HubSpot is a powerful tool capable of handling nearly all of your sales and marketing needs. With the many different ways to set up your portal and customize it for your business needs, there comes an increasing need to automate everyday tasks and processes that eat away at your time.
Enter: HubSpot’s powerful workflow automations.
It’s important to note the difference between “workflows” and “sequences” in HubSpot. An easy way to remember the difference between the two: workflows are typically on the marketing side and sequences deal with one-to-one sales communications.
Both send emails. Workflows, however, are leveraged to do so much more for your sales and marketing team.
While it may seem like heavy lift in the beginning, the time saved is huge — along with the actual return on investment. In fact, marketing automation leads to a 14.5% increase in sales productivity!
Here I break down my top five most used HubSpot workflows I believe every business, no matter the size, should implement.
Basic Asset Delivery HubSpot Workflow Example
Regardless of which industry you’re in, it’s extremely likely you keep downloadable content on your website behind a form. While your form may redirect to a thank you page with a link to download the final asset, it’s best practice to also have a “thank you” email deliver that asset to their inbox, as well. This also offers you the opportunity to have a secondary call to action in the email.
Pro tip: if you’re having issues with leads putting in fake emails just to get to the thank you page and download the asset, have the asset delivered only by email.
The trigger for this workflow is the form submission. The action after it will be to send an automated email to the lead that:
- Thanks them for downloading the asset
- Provides a link to download the asset
- Includes a secondary CTA (i.e. schedule a demo)
This workflow can also turn into a nurture workflow promoting more relevant or related content to the downloaded asset. To do this, set a delay after the first email — typically 3 business days — then send another email out to the lead. If your reps are actively working all leads, put in an “if/then” branch so all SQLs, lead status = open, etc. leads are withheld from the rest of the nurture workflow.
Lead Routing with Rotation
HubSpot Workflow Example
When a hot new prospect comes in, your whole team is most likely chomping at the bit fighting over the fresh inbound lead you worked so hard to generate. Unless you employ only one salesperson, your leads need to get evenly distributed throughout your team to keep things fair.
Please note: this rotation functionality will require you to have a Sales Hub Professional , Enterprise, Service Hub Professional, or Enterprise account.
This is easily handled by creating a simple workflow in HubSpot using the “rotate contact to owner” function. The easiest method to catch all sales-ready leads is to trigger the workflow lifecycle stage “Sales Qualified Lead.” A million different actions may contribute to a lead being considered an SQL, but for the purpose of this workflow example we assume you covered that already.
The next step is to put in the action to rotate the contact between the salespeople you choose. If the contact owner is known, keep the owner there, but have the workflow skip to the next step. Or overwrite the contact owner with the new owner. Choose specific salespeople to rotate leads between, or if teams are set up in HubSpot already, evenly rotate it between the team members.
With leads rotated between your sales team, next setup an alert to the new contact’s owner for immediate follow-up.
This can come in the form of:
- Task
- Text message
Regardless of which you choose, make sure your sales team is constantly checking that channel for hot leads who they should follow up with.
Nurture Emails Based On Activity Other Than Form Submissions
While nurture email workflows after content downloads are essential, form submissions shouldn’t be the only trigger for these workflows. With HubSpot, put contacts who visit certain website pages into workflows.
HubSpot’s powerful insights allow you to trigger nurture workflows for known contacts based on specific website page visits. This is especially useful for high-intent pages like scheduling a demo or an ROI calculator that signals a lead is interested in your company.
Trigger these workflows by lead scoring. Lead scoring could be a 2,500-word blog on its own (and is on HubSpot!), but the gist of it is that you are able to assign positive and negative “scores” to actions contacts take in emails and on your website, as well as attributes from their data.
From there, you can set thresholds for when a lead is considered an MQL and an SQL. With this in mind, create various workflows triggered by specific page views, or a HubSpot lead score.
For example, if I want leads in a nurture workflow after visiting the “contact us” page but not submitting the form, I would set something up like this:
Or, if I want to trigger a nurture workflow based off of a variety of actions I scored in HubSpot’s lead scoring, my workflow can start once a contact reaches a score of X:
Pro tip: if you want your emails to only go out during the week, in your workflow go to settings → specific times and select the days/times it should execute.
Inactive Contact HubSpot Workflow Example
Leads inevitably get lost in the day-to-day operations of your business, so it’s important to establish processes to catch them and bring them back into the fold. A workflow for inactive contacts is extremely beneficial for both the marketing and sales sides.
For sales, qualified leads handed off to them can sometimes stall out or other leads take priority. When this happens, reps sometimes put them on the back burner or forget about them entirely. Those are already qualified leads that could be easy pickings for new business!
To alert your reps to follow up with these forgotten leads, create a workflow like the one below:
Feel free to put your own timeframe in the second criteria. With this workflow, reps will always be alerted of leads once qualified but fell through the cracks for some reason. If they find out the lead is no longer sales-ready, revert the lifecycle stage back to an MQL so the lead can continue getting nurtured.
On the marketing side, contacts not engaged with your website or marketing emails can be warmed back up. A good way to do this is with a “special” offer for just those unengaged contacts. This could be a special e-book (or one that’s not behind a form), a discount, or whatever offer you think of that would entice your audience.
From here, you just set the criteria on what you deem as “unengaged” such as:
- Length of time since last website visit
- Length of time since last email open/click
- Last form submission
Then, set your automated email nurture to go out. This is very similar to the other nurture workflow I covered earlier, but the trigger criteria and content of the emails are much different.
New Customer Welcome
HubSpot Workflow Example
Hopefully, you are at (or soon will be!) a point where you’re onboarding so many new customers that manually completing all of the actions is overwhelming. This is the perfect opportunity to create a workflow to trigger when a contact’s lifecycle is changed to “Customer.”
From here, schedule a number of actions such as:
- Adding the contacts to a running list of “customers” that can be used to send company/product updates to
- Changing the contact owner from the sales rep to a customer service/success employee
- Starting the contact off in a “New Customer” onboarding/welcome email
- Setting the lead status to “Closed”
This workflow is very simple to set up and is invaluable as it pushes you to think through exactly what you want the journey to look like for new customers, as well as keeping it consistent for everyone.
These are the top five HubSpot workflow examples we use all the time with our clients and see the best results. Questions setting up your own version? Or have a new one in mind that you just can’t quite figure out? Reach out and we’d be happy to help!
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