Home · Solutions · Sales & marketing
Solution · Sales & marketingThe enquiry from your website reaches a named salesperson before the buyer closes the tab
Inbound leads qualified and routed in minutes, not days
Every web form and sales email is enriched, matched, scored and delivered to the right salesperson in Teams within minutes, with an SLA clock behind it.
Executive summary
Enquiries wait for someone's Monday sort while a competitor calls the buyer on Tuesday.
We build the routing layer between your enquiry channels and your salespeople, on the Microsoft 365 tenant and the UiPath Platform you already have.
Enquiries reach a named salesperson in minutes, at any hour and through whichever channel they arrived.
Dynamics 365 Sales; Power BI speed-to-lead report
Business problem
Speed to lead
Inbound enquiries do not arrive sorted. A web form, an email to the sales address, a card scanned at a trade fair and a partner referral all describe one thing: someone who wants to buy. Before anyone can sell, a person must establish who the company is, whether it is already a customer, which product line applies and who owns the territory. In most distributors that person is a marketing coordinator with a spreadsheet, and the enquiry moves at the speed of their calendar.
Waiting is the first cost, not the only one. Each lead is retyped into the CRM, so the database holds three spellings of one company and half the VAT numbers are blank. Territory rules live partly in a document and partly in the coordinator's memory, so some leads reach the wrong salesperson and travel back through two managers. None of it is measured: the only record of arrival is a mailbox timestamp.
At scale the process bends predictably. A campaign or a trade fair produces a week of enquiries in two days; the obvious ones are triaged and the ambiguous ones wait, and the ambiguous ones are often the large deals. When the coordinator is on holiday the sort stops entirely.
How it works today
Most B2B sales organisations run some version of this, whatever the CRM.
- PersonA marketing coordinator copies enquiries from the website form, the sales mailbox and event lists into one Excel sheet
- WaitingThe sheet is worked in two passes a week, so a Friday enquiry is first read on Monday
- PersonFor each row the coordinator searches the CRM for the account, then looks the company up in the national register
- PersonTerritory and product line come from a rule document, and the lead is forwarded by email
- Risk of errorA customer with a live opportunity is approached again by a second rep, because the check on open deals depends on someone remembering
- WaitingA wrongly routed lead returns to the coordinator, then to two managers, and reaches the right person a day or two later
- Risk of errorNo clock runs anywhere, so the time between arrival and first contact is unknown and unmanaged
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Time that disappears before anyone measures it.
- Speed is the part nobody prices. A buyer who fills in three forms on a Tuesday talks to whoever calls first; the enquiry that waited for Monday is answered into a decision already formed.
- Re-routing is invisible work. Each lead landing with the wrong salesperson costs two people a message, a manager a decision and the customer a second explanation.
- Retyping produces a lead database nobody trusts. Company names differ by a suffix, VAT numbers are blank, and the campaign report is built on exactly that data.
- Duplicate approaches damage live deals. Two reps quoting one customer at two prices is not a data quality issue; it is a conversation the sales director has to hold with a customer.
- Because no clock runs, the process cannot be managed. Closed revenue and pipeline are visible; the hours between an enquiry arriving and someone dialling are not.
Cost of inaction
Nobody schedules this cost; the sorting rota sets it. Two passes a week remain two passes a week, the next campaign produces the same backlog, and the reassignment loop stays part of somebody's Monday. What compounds is the order of the phone calls: the supplier who calls first has the conversation, the one who calls on Tuesday quotes against a decision already forming.
The quieter risk is a management blind spot. Without a clock nobody can say whether a weak quarter came from fewer enquiries, slower responses or worse leads, so the discussion turns into opinions about the marketing budget.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A European distributor of industrial equipment and spare parts: roughly 600 employees, sales teams in five countries, Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft 365 E3. One marketing coordinator in Warsaw collects the inbound enquiries.
About 900 inbound leads a month. Roughly half from website and product-page forms, a third from the sales shared mailbox, the rest from campaign pages, trade fairs and partner referrals.
The coordinator works the enquiries in two passes a week, copies them into an Excel sheet, checks the CRM and the business register by hand, then emails each to the salesperson she believes owns the territory.
About fourteen minutes per lead of sorting, looking up and retyping, plus the waiting between passes. A Friday enquiry is typically called on Tuesday, and a visible share reach the wrong person.
Every enquiry becomes a queue item within a minute, is enriched from the business register and the CRM, scored and routed by the published rules, written to Dynamics 365 Sales, and delivered to the named salesperson as a Teams card with an SLA clock.
In the modelled case the coordinator's 210 hours a month return to campaign work, the gap between enquiry and first call falls from days to minutes, and the sales director gains a speed-to-lead figure per source and person. These figures come from a model, not from anyone's books.
Proposed solution
We build the routing layer between your enquiry channels and your salespeople, on the Microsoft 365 tenant and the UiPath Platform you already have. Enquiries arrive from Microsoft Forms on the website and campaign pages, from the sales shared mailbox through the Microsoft Outlook 365 connector, and from event lists on SharePoint. Each becomes a queue item in UiPath Orchestrator within a minute, and that minute starts the SLA clock.
Enrichment and matching run before any person sees the lead. Robots confirm the company against the national business register and the VAT validation service, search Dynamics 365 Sales for an existing account, an open opportunity or a lead already in a colleague's name, and attach the buying and service history. Deterministic rules then route on size band, country, product line and existing ownership, from a table sales management edits rather than code.
The salesperson meets the lead in Microsoft Teams. A card carries the enquiry, the confirmed identity, the history and two buttons: accept, or hand back with a reason. Accepting stops the clock and writes the assignment to the CRM. A hand-back returns the lead to the rules rather than a mailbox; one nobody accepts inside the window moves to the second name in the territory, then to the sales manager's channel. Every step is time-stamped.
UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers and audit; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Outlook 365, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM; UiPath Action Center actionable notifications in Microsoft Teams; Microsoft Forms responses; Power BI reporting
The intake from every channel, the enrichment and duplicate matching, the scoring and territory rule tables, the CRM field mapping, the Teams brief card, the escalation ladder, the speed-to-lead report and the sales-operations runbook
National business register and VAT validation endpoints wrapped with UiPath Integration Service Connector Builder; the website form endpoint where it is not a Microsoft Form
How the automated process works
- AutomationA form response or a new message in the sales mailbox becomes a queue item in Orchestrator within a minute, with the source, the text and the arrival time
- AutomationThe robot enriches it: legal identity from the business register, VAT status, the matching CRM account, open opportunities, past quotes and service history
- SystemScoring and territory rules run on the enriched record: size band, country, product line, existing ownership, framework agreement
- AutomationThe lead is created in Dynamics 365 Sales, or merged into the existing account or opportunity, with the enrichment attached and the owner set
- AutomationThe assigned salesperson receives a Teams card with the brief, the history, two buttons and the SLA clock
- PersonThe salesperson accepts and calls, or hands the lead back with a reason; a hand-back returns it to the rules the same minute
- AutomationA lead not accepted inside the window escalates to the second name in the territory, then to the sales manager's Teams channel
- AutomationArrival, assignment, acceptance and first activity feed the speed-to-lead report in Power BI overnight
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Capture from every channel: website and campaign forms, the sales mailbox, event lists, partner referrals
- Enrichment: legal identity and VAT status from the register, plus the customer's history in the CRM
- Duplicate matching against existing accounts, open opportunities and leads already assigned to a colleague
- Assignment by the published rules, the SLA clock, the escalation ladder and the daily reporting
People decide
- Whether to work the lead: the salesperson accepts or hands it back, and the reason is recorded
- Anything the rules cannot place: a new country, a product outside the catalogue, a group customer under a framework
- Qualification depth, pricing and the first conversation, where a salesperson's judgement belongs
- The rules themselves: scoring bands, territory maps and SLA windows stay owned by sales management
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Every entry can be checked in vendor documentation. The evidence class is stated next to each one.
Inputs
- Microsoft Forms website and campaign enquiry forms
- the sales shared mailbox in Outlook
- event and partner lists on SharePoint
- national business register and VAT validation endpoints
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- Dynamics 365 Sales
- Power BI speed-to-lead report
Human touchpoints: the Teams lead card with accept and hand-back; the sales manager's escalation channel in Teams
Technologies used
queue every enquiry, run the scoring and territory rules, retry, time-stamp and log
Areads the sales mailbox, searches the CRM for accounts and open opportunities, creates the lead
Awraps the national business register and VAT validation endpoints used for enrichment
Athe salesperson accepts or hands a lead back inside the chat
Acarries the lead brief to the salesperson and SLA escalations to the sales manager's channel
Awebsite and campaign forms deliver structured fields instead of free-text email
Aspeed to lead, acceptance and source quality for the commercial director
AIllustrative economic model
The arithmetic is open, so it can be argued with.
Left out of the model: the enquiries answered second, where the real money sits. What stays in is fourteen minutes of coordinator handling time, an average across easy leads and those needing a register lookup and an ownership conversation, at €33 fully loaded for a sales-operations role in Central Europe. Both figures are illustrative, drawn from ranges we see in B2B sales operations rather than measured at a client.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- Enquiries reach a named salesperson in minutes, at any hour and through whichever channel they arrived
- The first call is a sales call: the confirmed company, the buying history and the service record are already on the card
- Wrong routing stops being a two-day loop; a hand-back is a button with a reason and the lead moves on within the minute
- Customers stop receiving two calls about one enquiry, because duplicates are matched before assignment
- Channel decisions rest on complete data, since every lead is created the same way with the same fields filled
- A trade fair or campaign peak no longer changes the response time, because capacity is not one person's afternoon
The management view
- Speed to lead becomes a number the commercial director manages weekly, by source, country and salesperson
- Territory and scoring rules live in one versioned table, so a change of commercial plan needs no memo to eleven people
- Hand-backs with reasons build an honest picture of lead quality by source, the input marketing has never had
- Coverage is visible: who accepts, who lets the window run out, and where the queue is genuinely too deep
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Security is designed with the process, not after it.
- The robot signs into the CRM with its own account, restricted to lead and account objects, so every record it creates carries a machine identity that can be filtered out of a salesperson's activity report
- Mailbox access runs through an application registration scoped to the sales mailbox alone; no personal mailbox is opened and no individual's credentials are shared
- The only traffic that leaves is an enrichment call to a public register; the lead data itself stays in your Microsoft 365 tenant and on an EU-region tenant of UiPath Automation Cloud
- Enquiry text is personal data. Retention on queue items and Teams cards is set with your data protection officer, and the CRM record stays the single retained copy
- Scoring bands, territory maps and SLA windows are configuration, not code: every change is versioned, attributed and reversible
Why now
The arithmetic in the model is a running cost, not a one-off: 210 hours a month go into sorting and retyping before anyone sells anything, and the enquiries answered second are not counted in it
Response speed is a commercial variable most companies still do not manage. Harvard Business Review made the point in March 2011 in "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, and B2B buying has moved further online since: a buyer researches, shortlists and contacts several suppliers in one sitting
The building blocks are ordinary now. Structured forms, a mailbox connector, a CRM connector and task cards in Teams are configuration rather than a development project
Relevant executive roles
Speed to lead becomes a managed figure, and the pipeline reflects every enquiry rather than the ones somebody had time for
Territories and scoring stop being a document in a drawer; reassignment is a button, and coverage gaps surface before the quarter ends
Every campaign lead carries the same fields and a hand-back reason, so channel spend is judged on qualified leads rather than form fills
One service account per system, supported connectors and an audit trail, instead of forwarding rules and a spreadsheet on a network drive
Common questions and objections
A card carrying the customer's history and two buttons costs four seconds, which is the point. What changes behaviour is the clock behind it: an untouched lead moves to the next name and the manager sees it, so ignoring it becomes visible rather than free.
Rules read what is there: sender domain, signature block, product words, country. Free-text email is routed on the fields the robot can confirm. Where that share is large and genuinely varied, UiPath Communications Mining can classify intent and pull fields before the rules run, and we would add it only once the deterministic version is live.
That is the argument for one configurable table instead of eleven heads. Changing a band or a country takes minutes, and the change is dated, attributed and applied to the next lead rather than announced in a memo.
When this is not the right solution
- Fewer than roughly a hundred enquiries a month, where a disciplined shared mailbox and a good CRM form cost less than automation
- Ownership that genuinely has no pattern, because every lead is negotiated between managers; a rule set has to exist before it can be automated
- A CRM that is not really used, where opportunities live in personal spreadsheets. That is an adoption problem, and routing leads into an unused system will not fix it
A question for the next management meeting
If an enquiry arrives on our website this morning, how many hours pass before a named salesperson picks up the phone, and can anyone in this room say the number?
Implementation approach
Delivery runs in stages, so it can be stopped at any point.
We deliver
- A read of your actual enquiries: channels, volumes, how many are already customers, how many get reassigned
- The rule tables agreed with sales management: scoring bands, territory and product mapping, ownership precedence
- Intake from the forms, the mailbox and the list sources, with deduplication and enrichment
- The CRM mapping: what creates a lead, what attaches to an account, what merges into an opportunity
- The Teams brief card, the accept and hand-back flow, and the escalation ladder behind the SLA clock
- The Power BI speed-to-lead report and a runbook for the sales operations team
We need from you
- Three months of inbound enquiries as they actually arrived, including the reassigned ones
- The current territory and product-ownership rules, even where they exist only as a habit
- A CRM administrator for the field mapping and a service account with lead and account rights
- One sales manager to own the SLA windows and the escalation ladder
Stages
Discovery
Channels, volumes, reassignment reasons and the rules as applied today
Design
Scoring bands, territory map, CRM field mapping, SLA windows and escalations
Build
Intake, enrichment, routing rules, CRM writes and the Teams card in your tenant
Validation
Replay of three months of historic enquiries, with sales managers checking assignments
Go-live
One country or product line first, with the coordinator watching the queue for a fortnight
Optimisation
Weekly review of hand-back reasons and SLA breaches, rule tuning, further countries
Quick win. Effort is driven by the number of intake channels, how clearly territory ownership is defined, and whether the lead and account model in your CRM is tidy.
Two suppliers called back the same day; the third enquiry sat in a shared mailbox.
Send us one month of enquiries by channel, your territory rules and the CRM fields you need filled. You get back a routing design and an error taxonomy for the leads that would still need a person.
Measure your speed to leadThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Deals close in the CRM, then wait a week for someone to set up the customer, the project and the billing.
View solution Sales & marketingEvery lead with the right adviser within the hourNine channels, four brands, one receptionist deciding who calls the customer back. The Friday lead waits until Monday.
View solution Sales & marketingCRM data hygiene: duplicates, stale deals, missing fieldsThe pipeline review starts with an argument about the data, not about the deals.
View solutionIndustries we deliver this in most oftenManufacturing & industryRetail & e‑commerceServices & IT