Find dormant leads in HubSpot: step by step

Here is how to find dormant leads in HubSpot, the first step in any lead reactivation: create an active list, filter on last activity between 4 and 18 months back, narrow by lifecycle stage so customers and disqualified contacts drop out, and split the result by owner and source. The whole job takes under an hour and requires no paid add-ons beyond the list tool that is included.

Why it is worth the hour: 70 to 80 percent of all leads in a CRM never get followed up according to MarketResearchFuture, and each lead cost around 100 USD to generate. Your HubSpot portal very likely contains a paid list that no one is working.

Which filters should you use?

Go to Contacts, create a new active list and add the filters in this order:

1. Last activity date is more than 4 months ago AND less than 18 months ago. That is the core segment: old enough to be forgotten, fresh enough that the contact data holds.
2. Lifecycle stage is Lead, MQL, SQL or Opportunity. Exclude Customer and Evangelist, they are not dormant leads but customers. Also exclude contacts marked as disqualified.
3. Contact owner is known. Contacts without an owner you handle in a separate step, see below.
4. Email is known and hard bounce is not set. No point working addresses that bounce.

Use Last activity date rather than Last contacted, because Last activity also captures page visits, forms and email opens. A lead that visited your pricing page five months ago but never got a reply is exactly what you are looking for.

How do you segment the list further?

A raw list of a few thousand contacts is unusable. Split it in priority order:

• Lost deals. Contacts with an associated deal in closed lost. They have seen a proposal and a price, top priority.
• Unanswered inbound. Contacts with a form conversion but no logged sales activity afterwards. The Original source filter helps here.
• Ended trials and demos. If you tag these, filter on the tag.
• Other MQLs and SQLs. The rest of the segment, sorted by lead score if you use it.

Build a list per group instead of one giant list. Then you can work them in order and measure reply rate per group.

What do you do with contacts without an owner?

Ownerless contacts are their own gold mine. When a salesperson leaves and the contacts are never reassigned, the whole book goes dormant at once. Create a list with the filter Contact owner is unknown plus the same activity window, go through it and assign owners before working it. A lead without an owner, by definition, never gets followed up.

How do you export for working the list?

Open the list, choose Export and include the columns you actually need: name, email, company, title, owner, last activity, lifecycle stage and source. CSV is enough.

Two things before sending:

• Verify the addresses. According to Apollo, 22.5 percent of contact data decays per year, so in the older part of the window a significant share have changed role or company.
• Check against unsubscribes. HubSpot excludes unsubscribed contacts from marketing sends, but if you work them through another tool you have to filter them out yourself.

How do you work the list afterwards?

Short version: look for signals per lead, such as a new manager, a funding round or a return visit to the site, and write short personal emails that open on the signal. Forrester has shown that 80 percent of leads stamped "not ready" buy within 24 months, so the job is to find them where the timing just turned. Manually, one person can handle around fifty monitored leads, at thousands automated monitoring like Revexa's Leo is more reasonable. Run the numbers on your list in the calculator.

Common questions

Which HubSpot plan is required?

Active lists and export are in the free version. Lead scoring and some source filters require a paid plan, but the core segmentation above works without.

Why 4 to 18 months?

Younger than 4 months is normal follow-up, not reactivation. Older than 18 months works too but requires verification first, because the data decay has caught up.

Should the list be active or static?

Active. Then it fills up automatically as new leads pass 4 months without activity, and you can return quarterly without rebuilding anything.