How we stopped a Lausanne startup from losing leads between their form and their CRM
The sales manager reached out with a pretty simple problem: leads were coming in, but follow-up wasn't happening fast enough. Sometimes not at all.
She was at a SaaS startup in Lausanne, 15 people, things starting to click. Good inbound, motivated team, HubSpot licence that was technically set up. And yet deals were slipping.
What was actually happening
Before building anything, I spent a call with her and one of the reps just mapping the real process, not the one written in a doc somewhere, the one that was actually running.
A lead submits the contact form. Zapier fires a message into a shared Slack channel. A row appears in a Google Sheet. One of the three reps, whoever happens to be looking at Slack at that moment, manually creates a contact in HubSpot, looks the company up on LinkedIn, assigns the deal to themselves, adds a note, schedules a follow-up task.
Every single step was manual. Every step was somewhere the ball could get dropped.
The actual failure mode was simple: if the Slack message got buried, which it did constantly, the lead just sat in that spreadsheet. Unclaimed. The three reps were all checking independently, so sometimes the same person got two calls. More often, the Friday afternoon leads or the Monday morning ones never got called at all.
What we built
The replacement runs on n8n and went live in four days.
When a form submission comes in, n8n catches it via webhook. The first thing it does is check HubSpot for a duplicate. If someone with that email already exists, it takes a different path: update the record and ping the right rep, rather than creating a mess of duplicate deals.
For fresh leads, it calls the Apollo.io API to enrich with company data, industry, headcount, estimated revenue, LinkedIn. Reps were doing this by hand, 5–10 minutes per lead. The API does it in about two seconds.
With that data, a simple scoring rule runs. Enterprise accounts or certain priority industries go to a senior rep. Smaller SMEs go to the mid-market rep. Everyone else into a shared queue.
Then HubSpot gets a properly structured contact and deal, already enriched, already scored, already assigned. Stage set to "New, call within 24h."
The rep gets a direct Slack message, not in the shared channel, to them personally. It shows the company, the person's role, a summary of the enriched profile, and a button that opens the deal directly. If that deal doesn't move within four hours, a reminder fires.
The stuff that didn't work first time
First version went live and immediately hit something we hadn't fully thought through: leads from outside Switzerland and the EU using professional emails that Apollo didn't recognise. Enrichment came back empty, which broke the scoring.
Fix was a fallback path. No company data found? Still create the contact and deal, flag it "Unverified, needs manual enrichment", drop it into the shared queue. Takes a rep about 90 seconds to handle manually. Not perfect, but not a lost lead.
Second issue: checking for duplicates by email alone wasn't enough. Two people at the same company could submit with different personal emails. We added a check on company domain and flagged those for manual review rather than creating parallel deals.
What happened after
The first lead the new workflow caught landed on a Thursday at 18:47, outside business hours. In the old setup, it would have surfaced in Slack at a time nobody was watching. The rep got a direct Slack message at 18:48 and replied by email eight minutes later.
That lead became a customer.
Three months in, the numbers were clean. Median first response time went from 4.2 hours to under 20 minutes. No leads fell through. The senior rep, who'd been spending 45 minutes every morning triaging and logging new leads, stopped doing that entirely.
The sales manager's take: "I didn't realise how much we were losing until we stopped losing it."
What makes these projects take time
The technical build was straightforward. What actually took time was the discovery work, mapping the real process, identifying where things actually broke, designing the scoring logic with the sales team so it matched how they genuinely thought about lead quality.
The scoring rules changed twice during testing before everyone agreed they felt right. You can't calibrate that without the people who will live with the output.
Total time from first call to go-live: eleven days. Most of that was iteration and testing on real leads in a HubSpot sandbox.
If your team is working around your CRM rather than through it, manually copying, manually enriching, manually routing, that's usually a sign the system doesn't match how your sales process actually works.