Upstream USA
Upstream USA is a national nonprofit that partners with healthcare systems to ensure every patient can access the full range of contraceptive options. They work directly with hospitals, clinics, and health centers across the country.
Leads came in from five channels and nobody could sort them fast enough.
Automated routing that scored, classified, and synced every lead the moment it arrived.
Upstream USA works with hospitals and clinics on contraceptive care. Leads came in from healthcare conferences, webinars, paid campaigns, forms, and content downloads. High volume, multiple sources, all year.
There was no reliable system to sort any of it. Someone had to review spreadsheets manually and figure out whether each contact was a new lead, an existing partner, or not qualified. That took hours, sometimes days. By the time follow-up happened, the lead was often cold.
HubSpot was live, but it was not connected in a useful way to Salesforce, which the recruitment team relied on every day.
The fix started at the point of entry. Five source-specific routing workflows in HubSpot — one for each channel — tagged, scored, and classified every contact the moment they arrived. Conference attendees, already warm, moved into shorter nurture sequences. Cold leads from paid campaigns went through qualification scoring before anyone reached out.
Duplicate handling was the second critical layer. Upstream works with the same hospitals and health systems across multiple touchpoints — conferences, webinars, paid campaigns. Without dedup logic, a returning organization could trigger overlapping outreach from separate workflows. The system catches returning contacts, merges records, and flags them before any campaign fires.
Once leads qualified as SQLs, they synced to Salesforce in real time with Calendly scheduling links attached to each record. The recruitment team could book meetings directly — no email chains, no handoff delays.
The final piece was operational infrastructure: standardized lead imports with defined data requirements, clean segmentation by source and lifecycle stage, suppression lists to protect active contacts, and a reporting model benchmarked against historical performance so the team could measure what was actually working.
"I worked with Ethan at Upstream USA, where he served as a vital partner in the administration of the HubSpot email marketing platform. I was consistently impressed by Ethan's technical curiosity and eagerness to learn — he is a quick study who actively asks questions to understand the 'why' behind a project. During his time at Upstream, he built complex workflows to automate lead sorting, ensuring new marketing leads were categorized correctly and funneled into the right nurture campaigns. He was also proactive in improving our email list hygiene and streamlining the design of our newsletter templates to better serve our healthcare recruitment goals. I am sure that Ethan would be an asset to any marketing team."
