Latest / Marketing Automation with Fexingo: HubSpot, Marketo, and Automated Customer Journeys / How Marketing Automation Workflows Leak Revenue via Phone Format
Transcript
- Lucas: So you run a nurture sequence. A lead fills out a form, enters their phone number as ‘ 555-0198’ — parentheses, hyphen, space. Your automation platform sees that, routes them into a ‘follow-up call’ workflow, and nothing happens. Three days later, the lead gets a generic email that says ‘we tried to reach you.’ That’s not a CRM glitch. That’s a phone-format leak. Luna: Wait — are you saying the parentheses actually broke the workflow? Not just the SMS part? Lucas: Exactly. I looked at a B2B SaaS company — I’ll call them OpsFlow — that ran a post-demo follow-up workflow. They had a step: if the lead’s phone number contains exactly 10 digits, send to the inside-sales queue. But their form allowed free text. So a contact with ‘ 555-0198’ triggered a ‘false’ condition, skipped the queue, and got dumped into a generic email bucket. They found 12 percent of their demo leads were missing that step. Just because of formatting. Luna: That’s a huge leak. And I bet it’s worse with international numbers. Plus signs, country codes... Lucas: Yeah, the plus sign is a killer. A lot of platforms treat ‘+44 20 7946 0958’ as non-numeric because of the plus and spaces. So the workflow either fails silently or, worse, tries to send an SMS and the carrier rejects it. Now the lead’s phone is flagged as undeliverable. You lose that channel forever. Luna: Okay, this is hitting something I’ve seen in audits. But before we go deeper — Lucas, if these marketing automation conversations have sparked something you’ve actually used at work, or if today’s episode saves you one hour of debugging phone-field issues, honestly, if it was worth a coffee to you, that’s the link: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Just a small way to keep this show ad-free and independent. Lucas: Yeah, we don’t do sponsors, and listener support is what keeps the episodes coming. So if you’ve gotten value out of the show, that link is there. Now back to the phone-format question. Luna, you mentioned audits — have you run into this in practice? Luna: I have. One client’s Salesforce instance had a phone field that accepted 15 different formats. Dots, dashes, spaces, parentheses, even letters in one case. And their Marketo workflows were all checking ‘phone contains exactly 10 digits.’ They had a 6 percent lead routing failure rate. But I always assumed it was a CRM problem, not an automation problem. Lucas: It’s both. But the automation layer is where the leak becomes visible. Because the workflow doesn’t tell you it skipped a lead — it just... doesn’t fire. OpsFlow actually dug into their workflow logs and found that the phone-validation condition was returning ‘false’ for 12 percent of entries. They had been assuming those leads just weren’t interested. Luna: So what’s the fix? Strip all non-numeric characters at the form level? Lucas: That’s the first step, but it’s not enough. Because even if you strip parentheses and hyphens, you still have the plus sign for international numbers. And if you strip the plus, you lose the country code. Then the workflow tries to send an SMS to a ten-digit number that might be a UK mobile — and it fails. Luna: Right. So you need to standardize to E.164 before the workflow fires. Plus sign, country code, national number, no spaces, no punctuation. Lucas: Exactly. E.164 is the international standard. So a US number becomes +14155550198. A UK number becomes +442079460958. Once it’s in that format, any decent automation platform can route it correctly. But here’s the catch: most platforms don’t reformat on the fly. You need to do it at capture or in a pre-workflow data step. Luna: So you’re saying the automation workflow itself should not try to parse phone numbers. It should assume the number is already clean. Lucas: Yes. And that’s a shift in how people design workflows. Most marketers set up a condition like ‘if phone length equals 10’ and assume it’s a US number. But what about a contact who enters ‘+1 415 555 0198’? That’s 14 characters. Condition fails. Lead goes to the wrong bucket. Luna: I’ve seen that exact scenario. A colleague’s company had a workflow that pushed leads to a ‘high priority’ queue if the phone number started with ‘1’. But international contacts with +44 or +61 were all going to low priority. They assumed those leads were less interested. Actually, the workflow was just broken. Lucas: Right. So the solution has three layers. First, at the form: strip all non-numeric characters except the plus sign. Second, in your CRM or data layer: store numbers in E.164 format. Third, in the workflow: don’t check formatting — check the country code or the area code if you need to route geographically. Luna: And if you can’t control the form? Say you’re using a third-party landing page tool? Lucas: Then you use a data-enrichment step in the workflow. Some platforms have a ‘phone normalize’ action. Or you can pipe the number through a regex that strips everything except digits and the plus. But that’s risky because regex can be brittle. Better to fix it at the source. Luna: There’s also the SMS compliance angle. If you’re sending SMS in a workflow and the number isn’t E.164, the carrier might reject it. And then the platform flags that number as bad. Next time you try to send, it’s blocked. Lucas: Exactly. And that’s a permanent loss. One bad send can get your number blacklisted. I’ve seen companies lose 5 to 10 percent of their SMS deliverability just because of formatting errors. That’s a direct revenue leak. Luna: So the cost is real. It’s not just a data-quality nuisance. Lucas: Not at all. OpsFlow calculated that their 12 percent failure rate meant roughly 40 leads per quarter never got the sales call. At a 5 percent close rate and an average deal size of $15,000, that’s $30,000 in lost pipeline per quarter. Just from formatting. Luna: That’s a number that should get any marketing ops person’s attention. So what’s the one thing someone should do this week? Lucas: Audit your phone field. Export all contacts that have a phone number. Count how many distinct formats appear. I’d bet you find at least five. Then look at your workflows that use phone as a condition. If any check length, starting digit, or whether it’s numeric, you’ve got a leak. Fix the form first, then clean the data. Luna: And if you’re using a platform like HubSpot or Marketo, do they have built-in normalization? I know Twilio’s Lookup API can do it, but that’s an extra cost. Lucas: HubSpot has a phone property setting that can auto-format to E.164, but it only works if you enable it per property. Marketo doesn’t natively normalize. You’d need to use a webhook or a custom script. The point is: don’t assume the platform handles it. Test with a known international number and see what happens. Luna: I’m going to do that today. Because honestly, I’ve never thought about phone format as a workflow-killer. I always focused on email validation. Lucas: Email validation gets all the attention. But phone is where the money is, especially for B2B companies that rely on sales calls and SMS for high-intent leads. One format mismatch and the lead falls through the crack. And you never know it happened. Luna: Alright, I’m convinced. Next time I see a workflow with a phone condition, I’m going to check the formats first. Lucas: And if you find a leak, you might save your company tens of thousands of dollars. Not bad for a 10-minute audit.