Marketing automation for SMEs and B2B: the 7 workflows you should already have running

On Monday morning the salesperson opens their inbox and finds twelve enquiries that came in from campaigns over the weekend. Three are genuine quote requests, two are from students, and the rest are contacts who downloaded a data sheet and asked for nothing. They call two back; the others stay where they are. In a month nobody will remember who they were. Marketing automation is there to prevent this: every contact enters a journey with written rules, set timings and an owner, and at the end of each step there is a number to look at.

In this guide you will find the seven workflows we recommend to almost every B2B SME, in the order we usually switch them on. For each one there is the trigger, the entry and exit conditions, the sequence with its timings, the content, the KPIs, the typical mistakes and a workflow diagram you can copy. We mention tools in general terms: the logic works on HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Brevo or whatever CRM you already use.

What to automate and what not to

It is worth automating everything that repeats in the same way and has a precise timing: deliveries, reminders, alerts, assignments, field updates, reports. Anything that requires judgement should be left to people: qualifying a project, a negotiation, answering a technical question, handling an unhappy customer.

The practical rule: if an action must always happen, in the same way and within a certain time, and today it depends on someone’s memory, automate it. If the answer changes depending on who you are dealing with, automation prepares the ground (alerts, gathers information, books it in) and the person does the rest.

Activity	Automate?	How
Delivering a lead magnet	Yes	Instant email with the link, event recorded on the contact
Assigning a new lead to a salesperson	Yes	Rule by territory, product or workload, with a task due
Responding to a quote request	Partly	Automatic acknowledgement, then a call from sales
Qualifying a project (budget, timing, decision-makers)	No	Phone or video call; the automation records the outcome
Reminding about a missed follow-up	Yes	Reminder to the salesperson and, after the deadline, to their manager
Writing a proposal	No	The CRM can pre-fill the data; the content stays with the salesperson
Reactivating contacts dormant for months	Yes	Short sequence with automatic exit if there is no response
Handling a complaint	No	Immediate alert to the person responsible
Cleaning up duplicates and empty fields	Partly	Automatic report, fixes by rule plus human checks

Three questions before you design a workflow

Before opening the workflow editor, answer three questions in writing. What must have happened for the contact to enter? What must happen for them to exit, both positively (they asked for a meeting) and negatively (no response, unsubscribed)? Which number will tell you in three months whether the workflow is working? If you cannot answer the second, the workflow will become a chain of emails that carries on even after the contact has signed.

Watch out. An automation that sends the fifth nurturing email to someone who signed a contract yesterday does more harm than no automation at all. Every workflow needs an exit condition tied to CRM stages.

Self-assessment question. Today, if a contact asks for a quote at 6pm on a Friday, who knows about it by 9am on Monday? And how do you know?

The minimum data you need: forms, fields, consent, UTMs, CRM

A workflow is only as reliable as the data that triggers it. You need five things: forms collecting the right fields, consents recorded separately, contact source stored in hidden fields, a CRM with clear stages and an authenticated sending domain.

Form fields

Every extra field lowers completions; every field you drop removes a qualifying criterion. It pays to differentiate: few fields for informational content, a few more for quotes, and the rest collected later through progressive profiling (one new field per form) or by sales.

Field	Lead magnet	Quote request	Why it matters
First name and surname	Yes	Yes	Personalisation, deduplication
Work email	Yes	Yes	Unique contact key
Company	Optional	Yes	Fit, link to the account
Role (closed list)	Yes	Yes	Scoring and content by role
Industry (closed list)	Optional	Yes	Scoring and relevant case studies
Company size (bands)	No	Yes	Fit with the ideal customer
Country or region	No	Yes	Assignment to sales territory
Free-text message	No	Yes	Context for the first call
Newsletter and promotions consent	Separate box, not pre-ticked	Separate box, not pre-ticked	Basis for marketing emails
Profiling consent	Separate box, if you score on behaviour	Same	Basis for scoring and personalisation

Use closed lists for role and industry. A free-text field returns “tech dept mgr”, “Technical Dept” and “technical” as three different values, and lead scoring stops working. And do not put “Other” at the top of the menu: half your contacts will pick it.

Consent, with caution

In Italy, where we work, Article 130 of the Italian Privacy Code (Codice privacy) requires consent for commercial communications sent by automated systems, including email. The law refers to the “subscriber or user” and does not distinguish between individuals and businesses, so the prudent choice is to treat named business addresses the same way. The Italian data protection authority’s (Garante) 2013 guidelines on promotional activity and spam also require specific consent for each purpose: marketing, profiling, disclosure to third parties. If you send to other countries, have your DPO check the rules that apply there.

In practice, for the workflows in this guide:

• the email delivering the requested content is a service message;
• subsequent emails with promotional content require marketing consent;
• behaviour-based scoring and heavy personalisation are profiling, and need assessing with whoever handles data protection;
• every email must offer an easy way to unsubscribe, and unsubscribing must remove the contact from all promotional workflows.

Watch out. These pointers are for designing workflows; they are not legal advice. Forms, privacy notices and consent boxes must be checked by the company’s DPO or data protection adviser before switching on any sequence.

UTMs and contact source

Every contact needs to carry with it where it came from. The form stores in hidden fields the UTMs (source, medium, campaign, content, term), the platforms’ click identifiers (gclid for Google Ads, fbc for Meta, li_fat_id for LinkedIn), the entry landing page and the date of first contact. First and last touch go in separate fields: the first is never overwritten. We described the naming convention and field list in the article on connecting campaigns, CRM and revenue; here it is enough to know that without these fields workflow 2 cannot tell a Google Ads lead from a trade fair lead, and workflow 7 cannot tell you which campaign produces opportunities.

The CRM: lifecycle and pipeline

The CRM needs two levels. The lifecycle stage tells you where the person is (contact, lead, MQL, SQL, customer); the pipeline stage tells you where a deal is (qualification, proposal, negotiation, won, lost). Workflows enter and exit by looking at these two fields, so every stage needs a written criterion and someone who updates it.

The sending domain

Automated emails go out from your domain, and their deliverability depends on its reputation. Google requires anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, offer one-click unsubscribe in promotional messages and keep the spam complaint rate below 0.30% (Google’s email sender guidelines). An SME rarely reaches those volumes, but the same rules improve deliverability below the threshold too, and setting them up costs little.

To do. Export the last hundred contacts that came through the website and count how many have role, industry, source and consent filled in. If it is fewer than seventy, the first job is the forms, before any workflows. The full checklist is in Appendix D.

Workflow 1: lead magnet delivery and welcome sequence

The first workflow immediately delivers what the contact asked for and, if they gave consent, stays with them for ten days with a few useful messages that lead them from the downloaded content to the problem you solve. It is the moment of peak attention: the person has just handed over their details.

Trigger and conditions

• Trigger: submission of a download form (guide, data sheet, price list, webinar registration).
• Entry: contact with a valid email; the welcome part only if there is marketing consent.
• Exclusions: active customers and contacts with an open opportunity, who only get the delivery.
• Positive exit: quote request, call booking, reply to an email.
• Negative exit: unsubscribe, hard bounce, end of sequence.

Sequence

When	Message	Content	Goal
Day 0, immediately	Delivery	Link to the content, two lines on what is inside, signed by a person	Download
Day 2	Deep dive	The most useful part of the guide applied to a typical case in the industry	Reading, click
Day 5	Proof	A case study or a clearly labelled hypothetical example, with figures and steps	Click on the case
Day 9	Direct question	Short, plain-text email: “Which of these three points are you stuck on?” with three links	Reply or segmentation click
Day 10	End	Handover to nurturing (workflow 3) or the newsletter	Continuity

Clicks on the day 9 email are used for segmentation: each link updates a “main interest” field that workflow 3 will use to choose content.

Content

The emails after the delivery work better when they look as if a person wrote them: a sender with a first name and surname, little design, a single call to action. In the first message, skip the company introduction: the person asked for a piece of content.

KPIs

• content download rate (clicks on the delivery link);
• clicks per email and percentage of replies on day 9;
• share of contacts requesting a quote or call within 30 days;
• unsubscribes per email: if one clearly exceeds the others, that message needs rewriting.

We pay little attention to opens: with Apple Mail Privacy Protection many are recorded automatically even if nobody reads them.

Typical mistakes

• Attaching the PDF to the email instead of linking to it: it is heavy, ends up in spam more often and you do not know whether it was opened.
• Putting all contacts in the same sequence regardless of what they downloaded.
• Carrying on with promotional emails without consent.
• Forgetting to exclude customers, who end up receiving “Find out who we are”.

Workflow diagram

[Download form submitted]
        |
        v
Day 0: delivery email (always)
        |
        +-- marketing consent? -- NO --> end
        |
       YES
        |
Day 2: deep dive
Day 5: case or example
Day 9: question with 3 links --> updates "main interest"
        |
        +-- quote / call request? -- YES --> exits, moves to workflow 4
        |
Day 10: enters workflow 3 (nurturing)

Workflow 2: follow-up of leads from campaigns

This workflow makes sure every enquiry from Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn or the website is picked up within set times, with an assigned task and a reminder if nobody works on it. It is the one that recovers the most value in the least time, because it covers contacts you have already paid for.

Trigger and conditions

• Trigger: submission of a contact form, quote or demo request, Meta or LinkedIn native lead form synced with the CRM.
• Entry: all new leads with an explicit request, whether new or already in the database.
• Positive exit: the salesperson records an outcome (contact made, call booked, SQL).
• Negative exit: “not qualified” outcome with a reason, or no response after the last attempt.

Sequence

When	Who	Action
Minute 0	System	Creates or updates the contact, opens an opportunity, assigns it by territory or product, copies source and campaign
Minute 0	System	Confirmation email to the contact with the salesperson’s name and photo and a link to book a call
Minute 0	System	Notification to the salesperson with the key details and a “call” task due
Within 1 working hour	Salesperson	First call attempt
Hour 4, if no outcome	System	Reminder to the salesperson
Day 1, if no outcome	System	Alert to the sales manager
Day 1	Salesperson	Second attempt and personal email
Day 3	System	Email to the contact: “We tried to reach you, when would you prefer us to call?”
Day 7	Salesperson	Last attempt
Day 10	System	If no response: “not reached” outcome, back into nurturing

Speed matters. A study published in Harvard Business Review covering more than two thousand companies found that those who tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify it than those who waited even one hour longer (The Short Life of Online Sales Leads). The study dates from 2011, but anyone who has asked for three quotes knows the first to call back starts with an advantage.

Content

In the confirmation email, say who will call the contact back, by when, and include a link to choose a time. The notification to the salesperson contains what they need to phone without opening the CRM: company, role, message, page of origin, campaign, previous downloads.

KPIs

• average and median time between request and first contact attempt;
• percentage of leads with an outcome recorded within 5 days;
• percentage of leads reached;
• share of leads that become SQLs, by campaign and by platform;
• rejection reasons, by campaign.

Typical mistakes

• Notifications sent to a shared inbox that nobody feels is theirs.
• Meta or LinkedIn lead forms downloaded by hand once a week.
• No mandatory outcome: the lead stays “new” forever and the reports say nothing.
• The same contact filling in two forms and generating two opportunities for two different salespeople.

Example. A hypothetical company gets 80 enquiries a month from campaigns. Before the workflow, the average response time was two days and a third of leads had no outcome in the CRM. With automatic assignment, reminders and escalation, the first figure to check after a month is exactly that share of leads without an outcome: if it falls, the workflow is doing its job.

Workflow diagram

[Request from form or lead form]
        |
        v
Create/update contact --> open opportunity --> assign salesperson
        |
        +--> confirmation email to the contact (with booking link)
        +--> notification + task "call within 1 hour"
        |
Hour 4: outcome recorded? -- NO --> reminder to salesperson
Day 1: outcome? ----------- NO --> alert to manager
Day 3: outcome? ----------- NO --> email "when shall we call you?"
Day 10: outcome? ---------- NO --> "not reached" --> workflow 3
        |
       YES (at any point) --> exits; if SQL, stays in the pipeline

Workflow 3: nurturing leads that are not ready

Nurturing follows on-target contacts who are not yet ready to talk to sales, with content chosen by role, industry and interest, until their score crosses the threshold or they ask for a meeting. In B2B it is the workflow that runs longest: weeks or months.

Trigger and conditions

• Trigger: end of the welcome sequence, “not reached” or “not now” lead from workflow 2, newsletter sign-up with an on-target profile.
• Entry: marketing consent in place; at least medium fit according to lead scoring.
• Exclusions: active customers, open opportunities, low-fit contacts (they go to the general newsletter or into no workflow).
• Positive exit: crossing the MQL threshold (moves to workflow 4), quote or call request.
• Negative exit: unsubscribe, no clicks for the whole duration (moves to workflow 5 later on).

Sequence

A sustainable starting cadence for an SME is one message every ten to fourteen days, for about three months, with different branches by interest.

When	Phase	Content	Expected signal
Day 0	Problem	Article or video on the most common problem for the role	Click
Day 12	Method	Guide or checklist on how to tackle it	Download
Day 24	Proof	Case study from the contact’s industry	Click, site visit
Day 36	Comparison	Criteria for choosing a solution or supplier	Visit to pricing or services
Day 48	Invitation	Webinar, company visit, demo	Registration
Day 60	Question	Personal email from the salesperson, plain text	Reply
Days 75 and 90	Maintenance	New content, then handover to the newsletter	Click

Conditions matter more than the sequence: if halfway through the contact visits the pricing page twice in a week, the workflow does not wait for the next email and alerts sales even below the threshold.

Content

Prepare content by phase before building the workflow. The table below is a good test: if a cell stays empty, you know what to produce.

Role / phase	Problem	Method	Proof	Comparison
Owner or managing director
Technical or production director
Purchasing
Technical office, maintenance

The argument changes by role: the owner cares about payback time and risk, the technician about specifications and integration, purchasing about terms and supplier reliability. You can find example sequences by role in the guide to B2B lead nurturing.

KPIs

• percentage of contacts that become MQLs during the workflow;
• average time between entry and MQL;
• clicks and site visits by phase;
• unsubscribes per message;
• opportunities opened within 90 days of entry, compared with contacts not nurtured.

Typical mistakes

• One sequence for everyone, the same for the owner and the technician.
• Purely promotional content: after the third “discover our product” email the unsubscribes start.
• No branch for strong signals, so a hot contact waits three weeks for the next email.
• Workflows overlapping with the newsletter, so the contact gets three emails in the same week. Set a frequency cap shared by all workflows.

Workflow diagram

[End of welcome / "not now" / on-target sign-up]
        |
        +-- marketing consent and at least medium fit? -- NO --> newsletter or no workflow
        |
       YES
        |
Branch by "main interest" (A / B / C)
        |
D0 problem -> D12 method -> D24 proof -> D36 comparison -> D48 invitation -> D60 email from sales
        |
At any point:
  score >= MQL threshold -------------> exits, workflow 4
  2 pricing page visits in 7 days ---> alert to sales (stays in workflow)
  quote request ---------------------> exits, workflow 2
        |
D90: no clicks --> newsletter; after 6 months of inactivity --> workflow 5

Workflow 4: sales alert at the lead score threshold

When a contact crosses the MQL threshold, this workflow hands them to the right salesperson with the context needed to call, asks for an outcome within agreed times and, if the contact is rejected, puts them back on the right track. It is the point where marketing and sales pass the baton.

Trigger and conditions

• Trigger: the score crosses the MQL threshold, or a combination of high fit and a strong signal (pricing page visit, returning to the site after a webinar).
• Entry: at least medium fit; no open opportunity; no alert already sent for the same contact in the last 30 days.
• Positive exit: sales accepts the contact as an SQL and opens an opportunity.
• Negative exit: rejection with a reason, or no outcome recorded within the SLA (escalation kicks in).

The score, in brief

The model we recommend keeps two scores separate: fit (role, industry, size, geography) and behaviour (requests, visits to key pages, webinars, downloads). It adds negative points for people who will never buy (competitors, job applicants, students) and decay for old behaviour. Thresholds are set at the start using common sense and adjusted after a few months by looking at the scores of closed deals. The template to fill in is in Appendix B; the full reasoning, with examples, is in the article on B2B lead scoring.

Sequence

When	Who	Action
Minute 0	System	Changes lifecycle to MQL, records date and score
Minute 0	System	Notification to the salesperson with the contact’s last five actions and content read
Minute 0	System	Creates a “contact” task due according to the SLA
Working day 2	System	If no outcome: reminder
Working day 5	System	If no outcome: alert to the sales manager
On “accepted”	System	Lifecycle SQL, opportunity opened, excluded from all nurturing workflows
On “not now”	System	Back into workflow 3 and reminder to the salesperson on the date given
On “rejected”	System	Mandatory reason from a closed list, possible negative score

Content

The notification is the most important piece of content. The salesperson needs to understand in ten seconds why the contact is hot: “Viewed the pricing page twice this week, attended the webinar on packaging lines, food company with 120 employees”. A score without an explanation gets ignored.

KPIs

• MQLs generated per month and share accepted by sales;
• average response time compared with the SLA;
• percentage of MQLs with no outcome beyond the SLA;
• most frequent rejection reasons;
• MQLs that become opportunities and then contracts, by score band.

Typical mistakes

• Threshold too low: the salesperson gets ten alerts a day and stops reading them.
• Repeated notifications for the same contact with every extra point.
• Rejections without a reason, which take away marketing’s only useful data for fixing campaigns and scores.
• A score that never goes down, so after a year half the database looks “hot”.

To do. Take the last twenty signed contracts and reconstruct what those contacts had done before the first phone call. The actions that come up most often are your strong signals.

Workflow diagram

[Score >= MQL threshold]  or  [high fit + strong signal]
        |
        +-- open opportunity or alert in the last 30 days? -- YES --> no action
        |
       NO
        |
Lifecycle = MQL --> notification with context --> "contact" task
        |
Day 2: outcome? -- NO --> reminder
Day 5: outcome? -- NO --> alert to manager
        |
Outcome:
  accepted --> SQL, opportunity, exits nurturing
  not now ---> workflow 3 + reminder on the date
  rejected --> mandatory reason, possible negative score

Workflow 5: reactivating inactive contacts

This workflow tries to reactivate contacts who have not engaged for months and, if they do not respond, removes them from regular sends. It does two jobs: it recovers a few forgotten opportunities and protects the reputation of your domain, which suffers when you keep writing to people who do not read.

Trigger and conditions

• Trigger: no clicks, no site visits and no replies for six months (adapt the window to your sales cycle).
• Entry: marketing consent in place; no open opportunity; not an active customer.
• Positive exit: a click, a reply, a site visit, a download.
• Negative exit: no engagement by the end of the sequence.

Sequence

When	Message	Content
Day 0	Useful update	The most popular content of recent months, with a line on why it may be of interest
Day 7	Question	“Are you still working on [topic]?” with two links: yes, I’m interested / no, not any more
Day 14	Choice	“Would you like to keep receiving our updates?” with a button to stay
Day 21	Close	No response: the contact leaves regular sends and is marked “inactive”

Even the day 7 “no, not any more” is useful data: often the person has changed roles, and sales can ask who handles it now.

Content

A simple tone, no fake urgency, no misleading subject lines. Short emails that ask for one thing, clear from the subject line alone.

KPIs

• percentage of contacts reactivated (at least one click or reply);
• opportunities generated by reactivated contacts within 90 days;
• contacts marked inactive and removed from sends;
• trend in bounces and spam complaints on regular sends in the following months.

Typical mistakes

• Using opens as the activity criterion: with Apple’s privacy protection many inactive contacts look active.
• Reactivating contacts for whom you no longer have valid consent, or imported from old lists.
• Never closing: inactive contacts stay in sends “so as not to lose them” and drag down deliverability for everyone else.

Watch out. Before launching a reactivation on an old database, have the addresses checked by a validation service. A burst of bounces in a single day can damage your domain’s reputation for weeks.

Workflow diagram

[No engagement for 6 months]
        |
        +-- valid consent, not a customer, no opportunity? -- NO --> excluded
        |
       YES
        |
D0 useful update --> D7 "still working on...?" --> D14 "want to stay?"
        |
At any point:
  click / reply / visit --> exits, back to workflow 3
  "no, not any more" ----> task for sales: who handles it now?
        |
D21: no engagement --> "inactive", out of regular sends

Workflow 6: after-sales, upselling and referrals

After-sales supports the customer after signature: project kick-off, a satisfaction check, offers consistent with what they have already bought, and a request for referrals when the relationship is working. In B2B a good share of revenue comes from existing customers, and this is the workflow most often missing.

Trigger and conditions

• Trigger: opportunity closed won; delivery or acceptance testing complete; contract anniversary.
• Entry: customer with an active contact; no open complaints.
• Positive exit: new upsell or renewal opportunity; referral received.
• Negative exit: low satisfaction score (the workflow stops and alerts a person), unsubscribe from promotional communications.

Sequence

When	Message or action	Content
Day 0 from signature	Customer welcome	Who the contact is, what happens in the coming weeks, useful contacts
Day 7	Kick-off	Onboarding materials: documentation, training, support
Day 30 from delivery	Satisfaction	A single question, score from 0 to 10 and a free-text field
Score 9-10	Referral	Request for a review or referral, with a simple link
Score 0-6	Alert	Immediate task for the account manager; the workflow stops
Day 90	Usage	Tips for getting more out of the product or service
Months 6 and 10	Upsell	Offer consistent with the purchase (spares, maintenance, extensions)
60 days before renewal	Renewal	Task for sales and a summary of what was done during the year

Privacy in after-sales

Under Italian law, Article 130(4) of the Privacy Code provides an exception for customers: an email address provided in the context of the sale of a product or service can be used to offer similar products or services without specific consent, as long as the customer has been informed and can object at any time, easily and free of charge. In Italy this is known as “soft spam” (in the UK the equivalent concept is usually called the soft opt-in). The scope of “similar” is narrow and should be interpreted cautiously: decide with whoever handles data protection which offers fall within it and which require consent.

Content

Sign every email with the contact person’s name, write little and ask whether things are going well before offering anything else. Offers should be tied to the purchase: someone who bought a machine gets the scheduled maintenance, not the whole catalogue.

KPIs

• response rate to the satisfaction question and average score;
• referrals and reviews received;
• upsell and renewal opportunities opened by the workflow;
• revenue from existing customers as a share of the total;
• low-scoring customers dealt with within a week.

Typical mistakes

• Treating the job as done at signature: the customer only hears from the supplier when the invoice arrives.
• Asking everyone for a review, including unhappy customers.
• Leaving customers in acquisition workflows, with emails introducing the company to people who already know it.

Workflow diagram

[Opportunity won]
        |
D0 customer welcome --> D7 onboarding materials
        |
[Delivery complete] --> D30 satisfaction question (0-10)
        |
  score 9-10 --> review / referral request
  score 7-8 ---> no request, continues
  score 0-6 ---> STOP + immediate task for the account manager
        |
D90 usage tips --> months 6 and 10 similar offers
        |
60 days before renewal --> task for sales

Workflow 7: reporting and regular database clean-up

The last workflow does not talk to contacts: it works for you. Every week and every month it produces the numbers you need to see whether the other six are working, and flags data problems before they break the automations.

Trigger and conditions

• Trigger: scheduled. Every Monday for the operational report, the first working day of the month for the full report and clean-up.
• Recipients: marketing manager, sales manager, CRM administrator.
• Exit: none; it is reviewed every quarter.

What it contains

Frequency	Check	Alert threshold (to be set)	Action
Weekly	New leads by source and campaign	Sharp drop against the average	Check forms and campaigns
Weekly	Leads with no outcome beyond the SLA	More than a handful	Reassign, raise it in the meeting
Weekly	MQLs generated and accepted	Accepted share falling	Review thresholds or campaigns
Monthly	New contacts with empty UTM or source	Over 10%	Check hidden fields and tags
Monthly	Duplicate contacts and companies	Rising	Merge, review deduplication
Monthly	Empty key fields (role, industry)	Over 30%	Review forms and progressive profiling
Monthly	Hard bounces and spam complaints	Rising	Clean the list, review frequency and content
Monthly	Contacts in several workflows at once	Any	Fix exclusions and frequency caps
Quarterly	Opportunities and contracts by source		Shift budget and content

The thresholds in the table are indicative: set them by looking at your own figures from the first two or three months.

Automatic and manual clean-up

You automate the normalisation of emails and names, consistent country and industry values, the exclusion of bounced addresses and the flagging of inactive contacts from workflow 5. Merging duplicates between companies with similar names and deciding what to archive stay with a person.

Typical mistakes

• A report with fifty numbers nobody reads. Better six indicators with a two-line comment.
• A clean-up done once a year, after duplicates have already skewed the reports.
• Deleting contacts instead of archiving them, losing the opportunity history.

Further reading. Linking these numbers to revenue, and sending outcomes back to the ad platforms as offline conversions, takes one more step in tracking. We describe it in the article from lead to contract, and the metrics to keep an eye on are collected in the one on B2B lead management.

Workflow diagram

[Every Monday]                           [First working day of the month]
     |                                          |
Operational report:                      Full report + clean-up:
- leads by source                        - UTMs and empty fields
- leads with no outcome                  - duplicates
- MQLs generated/accepted                - bounces and spam
     |                                   - contacts in several workflows
     v                                          |
Email to marketing and sales             Automatic fixes + list for manual review
                                                |
                                   [Every quarter] review of workflows, thresholds and content

Marketing-sales SLA, KPIs and continuous improvement

The seven workflows work if marketing and sales have signed an agreement on what they hand over to each other, how quickly and how outcomes are reported back, and if every month someone looks at the same numbers and decides what to change. Without this, the automations run but nobody trusts the data they produce.

What to put in the SLA

The SLA (service level agreement) is a one-page document. It must contain:

• MQL definition: fit and behaviour criteria, or an explicit request with at least medium fit;
• SQL definition: the salesperson has spoken to the contact and confirms need, timing and decision-maker;
• response times: for example one working hour for quote requests, the same day for priority MQLs, two working days for the rest;
• mandatory outcome within five working days, with a closed list of rejection reasons;
• marketing’s commitment: an agreed number of MQLs per month, measured on quality too (share accepted);
• review: a monthly meeting with the workflow 7 numbers on the table.

The template to fill in is in Appendix C.

The KPIs that matter

A B2B SME does not need dozens of indicators. These are enough to know whether the system is working and where it gets stuck:

KPI	What it measures	Source	Who looks at it
Leads by source and campaign	Incoming volume	CRM (UTM fields)	Marketing
Time to first contact	Sales speed	CRM (lead date, first activity date)	Sales
Leads with no outcome beyond the SLA	Process discipline	CRM	Sales manager
Lead → MQL rate	Quality of audience and nurturing	CRM	Marketing
MQL → SQL rate	Quality of the scoring threshold	CRM	Marketing and sales
SQL → contract rate	Sales effectiveness	CRM	Sales
Opportunities and revenue by source	Campaign return	CRM	Management
Unsubscribes and spam complaints	Health of sends	Email tool	Marketing

The improvement cycle

Once a month, with the numbers in front of you, ask four questions. Where are most contacts lost between one stage and the next? Which rejection reason has grown? Which email has the most unsubscribes or the fewest clicks? Which campaign brings leads that sales accepts? Each answer becomes a change to test, one at a time, with a date to check its effect. Every six months, recalibrate lead scoring against closed deals, as explained in Appendix B.

Self-assessment question. If you were asked tomorrow how many of last month’s MQLs were contacted within the SLA, how long would it take you to answer?

Where to start

If you have no workflows running today, this is the order we recommend: first workflow 2 (campaign follow-up), because that is where you lose contacts you have already paid for; then workflow 1 (delivery and welcome) and workflow 7 (reporting), which give you numbers straight away; then scoring with workflow 4 and nurturing with workflow 3; and finally reactivation and after-sales. Each new workflow only starts once the previous one has been running for at least a month without errors.

If you want to brush up on the basics (triggers, segments, conditions) before designing, start with marketing automation: what it is and how it works. If you would rather have support, that is the work we do in our marketing automation and B2B lead nurturing services.

Appendix A: Map of the 7 workflows

Use this table as a work plan. The “Owner” and “Go-live date” columns are for you to fill in.

Workflow	Trigger	Positive exit	Duration	Main KPI	Owner	Go-live date
1. Lead magnet delivery and welcome	Download form	Quote or call request	10 days	Contacts asking for a meeting within 30 days
2. Campaign lead follow-up	Explicit request from form or lead form	Outcome recorded by sales	10 days	Time to first contact
3. Nurturing leads not ready	End of welcome, “not now”, on-target sign-up	MQL threshold or request	90 days	Contact → MQL rate
4. Sales alert	Score above threshold or strong signal	Accepted as SQL	5 working days	Share of MQLs accepted
5. Reactivating inactive contacts	6 months without engagement	Click, reply, visit	21 days	Contacts reactivated
6. After-sales, upsell, referrals	Opportunity won	Upsell, renewal, referral	12 months	Opportunities from existing customers
7. Reporting and clean-up	Scheduled	None (recurring)	Ongoing	Contacts with complete data

For each workflow, before switching it on, check:

• trigger tested with a test contact
• exclusion conditions set (customers, open opportunities, unsubscribed)
• exit condition tied to a CRM stage
• frequency cap shared by all workflows
• consent checked for promotional emails
• copy reviewed by someone in sales
• KPI measurable in the CRM or email tool
• date of the first review in the calendar

Appendix B: Lead scoring template

Fill in the “Points” column, adapting the example values to your market. Keep the two totals separate: fit and behaviour.

Fit (who the contact is)

Criterion	Example values	Example points	Your points
Decision-maker role	Owner, managing director, technical director	+15
Influencer role	Technical office, purchasing, maintenance	+8
Role outside the process	Student, consultant, agency	-15
Primary industry	The two or three industries with most customers	+10
Secondary industry	Industries where you have a few customers	+5
Off-target industry		-10
Ideal size	Employee band where you sell best	+10
Acceptable size		+4
Too small		-10
Area served	Countries or regions with a sales network	+5
Outside area		-20
Work email	Company domain, not personal	+5

Behaviour (what they do)

Action	Example points	Frequency limit	Your points
Quote or demo request	+40 (goes to sales anyway if fit is at least medium)
Visit to pricing page or configurator	+15	Once every 7 days
Attending a webinar	+15
Registering for a webinar without attending	+5
Downloading a data sheet or guide	+10
Reading a case study from their industry	+8
Email click	+3	Maximum 3 a month
Email open	0
Visit to the “careers” page	-30
Unsubscribe	-20
Decay	-50% of behaviour points after 60 days without activity

Threshold matrix

Fit / behaviour	Low (under 15)	Medium (15-34)	High (35 or more)
High (30-45)	Targeted nurturing	MQL	Priority MQL, contact the same day
Medium (15-29)	Nurturing	Intensive nurturing	MQL
Low (under 15)	No action	General newsletter	Manual check

Recalibration every six months

• won and lost opportunities from the last 12-24 months exported with the score at handover
• percentage won calculated by score band
• threshold moved to where the percentage changes step
• weights of the most frequent criteria among won and lost reviewed
• recurring rejection reasons turned into criteria
• changes communicated to the sales team

Appendix C: Marketing-sales SLA template

Fill in the fields in square brackets, share the document with both managers and sign it. It should be reviewed every six months.

Parties: marketing manager [name] and sales manager [name]. Valid from [date] to [date].

Item	Agreement
Lead definition	Contact with a valid email and at least [required fields]
MQL definition	Fit of at least [value] and behaviour of at least [value], or explicit request with at least medium fit
SQL definition	The salesperson has spoken to the contact and confirms [need, timing, decision-maker, other]
Assignment	By [territory / product / rotation], automatic from the CRM
Response to quote requests	Within [1] working hour
Response to priority MQLs	Within [the same working day]
Response to other MQLs	Within [2] working days
Mandatory outcome	Within [5] working days: accepted, rejected with reason, recontact on a date
Escalation	If the outcome is missing beyond the SLA, alert to [name]
Marketing’s commitment	At least [number] MQLs a month, with an accepted share of at least [percentage]
Rejected contacts	Return to nurturing if the reason is “not now”; otherwise excluded
Review	Monthly meeting on [day], with the workflow 7 report

Accepted rejection reasons (closed list, to adapt):

Code	Reason	What marketing does
R1	Off target (industry, size, area)	Reviews audiences and fit criteria
R2	Not now, project postponed	Back to nurturing with a call-back date
R3	No budget	Back to nurturing, no action on campaigns
R4	Competitor, supplier, job applicant	Negative score, exclusion
R5	Student or information request	Reviews the content and forms generating it
R6	Duplicate	Fixes deduplication
R7	Unreachable after [3] attempts	Back to nurturing

Signed: marketing [] sales []

Appendix D: Data and tracking checklist to get started

Tick each item before switching on the first workflow. The ones left blank are your work plan.

Forms

• each form has a clear purpose (download, quote, newsletter, event)
• role and industry are closed lists, without “Other” at the top
• quote forms ask for company, size and geographic area
• the thank-you page says what happens next and how soon
• Meta and LinkedIn lead forms arrive in the CRM automatically

Consent and privacy

• separate consent boxes for marketing and, if needed, profiling, not pre-ticked
• consent date, form and wording recorded on the contact
• privacy notice up to date and linked from every form
• working unsubscribe in every promotional email, removing the contact from all promotional workflows
• use of the customer exception (in Italy, Art. 130(4) of the Privacy Code) agreed with whoever handles data protection
• forms and copy checked by the DPO or data protection adviser

Source and tracking

• UTM convention written down and applied to all campaigns
• hidden fields for UTMs, gclid, fbc, li_fat_id, landing page and first contact date
• storage of parameters subject to cookie banner consent
• first and last touch in separate fields
• tracking of visits to key pages (pricing, services, case studies) linked to the contact

CRM

• a deduplication rule on email, normalised to lower case
• lifecycle stages defined with written criteria
• pipeline stages defined with written criteria
• outcome field and rejection reasons from a closed list
• lead assignment rules for salespeople
• one person responsible for CRM administration

Domain and sending

• SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up for the sending domain
• sender with a person’s name and an address people can reply to
• frequency cap shared by all workflows and the newsletter
• hard-bounced addresses excluded automatically
• internal test contacts to test each workflow before switching it on

Measurement

• weekly report set up (workflow 7)
• SLA KPIs calculable from the CRM without hand-filled spreadsheets
• date of the first monthly review in the calendar