster, reliable lead assignment. Leads that had previously required manual triage are now assigned programmatically when they enter the system — by region and by manufacturer/brand — saving staff time and accelerating first response.
No more leads falling through the cracks. Timer-based reassignments and explicit escalation to the management pool ensure unworked leads are redistributed or triaged, preventing silent failures.
Clear, organization-wide sales activity insights. Copying the listing owner into contact and lead ownership created a single source of truth for “who owns the listing,” eliminating assignment ambiguity, reducing errors, and improving visibility into which agents are actively selling which boats.

Why This Worked

The implementation matched the dealer’s business model (multi-location + multi-brand + listing brokers) instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all CRM process.
A hybrid approach — HubSpot workflows for business logic plus targeted custom workflow actions for associations and day-parting — minimized custom code while giving full control where the platform’s built-in actions weren’t sufficient.
Built-in fail-safes and an explicit escalation path to management turned ad-hoc manual triage into a predictable operational process, reducing dropped leads and confusion.

By moving the dealer off a manual legacy CRM process and implementing a HubSpot-centric solution with carefully designed workflows, targeted custom actions, and management fail-safes, No Bounds Digital delivered faster lead assignment, fewer dropped leads, and company-wide clarity on listing ownership — all of which improved sales visibility and operational scale for the multi-location marine broker.