How to Pinpoint Your Most Qualified Leads Using HubSpot

If you’re a founder or a senior leader, you know the sinking feeling when a massive budget is spent, but you can’t confidently point to where your truly qualified leads came from.

This isn't just about wasted money; it's about the emotional and personal cost of misaligned teams and chasing leads that were never going to close. We’ve all been there—tossing money at a channel because "everyone else is doing it," only to realize the real ROI was… confusing.

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The good news is that HubSpot is designed to answer this exact question, but the path to that clarity isn't always obvious. It requires understanding a few key concepts. Here is a no-nonsense guide to using the tools you already own to find your best lead sources.

The Confusing Trilogy: Understanding HubSpot's 'Source' Properties

HubSpot uses a few different "source" properties, and mixing them up is the number one reason leaders lose sleep over reporting. You need to know the difference.

1. Original Source (The Truth Serum)

This property is the most important one for attribution. HubSpot automatically records the first time a contact ever interacted with your company and classifies it into a top-level bucket (e.g., Organic Search, Paid Social, Email Marketing, Direct Traffic).

• Why it matters: It tells you where the relationship began. You can't change this property—HubSpot owns it, which is why it's trustworthy.

• Best use: Grouping your marketing channels to see which ones are generating new relationships.

2. Traffic Source

This is the next level of detail below Original Source. If the Original Source is 'Organic Search,' the Traffic Source will specify the actual search engine (Google, Bing) and the specific landing page.

• Why it matters: It provides the granular context needed for your marketing team to optimize efforts. For example, knowing that "Organic Search" works is good; knowing that Google traffic to the /pricing page converts better is actionable.

3. Lead Source (The Team's Context)

This is typically a custom property that you or your Sales/Ops team creates. Unlike the two above, this one is often set manually, or via a simple workflow, to reflect your internal processes.

• Why it matters: Sales often uses this to define how a lead became qualified. For example, a salesperson might select "Inbound - Website Form" versus "Outbound - Cold Call."

• Best use: Reporting on the operational team's effort and ensuring alignment between Marketing and Sales definitions.

Beyond the Defaults: The Reports You're Already Paying For

You don't always need to start from scratch. HubSpot has powerful report templates that address this exact challenge, though you may need a Professional subscription to get the full benefit.

The Standard Reports (Starter & Up)

The Traffic Analytics and Contact Analytics reports are your baseline.

• Sources Report: Found under Reports > Analytics Tools, this default report breaks down your Contacts and Sessions by the Original Source property. This is your first stop for proving which high-level channels are bringing people in.

The Custom Reports (Professional & Enterprise)

To find the most qualified leads, you have to link the source data (from the Contact object) with the qualification data (from the Deal or Contact object).

1. Define "Qualified": Before you build the report, ask yourself: Is a qualified lead a contact with a "Lead Status" of SQL? Or is it a deal that closed-won? The closed-won deal is the true qualified lead.

2. Use the Custom Report Builder: You need a Cross-Object Report. This allows you to combine data, typically Contacts with Deals. You can filter the deals by Deal Stage = Closed-Won and then break down the resulting Contacts by their Original Source.

3. The Result: A clear visual showing which Original Sources delivered the most revenue—not just the most traffic.

The Game Changer: Why Attribution Models Matter

If you’re on a Professional or Enterprise plan, you have access to Attribution Reports, which is how you get off the "First Touch" merry-go-round.

Attribution is the process of giving credit to all the marketing efforts that contributed to a closed deal. The Original Source property only gives credit to the very first click. But in reality, your customer probably read a blog post, clicked a social ad, downloaded an eBook, and then finally converted.

To find the source of your most qualified leads (meaning, leads that became customers), you must look at multi-touch attribution.

• First Touch: Gives 100% of the credit to the first interaction (the Original Source). Simple, but ignores everything else.

• Last Touch: Gives 100% of the credit to the last interaction before the conversion. Simple, but ignores the start.

• Full-Path: This is the answer for leaders. It credits all the steps in between (First, Last, Middle) and gives a more realistic view of how your marketing channels work together to drive a qualified lead to a customer.

You don't need to be a data scientist to get started with this. Just head over to Reports > Reports > Create Report > Attribution and start experimenting with the Full-Path model, linking it to your Closed-Won deals. You can find more information about how this works on the HubSpot Academy.

The Hard Truth: Feature Limitations by HubSpot Hub

This is the part where we talk about budget—my favorite topic. The tool you need to confidently answer this question is directly tied to your subscription level.

The clarity you get on your qualified lead sources scales with your HubSpot Marketing Hub version:

• Marketing Hub Starter: You get Basic Reports (Traffic Sources, Contact Sources). This is Good for Volume, Bad for Qualification. You can see which channels bring the most people, but you can't easily connect that to deals or revenue. Your data will be siloed.

• Marketing Hub Professional: You unlock Custom Reporting (Cross-Object) and Basic Multi-Touch Attribution. This gives you Solid Clarity. You can build the necessary reports to link a contact's original source to the closed-won deal and see the full-path journey.

• Marketing Hub Enterprise: You gain Advanced Custom Reporting (Data Sets) and Full Multi-Touch Attribution, plus Predictive Lead Scoring. If you're paying for Enterprise, you have the full toolkit to not only see the source of your qualified leads but also build models that predict them. You have Zero Excuses for not knowing this data.

The key takeaway for any leader is this: If you're operating on a Starter plan, your data will always be siloed. Once you scale past a few sales reps, the move to Professional isn't just a cost; it’s an investment in the operational clarity required to prioritize your budget and get your personal time back.

You don't need another expensive consultant or a new tool. You just need to look at the right properties and the right reports. The answer to your "where are my best leads?" question is already waiting for you in your CRM.

Ready to stop guessing and start scaling with confidence? If you need our help, let's talk about it.

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