Advanced Workflows | HubSpot Admins HUG | November 22, 2022

Yes. All right, we are now recording again. Welcome to this session on advanced Workflows. I'm Kyle Jephson. I'm hosting this as part of the HubSpot admins hug. Got Matthew Shepard and Megan Leg here. We will all introduce ourselves in just a minute. But thank you all for joining and those of you who are watching the recording, welcome. Yeah, Matthew, go ahead, take it away.

Perfect. Thanks everyone for joining. Great to see so many of you. Today we are going to be covering advanced workflows. Going to be talking a little bit about why and when to automate automation best practices and avoiding some of the common pitfalls. Going to take a quick five minute break in the middle just to break things up, answer some of the initial questions, then we'll dig into some workflow examples and concepts and then hopefully have some time at the end for Q and A. So we have today we've got Kyle.

Yep. So I'm, I'm Kyle. I'm. I'm a senior inbound sales professor at HubSpot Academy. I'm also an encourageable LinkedIn video creator and poster. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you will get new HubSpot features explained every business day. So that's kind of, kind of my thing. Thank you, Sherry, for sharing my LinkedIn there.

Now we have Megan.

Hello everyone. I'm Megan. I'm a product manager for one of the workflow teams at HubSpot. The mission of my team is to help everybody automate their front office activity, maximize business efficiency and effectiveness, and in particular, my team focuses on workflow logic and the infrastructure that actually powers our workflow engine.

Great. Thanks, Megan. And I'm Matthew. I'm an inbound consultant with HubSpot. As an inbound consultant, I consult with our HubSpot customers on their inbound strategy, including automation strategy, and really help customers leverage the platform and achieve their goals. Great. So that's your team for today. So to set the scene and what we're going to be discussing, I just want to mention this webinar is really designed for HubSpot users that have a pretty firm grasp on the fundamentals of HubSpot workflows. So if you feel like you're missing some of the basics here that are going to help you understand some of the examples, hang in there and we'll have some resources to share at the end that you can refer back to along with the recording of this webinar and then you can pour over some of the details because some of the slides have a good bit of detail. And maybe we won't be able to spend a lot of time going through every little piece. So you can do that after the fact. Okay, so for this webinar, we've promised advanced workflow examples. So in case you're expecting NEO from the matrix level of advanced workflows, I just want to tee this up by saying advanced workflows doesn't necessarily mean complex. From the chat there, I could see lots of you have created really great, cool, complex examples of workflows. But in an hour, there's only so much we can cover. So really what we're trying to share is advanced best practices, useful workflow concepts, and some examples of what's new with workflows. So hopefully everyone will walk away with something actionable at the end of this. Okay, so we'll start off with why and when to automate. That might seem like a kind of basic thing to discuss when we're talking about advanced level of automation, but I think it's key to effective usage to keep in mind the benefits of automation and really when automation is a good fit and when it's not. So what are some of the benefits of automating a process? Well, first, they can free up time by reducing repetitive administrative or manual tasks. They can reduce errors introduced by manual data management can help you scale processes without scaling effort and losing personalization. They'll help you carry out tasks even when you're offline, and they'll allow you to send and receive timely and relevant content and notifications. Okay, but when should we automate and when should we not? Well, I think we should consider automating things like repetitive manual processes, the execution and scaling of clearly documented content strategy data management processes and business processes, and internal and external communications based on reliable data. So that means we should likely avoid automating processes that occur infrequently and that take less time than creating an automation itself. Processes that rely on inconsistent data. Inconsistent data is going to mean inconsistent results. Processes that require significant or timely human intervention. You won't be able to step in if something's automated. Existing, inefficient or poorly documented processes, really, you're just going to be scaling up that inefficiency and processes with no clear goal. Really hard to measure the effectiveness of your automation without a goal attached of some sort. Okay, so with that, let's jump into some automation best practices. So once your team start moving beyond the basics of automation and start generating a lot of workflows to automate the many processes and achieve the many goals that might exist within your organization, you might find this can introduce complexity, misalignment, and unexpected outcomes. So this is where these automation best practices can really help. So for some of you that have been using workflows for a long time to nurture leads and automate processes and maybe some more creative ways, this might be a familiar site, but is this an advanced workflow? Well, I just noticed in the chat. Can everyone see the slides there?

I'm seeing them. Is anyone else having. Okay, yeah.

Okay, again, we'll have the recording, so if anyone's having difficulty, we definitely will be sharing the recording. Okay. So, yeah, this workflow, I'd suggest that this, you know, isn't necessarily an advanced workflow. It's complex. So as I mentioned at the start, a complex workflow isn't necessarily equivalent to an advanced or an effective workflow. That's because the more complex a workflow is, the harder it is to understand. The hava is to measure, maintain, and orchestrate with other workflows. What's the solution to this? And really, how do we scale effective automation while managing this kind of complexity? Well, first, I'd recommend that when creating our workflows, we should start with our outcome in mind. What's the primary outcome this workflow should achieve? If we find our workflow is trying to achieve many things and is getting really complicated, perhaps that's a good opportunity to break the workflow up. So if we take this nurturing workflow, for example. So this workflow is trying to nurture a contact through all the stages of the buyer's journey. And it makes sense. One journey, one workflow. But this approach can lead to some issues. For example, it can produce long, complex workflows that are hard to understand and hard to maintain. As we have to spend a lot of time scrolling around to figure out everything that workflow is doing and what it's trying to achieve, it can also make it difficult to track the performance of the workflow. The goal of this workflow might be to book a demo meeting and move the contact to SQL. But if that's the goal against which we're going to measure the workflow performance, we'll see how effective the journey is overall, but not really get a good understanding of which distinct parts of the journey are performing well or which are underperforming. So if we now break this into three workflows for each stage of the journey, this will allow us to clearly see what's happening at each nurturing stage. We can set a goal for each of these stages of the journey and then as a result measure and test the effectiveness of each part of the workflow. But you might say, surely this approach of creating more workflows adds more complexity. So let's take a look at some tips to help manage this so the first tip is Consistent workflow and folder naming conventions are going to save you a lot of time and confusion when navigating an increasing number of workflows with different ownership and purposes across your organization. I've seen and used many different naming conventions over the years, and ultimately the best naming conventions are a personal choice. It's about what makes most sense to you and your team, but here are some of the common approaches I see to workflow naming convention and that is to include in your workflow or folder names things like team or region the workflow belongs to or that it's targeting. Whether this is a workflow that is acting or communicating internally or externally the action or purpose of the workflow, which can be broken down into abbreviations for the sake of conciseness in this maybe long name. So things like data management, lead routing, service routing, task creation, lead nurturing, really whatever actions you have workflows carrying out, we can also include things like the target buyer Persona or the stage of the bias journey the workflow is targeting, and maybe the date or timeframe that the workflow is attached to. If you're still looking for good naming convention examples, the HubSpot community has a lot of great threads and discussions on the topic, so I encourage you to search there. Some really good advice, but ultimately what you want to try and achieve through naming conventions is a nice list of folders and workflows that really communicate ownership, purpose and relationship between workflows. Another great tip to keep on top of the purpose of your workflows and the actions that they contain is to use workflows descriptions and comments to to further describe the purpose of your workflow and each action. So here we can see we can edit the name and description of our workflow, give it a good name with our naming convention, be descriptive about the purpose, the target, everything we want to convey about what this workflow is doing, and then on actions themselves we can insert comments. So with comments we can also ention our colleagues and this really will help us collaborate with those colleagues when building out workflows. Okay, so now we have well organized workflows. What about some other best practices that we should be thinking about? So before publishing your workflow, maybe it goes without saying, oops, sorry, that's my dog trying to break into my office. So before publishing your workflows, test, test, test and test again before you let this loose on all of your records. So with the testing functionality in workflows, you'll select contact that would be expected to enroll in the workflow. Make sure they enroll and pass through each action as expected, and you can even select to receive the emails that would be delivered as part of that workflow to make sure that they are delivered and displayed as expected. And finally, monitor your workflows. Look for the errors in your workflows because workflows shouldn't really be a set it and forget it part of your strategy. Once you publish your workflows, check the Errors tab on your workflows dashboard to make sure nothing unexpected is preventing your records from enrolling or your actions from firing. Common workflow errors to watch out for can include things like emails not being sent due to issues around marketing, contact status, email contacts, previously bounced contacts are unsubscribed or not opted in, or emails being skipped due to gray mail or low engagement filters, things like date action skipped where contacts enroll after the date has passed, or copy property value failures where the values we're copying to don't match fixed values in the property that's on the target side. So that's a really quick overview of some best practices to help you set up and manage these advanced workflows. Now I'm going to hand over to Megan and she's going to talk about some common pitfalls to avoid.

Thanks Matthew. We've gone over a lot of best practices and now we're going to go over things that you should pay close attention to to avoid. Unwant Outcomes RE Enrollment we get a lot of questions about RE enrollment. It can be confusing and it can also be an overlooked feature. RE enrollment is the concept of whether or not an automated process that you've created is relevant only one time, or if it could be relevant for the same record on multiple occasions. For example, say you're sending a slack notification to your team every time a new deal is created, you don't expect to get more than one notification per deal because be created once, so RE enrollment is not applicable for this use case. On the other hand, if you've got a help request form on your website for your customers, it's feasible that they might need to ask for help on several different occasions. Each time they do, you're going to create a ticket and you want RE enrollment enabled here because every time someone comes and asks for help, you want to follow up. When you're making this decision about RE enrollment, think about edge cases. If you have a workflow that triggers when a ticket is closed, consider will the ticket only ever close once? Could it be reopened and closed again? And is that automated process that you're running relevant each time it closes? So once you're in the habit of checking RE enrollment, you might come across a different challenge, which is RE enrollment not always being available. Some properties and filters can't be used for RE enrollment as pictured here. Activity properties are one of these that cannot be used, but in some scenarios for contacts and companies, you could circumvent this limitation using a list. We can build criteria into the list to monitor for contacts that have a recent meeting and then trigger our workflow based on list membership. So every time a contact joins that list, they qualify to enroll in the workflow. You may find that some filters that don't allow RE enrollment you could replace with a workaround using Property is known. So here contact priority is known. Using this filter with RE enrollment will mean that a record enrolls every time the property is set, and also if it goes from one known value to another known value. So here we can change this trigger to the more broad trigger of contact Priority is known, and we can still segment based on the priorities that we care about by using a branch as our first step. The Is Known filter doesn't always help. It's not always going to be a workaround for a RE enrollment limitation, but it can generally be a very helpful trigger option to have in your pocket. So keep the tip in mind. All right, I wanna stop here and pause to acknowledge that triggers in RE enrollment can be difficult and have limitations. And it's something that we are very well aware of and we are gonna put a lot of effort into improving. And we have a beta running right now that I'm gonna pop into the chat. Oh, thank you, Kyle. That introduces a new trigger building experience that strives to make triggers easier to understand and also will help us expand trigger functionality. So if you want to sign up and test it out, click on that link that Kyle shared and enter your information. Okay, continuing on with features to pay close attention to the Enroll existing option when you turn your workflow on or edit the trigger on a live workflow, the prompt that you see here is asking you to decide if all of the records in your system that have previously taken an action or met a condition that match your current trigger should they enroll right now when you turn this workflow on, we can look at this question through the lens of two examples so if you're setting up a new workflow triggering on a form that's been on your website for a year, you probably don't want to enroll everyone who's ever submitted that form. You probably only want to enroll people who submit that form going forward after the workflow is turned on. In this scenario, you would not enroll existing contacts because chances are you already followed up with them and they wouldn't all be expecting to hear from you today when you turn the workflow on. An alternate example would be a workflow that's going to clean up data. Say you want to update your country property to use an abbreviation instead of full country names. When you turn that workflow on, there's a good chance you already have records in the CRM that need this update. In that scenario, it does make sense to enroll the existing records and do a bulk data cleanup at the time that you turn the workflow on. And then in addition, the workflow will maintain that data by enrolling records that meet the criteria going forward. In summary, there's a couple examples here with a more probable approach, but they're definitely not hard and fast rules, so you want to think this through for every workflow. Goals as Matthew brought up earlier, workflows should have a clear and specific purpose. Goals are a great tool for defining and measuring your objectives. One behavior to flag here, however, are the ways that goals can impact enrollment. So if a record already meets goal criteria, it could be prevented from enrolling in certain workflows. And if records are in a workflow and reach a goal, they'll unenroll immediately. These are helpful functions in relation to something like ceasing a nurturing campaign once a lead engages, but can be counterproductive if the workflow is serving multiple purposes, such as nurturing and also administrative functions. So if there are certain actions like setting property properties, that needs to happen no matter what, those actions and processes might be better suited in a different separate workflow. Let's talk about a few timing considerations next. So first would be delays. Workflows execute actions almost immediately after being triggered, so if you're relying on recently added data, you might need to use delays. For example, if you're using a send email action, follow it with a delay to give contacts time to actually interact with the email before moving on to the next step of the workflow. This is another place where using a property as known trigger could be helpful if your workflow is dependent on key pieces of data being present. So data that syncs from another system or even HubSpot analytic properties are a good example of this. The original source properties can take a minute to populate when a record is newly created. So if you're going to use those properties in your workflow, like in if then branches, make sure the data is present even before the workflow runs by putting a trigger like original sources known on top of the other triggers that you're using. Delay until event Actions Sometimes you don't know how long you want to set a delay for, but it would be helpful for the workflow to wait for something to happen before going to the next action. Our delay until event happens action will dynamically move records to subsequent actions relative to something that they do or a change that is made. We're going to go over a specific use case for this action in a little while, then orchestration. If you have a lot of workflows carrying out similar actions that could affect the same records, you may need to coordinate to avoid overlap or overwhelm. So make sure you're considering suppression lists to keep records out of workflows until it's relevant. Or you could even use the Enroll and workflow action to string together a series of workflows if you want them to happen in a specific order. Okay, the last tip category that we'll cover is related to data. Beware of inconsistent data. A common example is triggering or filtering on email opens between privacy protections and inbox security checks, email data can be inconsistent. So consider the most reliable data source for your use case if you want to target engaged leads. Perhaps website visits could also serve that purpose and be more reliable. Copying properties Matthew mentioned this. You can get a lot of errors when trying to copy properties with workflows, so make sure that you look at both properties. The field types match. Make sure the values are exactly the same between each of the two properties before you put them into workflows. And finally, subscriptions. Make sure the subscription types of the automated emails that you're sending through a workflow are ones that you've gotten opt in for. And just like when sending normal emails, think about gray mail suppression. For each email, think about should this go to an unengaged contact or not and use that setting as needed. So we have covered a lot of ground already in a pretty short period of time. I want to check in with you Kyle, so if there is any questions that would be good to stop and answer.

Yeah, so in in the second half of this event, everyone, we're going to transition more into specific examples and before we do that, we want to make sure we're addressing any questions you have about the best practices stuff, Matthew and Megan just covered something that would be really helpful for me as the moderator. I forgot to mention this up front. If you all go to the Q and A tab, so if you look up at the top of the chat, there's general, there's Q and A, there's DMs. If you click on Q and A, you'll see all the questions that have been submitted so far. You can upvote these. There's a little thumbs up like icon. If there's a question here you would really like to make sure we get to. We are definitely not going to get to all of them right now or in this event, we will answer some of them asynchronously and send out answers afterward. But the ones that are most important to you, if you could vote on, lots of votes are coming in. This is great. Thank you so much. So the top question right now is we have the calculation property available for retriggers except for contact calculation property. When can that get included too? Do you have insights on that, Megan?

Yeah. So I mentioned the beta that we have going on right now that is iterating how we help people build triggers. Part of that, which isn't available quite yet, but that is coming would be making sure that we're using the newest filters that are available. So if you've ever seen or noticed a discrepancy between Contact Filters and your other object type filters, it's because the other object types are using our newest filter technology. We're going to bring that to Contact Workflows next year. It's going to be adopted as part of that redesign that we're in progress on. So stay tuned for that. It's coming.

Cool. And then our next question. What is the best way to trigger an Action X days after today, specifically in a workflow branch? So just more on the delays you were talking about. This got a lot of upvotes I'm a little unclear on.

Does someone else want to put any color in the chat? Because it sounds like if you just want to do X days after today.

You can now delay until a specific date. That's a fairly new option. And so if you have like an event coming up. Right. If I had created workflows around this event and I want to make sure workflows went out sending follow up emails after this was over, I could have delayed till today at this time or whatever.

Yeah, we're gonna. We have two examples coming that talk about today's date as a property and the date delay. So if either of those got your attention, we are gonna dive into those.

Awesome. Okay, can you search across workflows to locate a user when someone leaves the company? Is there a way to identify and replace that user in workflows? So I assume this is for like task assignment or lead rotation.

Not today. It's definitely a problem we hear from a lot of customers and is something that our team who focuses on managing workflows is considering. Like how can we help you identify workflows that have certain actions that you want to make updates to. So it's on the radar.

One thing I will mention with Record Assignment, if you use the the rotation feature, if you select a team rather than individual users, then teams are just dynamic. And so as people get added and removed from teams that really future proofs that workflow in a way that if you're hard coding individual users, you're going to have trouble when those people leave the company later. This is great. Thank you all so much for voting on things. I just realized this list doesn't sort automatically. So I'll just keep refreshing. It does. So the top one right now. Does anyone have a smart wait to work days? So we're gonna. We're gonna talk more about delays I guess.

Huh.

And work days I guess is a little tricky rather than just two days. But do you have thoughts on that?

So we have a delay until a day action which is more generic. So you could say I want to delay till Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday. And that will keep your workflow paused at that step until it's a business day. That could potentially help.

Am I making this up? Is there a workflow setting? Maybe it's just for emails, not sending.

There's a workflow setting where if you only want your workflow to run on business days, you can also configure that.

Cool. Do you have any best practices for reporting on workflows? I think reporting is something we're not going deep on today.

Yeah. Like from my side I would say goals for anything that is nurturing especially but having a specific goal. One thing that that workflow should achieve, attaching a goal to it that's going to actually give you a conversion percentage on the performance tab of your workflows. So you'll actually be able to see how good is this workflow at. At achieving that goal. Then the other thing is maybe thinking about the maybe properties that the workflow is updating. So then you'll be able to report on how many contacts, for example, have been through this workflow where a property has been updated. But other than that I think it would really depend on what specifically you want to get out of your reporting or the type of workflow.

Cool. I think we will need to move on here pretty quick. Just a couple really quick Ben asked, is it possible to create a workflow that creates tasks but alternates giving the task between two to three users? That is, that's related similar to what we were just saying with people leaving. That's not a thing we have today. And the rest of these are kind of specific individual circumstances or more feature requests. So I think a lot of these will answer asynchronously. Again, because there are 500 people in the room, we're not going to get to everyone's questions live, but we will answer these after this event is over. You'll get an email with a link to the recording, to the slides, and to our answers to the questions we weren't able to answer during the live session. So we are not ignoring you, we promise. We just we have more to get through in the in the 27 minutes we have left. So I think we'll move. We'll move on from here.

Okay, so now we're going to look at real examples of advanced workflows and we are going to start with Marketing use case and our first will highlight our brand new Delay until Date action that we just touched on briefly. If you've been with HubSpot for a while, you may be familiar with the special type of contact workflow that has supported date automation. Now we have a new action that covers that functionality and also does more so with this date functionality in an action. It is now brought to all types of workflows no matter what type of object you want to automate. And this allows you to add multiple date actions to workflows with really straightforward logic. One of the other big ones that people have gotten really excited about is you no longer have to create multiple workflows for immediate versus date driven actions. So we'll dive more deeply into this example of webinar nurturing. You can trigger a workflow when a contact signs up and immediately send that registration confirmation email. Then delay until the date of your webinar. On the webinar date email all registrants to make sure they have everything they need to sign on and attend. Then use another delay until date action to wait until the webinar is over to send a perfectly timed follow up survey for the next marketing Example, we'll talk about date stamping. So, date stamping is a practice of using a custom date property and a workflow to record when something happened. So we're going to go over a workflow that will enable you to report on email subscription, opt out, and opt ins over time. So first you create some contact lists based on subscription statuses, then set a workflow trigger based on those list membership changes. When contacts have a status change, they'll join the appropriate list and they'll enroll. In this workflow, you use an if then branch to check for different subscriptions and statuses that you want to track you and create custom date properties for each of those. Finally, in the workflow, you're going to stamp the relevant date property with a real time stamp of when the record is going through the workflow, which is going to be equivalent to when that subscription change happened. I'm going to give you another use case that you can use for a system just like this, which would be reporting on the number of days that a record is in a certain stage or has a certain status. So for example, contacts in lifecycle stages or deals in certain parts of the buying process. All right, we'll look at a sales automation example next. This is going to use the delay until event happens action that I mentioned earlier. And in this workflow, we're going to nurture leads towards sales and respond quickly in reaction to lead behavior. So enroll your target leads, be that from a list or another criteria, and send that first nurture email. The delay until event happens action here is going to wait for one of two things to happen in with focusing on whichever happens first. So either that lead will visit that page on your website and if and when they do, immediately proceed to the next action, or five days will go by. If the lead has not visited the page within five days, we want to try something else. We'll follow the delay with a value equals branch. You can use a value equals branch to evaluate the outcomes of other workflow actions. So here we're checking what happened with that delay. Did the event that we're monitoring for that website visit? Did that happen? Or did five days go by and there was no visit? So again, if that lead visits, they are ready for sales and the workflow will immediately push them to an enroll in sequence action for that handoff. If the five days goes by without any engagement, we can route the leads down a different path, send a second email, and then repeat delay until event action and the value equals check again. If the lead engages, they'll immediately route to that sequence and if they don't after that additional five days, maybe we consider them inactive and categorize them accordingly. Next I am going to give it back to Matthew and we'll talk about some service use cases.

Great. Thanks Megan. On the service side of the platform, let's talk about ticket creation and routing. I often see service users looking to build more complex automated ticket routing and ticket rotation using ticket forms may be connected to their conversation as Inbox, which can handle ticket creation and individual or team assignments, but no ticket rotation or more complex routing at the moment. However, this can be done using workflows. So in this example I'm creating a regular form with a drop down for routing. So in this example my dropdown is the category of the issue. Now I'm going to create two workflows when my form is submitted. Workflow 1 creates a ticket using our category of issue drop down in the ticket name. Note that I don't assign a ticket owner at that point. Workflow 2 checks for new ticket names containing our category of issue and then routes and rotates tickets to different teams using an if then branch. So here we can see the bottom section of our workflow where we're routing and rotating our tickets to different teams based on the category of issue value in our ticket name. Also, to differentiate our tickets, we append our ticket ID to the existing ticket name using ticket based personalization tokens. So worth pointing out here that this is a good example of multi branching in if then actions. So with this you can add up to 20 branches to an if then branch action to save you from adding lots of subsequent if then actions that only check in on one set of criteria to see if they're true or false. So a much more compact way of achieving this. So in this example we've achieved creating our tickets, routing it to the right team, giving it a meaningful name, and actually rotating that ticket ownership. Okay, that service. So onto the operations side, our operations users are typically working on automating business processes and managing data. So there were many examples we could choose from here, and many that are probably going to work best with the more powerful features of Operations Hub, professional or enterprise. But for this example I wanted to show an example of something that was around data management that's possible even without Operations Hub. In this example we're using workflows and a custom date property to store today's date for use in calculation properties to see how much time has passed. This can be useful in many different scenarios, for example calculating how Many days have passed since there was a specific activity or update to a property on a record, such as how long has a contact been our customer? Or as I'm going to show in this example, calculating your customer's age before the arrival of our new delay until a day or time action. This is something that either required the functionality of Operations Hub Professional or we'd use maybe about three separate workflows to achieve. But with the arrival of our new action, I quickly saw our amazing HubSpot community formulating and sharing the following example and a shout out to Stuart Balcombe from HubSpot partner Arrows, whose example I'm actually following today. So using this workflow, we want to figure out how much time has passed between a date property and today. We create a custom date property in our record to store today's date and then we create a workflow that enrolls and re enrolls records. If today's date is known or if today's date is unknown, we are then going to use an if then branch to check if we are setting today's date for the first time or if today's date is unknown, we set today's or if yeah, today's date is unknown, we set today's date to date of step. And what that is going to do then is allow our record to re enroll. So this is the first time that this is happening. We're setting the date for the first time. But because that today's date is now set and our trigger criteria was today's date is known or unknown, the record is going to be allowed to re enroll into this workflow. If today's date is known, we're going to delay until tomorrow. So we've already got today's date in the property. We're going to set this date until just after midnight and then we are going to set the today's date property to the date of the step again. As today's date has been updated again, the record will re enroll. So this is going to be a workflow that continually loops around setting this today's date property that we can then use for our calculations. Hopefully in the future. This is a property that we'll add. It's very useful. But for the time being, these workflows can do this quite, quite handily. Okay, so now that we are capturing today's date and a property every day, let's say we already are going about collecting a contact's date of birth in a date of birth date property and we now want to calculate the contact's Age. So we create a custom time between calculation property. We set the date of birth as the start, the today's date as the end, and bingo, I'm 21 again. Okay, how are we doing for time? I'll quickly run through this. It's just bonus, it should take about one minute and then we'll move on to our final Q and A section. So just to mention, there's so much more powerful functionality available through workflows, webhooks being one of those examples. So webhooks allow you to send or retrieve information between HubSpot and other external tools directly from a workflow, really helping you improve transparency across systems and maintain data integrity. So you can send or retrieve with webhooks. And it allows you to do things like sending data to Slack, another CRM, SMS service, external database, custom scripts, moving data back and forth with those webhook actions, then also to mention operations, Hub Pro and Enterprise. So that can add schedule triggers to recur workflows or custom intervals, gives you format data actions to allow you to easily fix format, maintain your CRM data, and also gives you custom coded workflow actions which really allows you to create the rules and create your processes using JavaScript or Python and allow you to interact with the HubSpot API, external APIs, database and more. So adds so much power and flexibility. Definitely encourage you to explore that. And if you're looking for some inspiration on what's achievable with custom coded actions and programmable automation, I'd encourage you to take a look at the Programmable Automation library and our documentation to really get a feel for some of the use cases that these can help tackle. Okay, great. And just a final point before we move on to the Q and A. If you do need help with your automation, you're looking for a little bit of help and guidance, then we do have a service where you can work with strategic consultants like myself on a project or an ongoing basis. And if that's something that you're interested in, just visit this link, fill out the form, and then we'll be in touch to help you. Or reach out to me and I'll try and help you find what you need. Okay? Oh yeah. Finally, resources. I did mention the beginning for anyone who's still at the basic stage of workflows and really just wants to dig in and cover all of the great functionality that we've discussed and go from the basics up. Kyle, of course has done this brilliant workflows deep dive course which is available in the Academy and I'd encourage you to take a look at. Okay, back to questions.

All right, thank you so much. I have been furiously dropping links into the chat there. There's a deluge right there. I hope that that's helpful for you. If you're ever having trouble finding anything, let us know. Happy to share. I'm going to share one final link here. Questions. I would love to get your feedback on this session if it met your needs. If there's anything you'd like to see in sessions like this in the future. It's just a two question survey, basically rate it out of 10 with 10 being the highest and then a free text box if you want to give any feedback on things you like, things you didn't like, things you'd like to see in the future. It's really helpful for me as I plan these events to know what it is that's most valuable to you. And we have 12 minutes for questions and we have probably 1200 questions. So we will again we'll get through as many as we can. The ones we don't get to I will copy paste into a doc. Matthew, Megan and I will work through them and I'll make sure that gets included in the resources I send in the follow up email after this is over. But here are our currently top voted questions over here. Do you always need to exclude bounce contacts from the workflow flows to avoid any errors?

I would say on that. Like if a contact is bouncing, we're not going to email them. What you're really looking for there is workflows that are consistently sending emails that are bouncing. Really that's an indication to go back and look at what's the source of those emails to people that we haven't verified the email address that we maybe are getting them from a less than reputable source or people are just filling out our forms and giving fake email addresses. So it's really just an indication to keep an eye on our email deliverability and figure out is there a large segment of our database that we think we're sending to that we're not. But otherwise if they're bouncing then to get the email. So it's more about going back and making sure that you're actually getting the emails out there that you.

Yeah, this is an interesting one. Nishant asks is a way in settings of workflow to add turn off this workflow on a particular date. If you want a workflow to stop at a certain point, how would you do that?

Yeah, we don't have an automatic turn off for workflows. It's something that has been coming up more recently. So anyone who does have feedback on that, I'd love to hear your reasons. And if there's not a community post going, I'd encourage you all to get one going. It's possible you could use delay until date. Yeah, Justin just said the same thing. If you want to just kind of dump everyone out of the workflow at a certain time, you or I'll go with Justin's suggestion again. Send yourself an email notification to go in and turn it off. But yeah, today we don't have it automatically set up to do that.

So Matthew, this goes maybe back to the very beginning of the presentation when you were talking about having multiple workflows instead of just one. Marcel asks how to best coordinate workflows with each other, especially within the same customer group.

Yeah, perfect. So really I think this first of all is about sitting down and planning. Like you have maybe lots of nurturing happening. It's really figuring out okay, what nurturing for example do we have in play and what often when. So if a customer comes and downloads a top of funnel and a middle of funnel and a like decision bottom of funnel, you know, which ones do we want to go out in preference which nurturing should they stay in? So we would think likelihood there is. We want the decision stage nurturing to then be happening if they've done all those things. So ways to potentially do that is to maybe use a property set of property workflow to record where the contacts are. So you could have like awareness, consideration and decision as a property. And then you could say in your decision nurturing workflow. A exclusion to this workflow is that anybody who's at awareness or consideration will be excluded. Actually the other way around, anyone who's in decision will be excluded from the awareness and consideration. You're recording where people are at and then using that create lists to to exclude from other workflows so there's a precedence that will make sense.

Cool. Seeing lots of requests for a Today function. Friends, I dropped a link in the in the chat to an ideas forum post for that currently has 300 upvotes. Our product teams really do monitor the ideas forum. This one is currently being reviewed it looks like. So go upvote it. There are 400 of us here. We could take it from 300 upvotes to 700 upvotes and that might catch someone's attention. We know this is something you need. And then John asks about any chance of delaying by working days in the future. Again, Megan, we talked a little bit about that setting that the workflow only runs on workdays. Does that affect delays too? Would that be the way to do that?

There are a couple levers here that can help you control what days the workflow is executing on. I saw someone bring up in the chat. I don't think we're quite covering all the different scenarios that people might want. So for example, it would be hard to have a two day delay and you only want to count work days for those two days. So if it's Saturday, Sunday, Monday, that's only been one day of work day delay. So there is a gap there that some people may may run into. But I would encourage them to use the workflow settings and the delay until day, generic day like Monday, Tuesday to try to control the cadence in the way they want.

Cool. Ben is asking a very big question. Can you undo what a workflow did if it by chance didn't do what I intended it to do? Changing the company property back to the original value before the workflow was turned on, for example?

Unfortunately not. So the workflow is going out into all these different parts of the app and making changes and we have no way currently to like roll those all back unsend that email. I'm so sorry, but what we would encourage you to do is lean heavily on testing. My team is exploring some improvements to testing for next year to make that more robust. So hopefully you don't get in that position in the first place.

I am going to drop in the chat of all time. Favorite HubSpot community post. This is a very clever support rep here at HubSpot who figured out a way to revert bulk property update changes. It would take a little bit of cleverness, I think, to apply that to a workflow, but it might anyway. It's excellent reading. It is excellent reading. I recommend it even if it doesn't address perhaps this this issue directly. Let's see, we have six minutes. Still more stuff about today's date. Oh, here's here's a good question as an enterprise question as an enterprise customer. When should we consider getting the Operations Hub for its role in workflows? Do either of you have a good like rule of thumb if you need to do this kind of thing? That's you're in Operations Hub territory now.

Yeah. From my side, I would say anytime that you feel like you can automate a valuable process and like the current functionality, just help you achieve it, it's worth at least trialing Operations Hub that You can actually recreate that process using Operations Hub. So I would think at any point trying a trial of Operations Hub will help you figure out the value that's there. You've got nothing to lose just by giving that a go.

Cool. I really like this question from Alan. When do you recommend using the if then branch versus values equal branching off of a dropdown pick list?

Sure. So we're doing some work here to help make that choice a little bit easier. But as things stand today, a lot of customers prefer the compact UI of the value equals branch, which you can use when you're doing an equals check. So owner equals Kyle equals Matthew equals Megan. The value equals branch is going to be a really slick way to set up a branch like that. You could also do that in an if then branch, but at that point you're kind of going for the UI experience. The if then branch lets you do the much wider range of filtering and operators, like greater than, less than. So you're going to want to use the if then branch if your filter's more complex. And then the value equals branch uniquely lets you do this branching on outcomes of other workflow actions, which we touched on in a couple examples. So there's some pretty cool functionality that.

One enables that is so cool. When when value equals came out and I saw that, that blew my mind. I still love it so much. Is there a workaround or way to filter based on a previous owner on a record? So I know some filters have value has ever been. I haven't specifically tried that with owner fields.

I haven't specifically tried that either. But if you're seeing a discrepancy between being able to do that for something like a deal or a contact, it could be because we are waiting for that filter upgrade that I mentioned before and if it's available in the other objects, then it's coming for contacts.

Cool. We can probably do a couple more questions here. Actually, you know what, I'm just going to copy paste the question. There are a lot of questions here. Thank you all so much for being so engaged. We will do our best to answer as many of these as we can asynchronously for you. Matthew, do you want to take us through the closing bit here?

Okay, so have questions, feel free to connect with us. We will share the recording, the deck and we will have a community post. We'll follow up with you and share all these resources. What I would say again, if you are looking for help with your automation strategy, how to set these things up, tackling some. Feel free to visit this page, fill in the form, and we'll be in touch. But yeah, otherwise, we will create this community post and try and tackle these remaining questions.

Thank you all so much for coming. Once again, I am dropping this survey into the the chat. If you haven't filled it out yet, please do. It's super helpful to me in figuring out how to how to make these sessions as helpful to you as possible. So really great session. Matthew and Megan, thank you so much for being here. Everyone, feel free to connect with all three of us if you would like to. And I think that's it. I'm going to go ahead and shut it down now.

Thanks everyone. Okay. Thanks everybody.

Thank you.

Take.