The Ultimate Hubspot Workflows-A-Palooza Crash Course: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly [HubHeroes...
George B. Thomas, Max Cohen, and Christina Kate break down HubSpot workflows: how to organize them, set goals, use delays effectively, and build automation that actually works. They cover what works, what doesn't, and why.
Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub Heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action and become the Hub Hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode.
Recording this podcast is in no way.
Affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer. Just an FYI. Christina K. There's a running joke that I hadn't changed that intro for about two months of one Mr. Max Cohen not actually being employed at HubSpot. And because you were going to be our special guest, I literally was like, I need to change this. I need to have no reason that Max can make fun of me on this episode where we're going to talk about workflows. Good move. You like that?
Yep.
So, Christina, before we get into the actual intro, intro, just kind of explain to the Hub Heroes listeners who you are, HubSpot ecosystem, things like that. Then we'll carry on this conversation about HubSpot workflows because there is a reason that you're in the seat today for sure.
So thank you so much. I have been in the HubSpot ecosystem since about 2009. So it's been a little bit of time almost from the beginning, and I have been in it in various ways. So I've been at a HubSpot agency or two different ones, and then in house and then freelance consulting, things like that. And when I have used HubSpot, I've really used it in my mind. It's funny because the CRM is talked about so much now, but even in the beginning, I always thought of it still kind of as a CRM because it has. It is a database of contacts, you know, and people never thought of it that way. So I've always had been that, like, I don't want to say true champion of HubSpot, because that sound like a HubSpot champion pulling that card. But you are. I have always.
You're allowed to Pull that card.
Just so it's, it's just a thing that I have loved to see them really kind of become who they are and it's a really cool place to be in and I think my self has grown within the community as well.
Yeah, I love it. I love it. By the way, if anybody out there is doing math 2009. Yes, yes, ladies and gentlemen, that predates your boy gbt. Just going to throw that out there because I didn't arrive on the scene till 2012. You can do the math. You can do the math. Max, when did you hit the scene, brother?
I'm the little baby here. 2015.
Hell yeah.
Well, get out of here.
What are you doing in the room now? So here's, here's the thing. The three of us though, we're going to add value to the listeners lives here and, and hopefully people are starting to giggle and like what we're doing with some of our titles. Honestly, we don't give two issues about SEO at this point. Literally the ultimate Hub Heroes. HubSpot Workflows. A Palooza Crash Course. The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. Yeah, we're, we're probably not going to rank for HubSpot workflows, but just, just so you know, it's not about that. It's about adding value. And here's the thing. If you want to shine a spotlight on the part of HubSpot that exemplifies an awe inspiring automation superpower that it can offer you, HubSpot can offer you. Ladies and gentlemen, you look no further than workflows in a HubSpot marketing hub. And, and for all of their might, however, workflows may be the most misunderstood tool within the marketing hub. Or at very least it's the tool that can cause the most anxiety. And I cannot tell you the amount of humans where I'm, I'm gonna break something. But here's the thing. Stop me if you've heard this one before. Your company is no slouch when it comes to HubSpot. In fact, you've been using it for years and you've been using workflows for years as well. Then one day, oh my gosh, somebody decides it might be a good idea to pop the hood of what you've been got going running in your portal workflow wise. That is because there's a whole lot of other places that they could have popped the hood. But today we're talking about popping the hood of workflows. And that's when things get spooky. There are hundreds of workflows running. I know we need like, some like, Halloween music right there when it comes to house, but here's the thing. There are hundreds of workflows running, but they're all named. Well, maybe they are named. Maybe they're named counterintuitively. In other words, you can't quite understand what most of them do, who built them, or why the heck they were even created in the first freaking place. On the other hand, you know that you undoubtedly got workflows running that should be turned off. And who knows what conflicts may be happening between the workflows that are live and of the ones that are live. When you poke around in the data, you're not even sure if they're helping or hurting you. Oh, my God, somebody stop me, please. But however, on the other hand, what if you break something? A HubSpot. Super admin's biggest fear, by the way. What?
You've never done that, right?
No, no, never, Never. What if you accidentally trigger something that sends a bunch of emails to a bunch of people on your list?
What if you would know what that's like?
No, no, never been there. Nope, not on my resume. What if you turn something off that's mission critical that really messes things up internally with your teams? Well, ladies and gentlemen, if this sounds familiar, then you're in the right episode. Heck, even if you're just getting started with workflows, but this is the exact nightmare scenario that makes you scared. Stay up at night and click anything within a tool. You also might be in the great place. That's right, we're back together, the three of us this time. Because guess what? We know for a second week in a row, max, there's not going to be a haiku or a poem at the end of this because Liz had some sort of tree fall down and knock out the interwebs in. In their location. And Devin is like crime fighting sick kids. So here we go. Here we go. All right, let's get into this. Before we dig into our tips, I want us to take a step back and think about workflows in the big picture sense. Workflows, really? How should folks be thinking about them? Christina, Kate, why don't you take the mic first and then we'll roll through this.
Yes. So whenever, honestly, whenever I'm. When I am starting workflows with like a fresh new instance or helping a one of my freelance clients, my consultancy with workflows in general, people just want to do everything at once and I'm like, let's pull it Back and stop because first off, that gives me anxiety. And two, like, no, like that just, that's not going to happen. And what I always do is when I have like a mindset of it to see what can help more than just like marketing at first and those like basic workflows of marketing triggers with emails automation. That's awesome. But let's get down to helping the business first and having that foundation and then let's get into the fun campaign workflow stuff nurtures you can do. So that's my take on it. Because you have to have a solid foundation to then and also document. I will say that. But thank God now you can have descriptions and folders and stuff because otherwise that was a little messy before, but.
Oh yeah, we'll get into organization here in a bit. But Max, when you think about what are workflows really and how should folks be thinking about them, where does your brain go?
Yeah, sure. I mean, it's the tool that helps you Automate inside of HubSpot, right. The easiest way to think about it, but I think that the better way of thinking about it is that it is the glue that holds. Holds all the hubs together. Right. If you think about it, because you're automating stuff that you're doing in the marketing hub, but then that's translating to actions that have to take place inside of the sales hub. So, like how are you doing things like assigning those leads over to sales after marketing's done their thing and how are you handing those leads off to service once they become customers? And what are all these little things that you're building in in order to enable the folks that are doing the work in HubSpot to make their lives a little easier, but also make sure things don't fall through the cracks and you're reducing as much friction as possible. Right. So it's the, it's the glue that binds all of HubSpot together and just makes your life a lot easier.
I love that. And Max, I'm pretty sure that that beep was for automates all the good stuff that you're trying to do. And HubSpot. Is that what that beep was for?
My finger accidentally hit it.
I thought that's what, what you're going to say there. It's funny because when I think of the HubSpot workflows, I think it's like it's HubSpot's magic wand, right? It's just a little magic wand that you have in the tool.
But what's funny Tiny little baby, magic wand.
It's a very microsc.
Look what you want.
You look really good.
Yeah, yeah.
Very powerful. Very powerful, though. And here's the thing. What's funny is everybody, they. Their brain immediately goes to workflows and they say automation tool. Dare I say that it's not just an automation tool. Right. When I think of workflows, I actually think of it as a communication tool, internal and external, by the way, but we'll get into that a little bit later in this episode. But also, it's a process tool.
Right.
And so that's why I like to call it a magic wand, because if you think about the three major vectors when you're talking about, you know, Hublandia, it's people, platform, and process. And the one tool that can actually affect the process, the platform and people, is your workflows tool. Anyway, so that's how I kind of think about it. I. I also like to teach the fact that it's not as complex as people think. I love to. To help people not have that anxiety. And so I just love to be like, hey, it's. It's going to be okay. Workflows aren't the nerdy deep end of the pool. Of course, some would call me a liar when I say that, because workflows can actually become the nerdy part of HubSpot, but it doesn't have to. So. So let's dive into this because I want this episode to be somewhat actionable. Somewhat. Example. Somewhat just bringing people up to speed if they're getting started with HubSpot and HubSpot workflows. What are the different types of workflows that the, you know, HubSpot users or potential HubSpot users should be aware of that they might want to use, or maybe that you think get left on, like, the back shelf.
I feel. Well, I mean, that's a very loaded question, like, where should I start?
Yeah.
Oh, goodness. I mean, so many come to mind right now. If you want to go first, Max, you can go ahead, because I have so many in my mind.
Sure, yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, and we can. We can break down a little bit. I mean, I think a lot of people, when they first start approaching it, they think this is just like the automated email Dripper tool. Right. Send an email delay. Send an email delay. Send an email delay. Have they bought something yet?
No.
Send an email delay. Yeah, it's not that. I mean, it is that, but that it's not that. Right. If you're of the mindset that that's all you're doing with workflows, you've totally missed the plot. So in terms of what can you use workflows for? I mean, to automate almost anything. Right. And most of that should be happening like your email automation should maybe be 10% of the total workflows you're creating.
Right.
If we're really coming down to it or thinking about like, how else you're. You're using it and the distribution of it. But in terms of like, types, I think the first thing, like, you know, there's, there's types of workflows for every object. And I think it's like important to point that out and like a lot of people miss this is that workflows center around the objects that go through them. Right. So you can always think of like a workflow as, you know, essentially a set of actions that get applied to an object as soon as it gets enrolled in it. Right. And those actions happen too that object. Right. So you can think of it like falling through this process or going through this like almost factory line or conveyor belt of different things that are having to happening to the object as it goes through it. Right. I think sometimes people just need like a little visualization to kind of understand that. But basically any object that you have inside of HubSpot, you could build workflows. And then there's like types past that. Right. So how they actually get triggered, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit. So I'm going to. I'll pause there.
I echo all of that. And then another thing that I would say that a lot of when I'm in like new portals that I haven't been in, and I see different things that I see how their data looks is really just like creating a, like formalizing your data really within workflows and being able to do that, because it helps a lot, especially of a small team, depending on like what tiers you are, obviously. But it. That's one thing that helped us a lot because I have a lot of. Well, I've worked with a lot of lazy sales people.
Oh, snap. Shots fired.
Get him.
That's fun. So, so it's interesting. I. I think that there are so many things you can do and you know, if you stop and think about just like, hey, I might be getting started. And by the way, when I say I might be getting started, you could be two years into this and you might hear something we say and be like, oh, yes, I should probably do that. Meaning if you hopefully you know what a HubSpot owner is? If you need to assign leads to owners, there's a workflow for that. Hopefully you know what life cycle stages are. It's literally the vertebrae of your sales and marketing funnel. There's updating life cycles stages, there's a workflow for that. You're probably going to run into unqualified leads. So qualifying out your leads from your database. Well, there's a workflow for that. You might want to score those leads because, well, you know, sometimes if you actually do it the right way, a number can really mean something. So setting up score properties. There's a workflow for that. Need to do lead nurturing workflow for that. Internal notifications workflow for that. Create and assign some tasks to people who need to get ish done. Yep, there's a workflow for that. Hey, you can even automate your deal stages. Why? Because there's a workflow for that. And you can also format your data. As Christina Kate just said, by the way, hopefully you're doing event marketing and you want to actually promote the events. Maybe it's webinars, maybe it's just a different type of event. It doesn't have to be webinar. But guess what, ladies and gentlemen, there's a workflow for that. And that's just scratching the surface, by the way. I mean, we could really do a commercial. We could do a commercial. Or HubSpot, by the way. HubSpot, if you're listening, you could literally do. There's a workflow for that.
Very, very, like one of those, like, easy buttons.
But I mean, they could also just sponsor the podcast. But I mean, that's.
I mean, they could do that. They could do that. Which hang around the way, ladies and gentlemen, because about halfway through this podcast, you're going to hear a word from our sponsor. But I won't mention them yet because they get their own. Now, moving forward, let's talk about this, because, Christina, you kind of actually alluded to like descriptions and folders, and I was like, hang on, we're talking about that later.
Yeah, sorry.
That's all good. It's all good. So what does great organization look like within HubSpot Workflows tool? And I would even maybe add in. Why is it so dang important to be organized in that part of HubSpot?
Yeah, so. Well, for your own sanity, one, I would say that. And then everything else is just so you. You know what's going on. Because for me, I've built so many at not at a time. But like, throughout a time period and you forget what you've done. And if you don't organize it, you can set something off that set something else else off. And then it's a domino effect of negativeness, nonsense that you don't really want. So that's why. But for everybody. And I will say, not just. I won't say just about yourself and your own sanity, but your teams. Like, I always have the analogy of if I get sick and I can't come in in our whatever for weeks at a time, I'm not saying I get that sick, but say that would happen. Someone could come in and see what's going on instead of being like, f Christina's out, we don't know what to do. And that's like the last thing that.
I would want to happen.
Yeah. And like, like, yeah. I mean, for me, a lot of, like, the basics of good organization is like, give the workflow a description, for God's sake.
Yes.
Forget doing that all the time. Let's be very specific about what it does, right? And now, like, even with, like, the comments that you can add to actions, right? Like, if that's updating a property, right. Sometimes it's not as simple as just updating a property. Maybe it's updating a property and that causes like, five other workflows to trigger and do something specific, Right? So like, you know, maybe consider writing a comment where you, like, switch that one property to say we're switching this property. And that's because it does X, Y, Z. That that's why we're doing it at this stage or whatever, right? So, like, get really good at coming up with, like, a very clear naming convention that explains at a glance what it is. Get more specific with a description and then utilize that comment feature when, when, like, like, you know, whenever there's any, like, nuanced understanding of, like, why you're taking that step in the workflow, right? Because, like, you may move on from that portal one day and someone else is going to have to take that over for you. Right. And then you're going to, you know, you're going to leave them not a mess. You're going to leave them a very clear process that that's built out, that's easy for them to understand. They understand why it's there and they don't have to, like, blow it up and start from scratch or like, tinker with something and end up, like, completely breaking it. Right. So that's big. They just released subfolders, I think. So now you can do folders within folders, which is awesome. But another little, like, tricky naming convention I did too is whenever I would name my workflows, you know, for me, I like to know, like, if it's a series of workflows that work together, right? You can put like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, like in the naming convention and sort by that, right? So. So from a combination of, like, a good naming convention, grouping things into folders, giving good descriptions, like, there's no reason that you shouldn't be able to have, or all the organization that, like, you need for workflows. You know what I mean? And then on top of that, what I would say is, like, try to consolidate them as much as you can, right? Like, try not to build a lot of these, like, repetitive workflows that are doing the same thing. Like, if you can get the workflows to kind of work together, that's great too, as well, you know, and just make sure you keep them simple. Sometimes, like, organization just means don't do a thousand if then branches. Do a couple if then branches. And some go to actions that bring things together. Yes. Repetitive, you know, enroll in next workflow.
Enroll and next. Oh, my God.
Yes.
Yes.
I was going through that today, actually, because the client was, like, asking. It was. I was like, let. You're hurting my brain right now. I was like, we have to break this down because after, if you hear a snoring, it's my dog. I apologize, okay? It gets loud sometimes. It's whenever I'm talking. It's really wonderful. But he. Sorry. He Goodness. For the workflows. They're. If you make them too complicated, they're more likely to break something, just to be honest, because you'll forget and then they'll just skip too many things. So the thing that I always. I limit myself for my if then because I used to be like, oh, let's see how big my workflow can get. You know, let's do that. Now I'm like, what? What was I thinking? I have a Snapchat from, like, 2013 that, like, shows this one. And I was like, what was I thinking? What was I thinking?
Yeah, it's. It's so funny because go to Next Action and enroll in workflow are two of my favorite, favorite, favorite features of workflows. But, Max, I want to unpack something that you said because you slipped right by it. And I hope that the Hub heroes listeners understand how important it is if you can treat and document your portal like you're the one that's going to inherit it. There's something there because again, we all think about ourselves, but if we think about others and not that we're planning on leaving or anything like that, but it's just, it's just being a good human to make sure you're documenting it in the way that it needs to be documented now.
Yeah, don't build it for you. Don't build it for you. Build it for someone else. That's it.
That's it. Speaking of which, I want to double down on this naming convention thing because you guys talked about descriptions and comments and stuff like that. Listen, I always teach use a tag mentality for your naming convention. It's automation or it's process, it's awareness or it's consideration. It's, you know, a singular or part of a group or whatever you can think of to actually give tags in the naming convention. And here's why.
And I have this in folders.
Yes, yes. And folders named with tagging and. But here's why. When you first get in there, you're like, well, I only have five workflows. That is just a moment in time, ladies, gentlemen, you will soon have 500, if not 5,000 before you know it. And so the best feature inside of the workflows tool is the search bar. Because if you actually do a tagging convention for your workflows naming, you can search those bad puppies, find all the ones that happen to be lead, nurture, awareness stage ebooks, and then pinpoint the one that you want. Anyway, just. I'll get off my soapbox, but actually we might get.
Oh, go ahead. Didn't they just, didn't they just add like the advanced like filtering and stuff? There's like a whole new like workflows like index page almost. Right. And it treats it more like the records where you have like tab now and like a whole bunch of other stuff just like, yes. Is wild.
It's very nice. It's very. It's time. I said time consuming. But opposite of that, it saves a lot of time.
Streamlines your day. Streams, lines your day. All right, I might get back on my soapbox here shortly, depending upon what the two of you say here. Because I found that so many people that are confused about this next thing we're going to talk about that is, is setting goal. I'm. I, I can't read it without sounding like I'm trying to be a dick when I. Is setting goals with workflows actually important?
It depends. Yeah. Situation. Should we define goals for people like are uneducated about them first.
Yeah. So first of all, there is a place that you can go into your HubSpot workflow and you can set a goal. Meaning what is the desired outcome that you want to happen after somebody is enrolled in this workflow? One of the things that I love about it, by the way, and taught for a long time is it actually gives you a percentage rate once you set a of people who have reached that goal or not. Literally, I have said it is a success or failure metric of what you have inside your workflow. But there's other things that we might need to talk about when we actually set a goal.
The other thing is that it removes the object from the workflow. So, you know, there's that idea that yes, it uses to say this workflow was successful. Right. Because the only other option is that they just get to the end. They get to that little finish line flash. Right. And in some cases, like you want a workflow to just do all the things and that's it. Like no matter what, I want all the steps to take place. If that's the case, you don't need a workflow, right? You don't need to.
Work done. Actually, I'm just saying you need the.
Workflow, you don't need the goal. Right. Now I can see where there's kind of like an argument there to say like, oh, well, we want to know that like it successfully went all the way through, right. Well then, hey, get it to change a property down at the end and then have that be the goal criteria or something and great, cool. You'll know it got all the way through the end and it does the thing, hits the goal, blah, blah, done. But yeah, so it's either it'll pull it out. So a lot of the times where you see people use this is email drip campaigns, right? So you're sending an email delay. Sending an email delay saying boring. But people still have to do it, right? Super boring. I hate getting marketing email these days. Now that I don't work at HubSpot anymore, I'm masked off. I hate email marketing. Oh my God, it's.
Anyway, don't even ask the amount of emails I had at my previous.
Yeah, yeah, it's brutal. Sorry for anyone listening here. If you're blasting people with emails. I'm sorry, you're, you're. It's. Anyway, I, I'm not. I don't want to piss too many people off, so I'm going to shut up there. But I mean with the goal stuff like, let's say it's a. It's an email drip. Like if someone takes the desired action, such as like fills out a form to like get a piece of content or goes and like makes a purchase or I don't know, maybe like clicks a link in the email or something, right? You can set that as a goal criteria. Just keep my eyes going to pull them out of the workflow and any actions that they haven't gone through yet, they won't. The other thing that you need to be like cognizant of when you're looking for the goal stuff is like, make sure you're setting delays so you give time for the goal to actually happen, right? Versus it just flying through everything and not giving any time for the goal to actually take place. Right? So time for that, click time for that form, fill time for that purchase, time for that, whatever. You know, a lot like workflows is all about timing, right? Because remember, workflows, while they sound very smart, they're actually very dumb. They just do exactly what you tell them to do. And if you don't give them time to search for these things or time to update information or time to wait for a goal to happen, it's not going to know that it was supposed to do that unless you tell it to, right? So time is everything.
So Christina, your thoughts on to goal or not to goal with HubSpot workflows?
So I'm 100% in line with Max with all of that because I have been on a the side of I loved goals at one point and then I was like, these are gray. But like Max said it like pulls people out of the workflow and it's not. Doesn't really. It's not the full goal in my, in my heart, like, you know, like, yes, but not really because it didn't really finish. So how could it reach the goal, you know, in my mind. But I also can see it. I will say this. There's some instances, like if it's a very factual, like streamlined. My dog snoring again, streamlined. Quick nurture per se. I say quick, but like two months quick nurture. And the goal is for like an upsell and we have this like one specific like offer for these set of people and everybody, same thing. Sure, that goal is fine. But also I'll just create a dashboard, like a dope dashboard with reporting on it too. And you can go there because that's where our executive team will get the emails anyway, you know, so it really depends in my mind of yeah.
You know, having this conversation makes me think like it, it almost would make. Because I could see a situation where you'd want to be able to say, yeah, they achieved what we wanted them to achieve in this workflow, but not remove them from it. Right, Correct. So like, I almost wonder like if it would, if it would almost make sense if they had like, if they renamed what goals actually is to like removal criteria or unenrollment criteria. Right, yeah, because there is that option that you could say if they no longer meet the starting criteria, unenroll them. But that's very different than them meeting a new set of criteria to then unenroll them. Right. And like, sure. Could you, could you jerry rig that and do it with like if then statements and like branch people off to like, like stop? Sure, you could do that. Right, but, but I mean, like, I almost feel like you could just. You could have a whole new thing called unenrollment criteria and then a goal criteria that they could hit but still keep going through the workflow. Yeah, no, it was successful. Right. You know, because just because a workflow is successful, does that always mean you want to take them out of it? Yeah, maybe, maybe not. Right? I don't know.
Yeah. Hashtag wishlist item.
Right?
Because it could be like the goal. You put the goal in and then it's like a checkbox of to unenroll or whatever. In my mind, I make it simple, but I know, you're right.
Yeah, maybe make it. Yeah, no, you're right. So same as the goal stuff now. Right? But maybe there's a checkbox that could.
Say like in settings, do you want.
To unenroll them if they meet the goal criteria? Yes or no?
Somebody get coding. Somebody get coding. Hey, I want to close the loop on something, by the way, because, Max, you almost had like, what was a little bit of a meltdown about email marketing listeners? If you're like, well, but I want to know how they really feel about email marketing, you should head over to episode 27 and 28 because it was literally a two part series. Episode 27, we talked about HubSpot email marketing strategy and Best Practices 101. Then episode 28, Man Hot to Trot. HubSpot and Email Marketing Part 2, the Electric Boogaloo. You got to go over and check that out for sure. Without a doubt. Okay, so here's the thing. We, we talked about goal or no goal, right? To goal or not to go. It's almost like we're the GIF and GIF thing, but around like HubSpot terminology. HubSpot workflow terminology. Because the next thing I want to know. And by the way. Well, no, I won't say that. I'm just going to actually ask the question because I have some thoughts, by the way. So now we're going to talk about to delay or not to delay. So beginning of a, of a workflow delay or no delay. What are your thoughts?
Can I ask a clarifying question?
Oh, snap.
Okay.
Okay.
Are you, Are you saying, like, here's like, the enrollment criteria, and then like, right away there's a delay, here's the.
Trigger, and the next step is a delay?
Like, it depends.
Yeah, it truly depends. Because, I mean, if someone fills out a form, I'm not gonna email them, like, seconds later. That's like, for me, I feel like that's like a 10. Unless it's like, an ebook, because. But still, sometimes with ebooks, I'm like, where is this ebook? It's been like five minutes. I just need it now.
But you should get it now on the thank you page.
I have had, believe me, that's the whole. I recently was on the landing page that. That didn't happen. And I was refreshing my emails and refreshing.
Oh, that's the worst, worst user experience ever.
Worst. But that's a whole, that's a whole other situation. It really depends. But I mean, I, I. This is going to go back to goals, but not HubSpot workflow goal. What's the goal of the workflow you're creating in a sense? Like, is it, is it internal, more wise? Is it, is it for, like, property value updating? Is it for lead scoring, all that kind of stuff?
I think we're both Curious George. Kind of Curious George. That's funny. What's the context? What's the context? Because I think me and Christina are very much both in the it depends on pens camp.
All right, so I will share my thoughts on this. First of all, I do agree with Christina. There's a whole nother episode that just popped in my mind of, like, the proper, proper delivery of your offer. Thank you pages and emails, everything you need to know. Because I think that for people who are coming up and want to do it in a certain way, that it would be very useful. But here's the thing. The way that I think about this, and by the way, this is for process and it is for nurture workflows as I actually fall into the camp. And by the way, I fully know that I'm going to get email. Either love email or Hate email when I say the statement, but I'm willing to put it into the world. When I think about HubSpot workflows, I always give it about a two to five minute delay, okay? And there are two major reasons why I do that. Reason number one, I do it for a technology standpoint. Meaning I understand that HubSpot is built on the Internet. I understand the Internet does not always work the way that it should. And I also understand that software sometimes has issues. And so if this is off of some type of form conversion or action or something along those lines, I want to make sure that the data or the thing got to the place where it actually needed to get to before I use some of the personalization tokens or something like that along the way. So technology, two to five minutes. The second reason that I bring this up is because psychology, I believe that we should be marketing in a mindset of abundance. Abundance, not of scarcity. And if I were to come to your website and if I were to fill out your form and if I were to immediately hit submit, and then all of a sudden I got you got mail or ding or whatever your email service provider does, I'm like, well, that's kind of creepy. However, if I've already downloaded my offer offer your thank you page, and I'm starting to kind of peruse it and about two to five minutes later I get a you've got mail or ding or whatever your email service provider does, and it's a nice email, talking about, hey, we just want you to save in a safe space because you don't have to go through the conversion process again. You can download your guide from here at any point in time. I go, well, that is helpful, that is valuable. And there is a wide cavern between that's creepy and that's valuable. And I want my brand to end up on the value side of this conversation.
And I think so. I agree with you there. But I would say this is like, this is why. I mean, that's like a little micro lesson on why thank you page copy is so important, right? Because you can easily kill the creepiness by saying, thanks, we just automatically emailed you a copy so you can get it later without filling the form, something like that. Obviously it's not that. Not that chunky. But like, if you say, if you're transparent and say we sent you an extra copy just in case you need it, right? It softens the blow of that immediate email, right? Because you go, oh, it's just automated, duh. Like, you know, people People understand that. You know what I mean? It's like a notification on your phone that you're kind of already used to. Right. So, I mean, if you give good, like, it's also good to just like, set expectations. Right. Like when someone requests like a demo or something from you. Right. It shouldn't just say, thanks, we'll be in touch. It's to say thanks.
Thanks.
We've assigned it to a member of our team. They'll reach out within X amount of time. Right. And like, under, like, get them prepped for what the follow up is going to look like. Because one, if it's not something that's immediate, then they're looking for it later. Right. And two, they're not disappointed if it doesn't come in X amount of time that maybe they're expecting. But you didn't do the legwork to set the proper expectation. Right. So thank you. Really important.
Do you mean that marketers should actually take the initiative to set expectations?
Yeah.
And maybe coordinate with the other people that you're setting up to have these interactions with and. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, you mean us as marketers should have accountability and work as teams?
Yeah. Oh, I think it's a great idea.
Wow. Yeah. That should be an episode in itself. Maybe in future Hub Heroes episode, we.
Did sales and marketing alignment kind of. Right. That falls into that episode, didn't we?
There we go. We did talk about that too, Too. We did talk about that too. All right, so let's get into some examples. What are some of the coolest things? Because by the way, Christina, the fact that you've been around since 2009, you. You've probably seen some stuff, girl, I'm just gonna throw that out there. But what are some of the coolest things that you've seen folks do with the workflows tool?
I would. One of the things. And I'll. I will say at first we had to create it in Zapier because there wasn't a way to do that in HubSpot at the time. And so then once HubSpot amazingly had the opportunity for us to do this and the product changed, we were able to. Okay, so long story short, we. This is gonna be. I'm gonna try to do this. Long story short, when we had a closed one deal. Cool. It was always in Salesforce. Someone had to manually go to our. Go to chargebee and create a contact. Customer. Yeah, customer and a contact. And then it would automatic. Then we had to manually go back to Salesforce to say yes. It was just a Whole journey of a person going back and forth. Okay, so once we switch to HubSpot CRM, everything from like the self service essentially signed up, they signed their Panda doc and then from that it. It did automatically change the property, the deal to closed one and then it automatically created. Well, I jerry rigged this. Automatically cloned. I say this because Maxx just a TikTok on this, I think, but I jerry rigged a duplicate clone deal prop. Deal object. Yeah, well, no, sorry, a new deal. And then from there it completely went to Charge B and charge B did all of it stuff like automatically with the customer contact, blah, blah, blah, and then created an auto renewal and then it went back to HubSpot to like put in the invoice and then it started their nurture campaign for auto renewal, like 90 day thing. So it was taking away basically the unmanaged customers we had and us having the opportunity to lose them because we had no contact with him really at that time ever. And we created this workflow that we made sure that our books were in order as well as the communication with the customers. We didn't talk to as much for auto renewals and everything like that within the book. And that saved a lot of time for our team. Like hours.
Max.
In a nutshell, that's what it was.
Yeah. Max. In a world where a guy might have used to work at HubSpot, I imagine that HubSpot probably used their own workflows tool. Or you may have been passed down stories from the mountaintops of amazing workflows. What are your thoughts?
I mean, in terms of like the coolest things we've seen?
Yeah, yeah. What's something cool?
Yeah, I mean, HubSpot's ones were always kind of like pretty simple. I try to think of like one that like really blew me away. You come back to me, George.
Yeah, yeah, I can.
I'm trying to think. I'm trying to think of like a really, really good example and I'm having trouble just.
It's all good. Yeah, it's all good. So first of all, I'm gonna give a shout out to Liam reading, because Liam reading, man, I. I'll tell you, freaking workflow dodges. Anyway, anyway, so there's. There's two that I'm gonna mention and we're gonna make sure we put links to these YouTube videos, by the way, in the description. One, he actually walks you through how to do a 365 Winback HubSpot workflow automation framework for like win bags of. Of what you're trying to do in your organization. The other one that I abso that I want to make sure because we are having a workflows conversation is. And the fact that we also talked about goals earlier is that Liam Reading has a tracking HubSpot workflow goals that actually shows you how to set up where you can see a little bit more than the average bear if you do what he shows in that video. So those are two where I'm like, those are really cool. As somebody who has talked to a lot of partners, dealt with a lot of clients, as soon as we were going to do this episode, I was like, oh, oh, I've got to get these out to the world and let people see them.
Yeah. I think the coolest stuff that I see people do with workflows these days is when you really start getting command of custom behavioral events or even just behavioral events in the past, because then you're using stuff from outside of HubSpot to orchestrate and like dictate the automation that's happening within it. You know, I, I bring up custom behavioral events a lot just because I see it as like one of the most underutilized tools that like, some people aren't, aren't, aren't touching. Right. But like, you know, a great example of this is if you're a SaaS company and you want to know when like one of your contacts has completed some sort of like high value or important action in your SaaS platform, you can tell HubSpot that happened through a custom behavioral event.
Yes.
Right. And with the recent rework. Wow, that's hard to say. Recent rework. Not recent. We work recent rework of the workflows tool. The engine behind it is all like events based. Right. So like you can trigger stuff, right. When custom behavioral events happening versus like waiting for like some list to compile in the background and like, however it works before, right?
Yes.
And so what's really neat is like you could say, hey, when someone completes a certain event event, right. Go trigger this. Or you can, you can do delays based on when events happen, right? So you can say delay until an event occurs, right? So you could say, hey, we kick off a, we kick off a workflow. That's like onboarding someone onto a product, right. But then we do a first email that goes out tells them to go do a couple things. Well, hey, if you can track, if they've done those couple things through custom behavioral events events, then you can build in delays that say, wait until they do those couple of things and then continue down the path. Right. So I mean, getting really smart with custom behavioral events is I think where you really start to get, you know, super, super advanced with workflows. Other than that, like it's gotta be, you know, some of the stuff you see people accomplish with custom coded like workflow actions and operations hub.
That's my baby.
Yeah, that's the best one. Right? Like. Cause at that point if you have a command to code you, you can get anything done. Right. You can automate almost anything under the sun. I think coolest thing I ever did that I was proud of is I use that format data, custom mode or whatever to create a Google Maps link based off of properties that were filled in on a company record. Right. So I think, you know, but people that are more skilled than I that can do a lot more cooler stuff with that. But you know, a lot of it's all just your creativity, you know what I mean? That's the beauty of workflows.
And Max, you were talking about the customer behavioral events with that. It's almost how I've created it with workflows is essentially like an intent based type of workflow. And then with our sales team and then also having it come in, like if they've clicked on an area that they usually they would have to like upgrade to so many times and we're on that page for so long, it's kind of like a lead scoring in a sense. But then you can pull from so many different things. And what I do on that is also then train the. Once we have the reports for this and the workflows created is train the team on what to look for when you're on the calls within their contact record in the CRM to have those conversations because it's gonna help so much. And you can also do like internal pings saying, hey, this person did this for so many whatever, you know, and it really just helps the team be more aligned. But that also helps like cross collaboration because sometimes sales just thinks marketing does like social media on email. But for me I'd love just to help them close quicker.
Yeah.
All right, we've got a. By the way, I, I have a special gift officially now at the end of the podcast, we, we reached a point where I was like, okay, I've got to do this, but I want to ask one more question before we get to the end of this episode because I think it's important and it might end up being its own standalone piece depending upon what happens here. But what do you do when you've inherited a mess of a portal. When it comes to workflows, how do you even begin to untangle a mess you didn't create and are struggling to understand? Where does your brain scrap go, Go.
Go, go, go into the. They have those new tabs now that tell you, like, the unused ones or something like that, or the ones that, like, don't. Yeah, yeah, go, go look at those, right? And if it says untitled workflow at the beginning, nuke that thing.
Yeah, there's.
You generally have an army of unused workflows because, you know, if you didn't get your permissions down, right? I'm sure there's been tons of people that have gone on there and go, what is this? And then gave up. After that, it tried to ask him what they wanted for a trigger, right? But yeah, I mean, I'd say whittle it down to. It's just the stuff that has a green light on and it's like, operating. But then, like, what I would try to do is like, go in there, make sense of what's going on, rename it so you understand, like, what's happening, and try to, like, map it out, right? Try to map out what's happening, what forms are triggering these things, what properties are they changing? Where are we using those properties, right? Because, you know, what's cool is like, you can go find all these different things they're touching and then see the dependencies those things have, right? So, like, for example, you could say, oh, okay, I'm looking at this first workflow, all right? There's a form that gets filled out. I can go to that form them and see what pages it's living on, right? And if it's changing some properties, I can go look at that property and see what that property's used in, right? And you can usually kind of follow it. Now, it may take a long time if someone really, you know, created a rat's nest of crazy automation, right? But the good thing is, is, like, HubSpot gives you those signposts to figure it out, if you really want to figure it out, right? Obviously there's a human element of someone doing some crazy shit, right? But, you know, HubSpot at least, like, helps point you in the right direction so you can solve the mystery. Three, which is really good. Like, dependencies are huge.
And one thing that I do, and even, like, sometimes on the regular as well, is do, like an exported view of the workflows and just to, like, see it in a, like, fully together, just not with other distractions within HubSpot. That you can go to and that's how I organize it. And then I pull from there to kind of get in line with where, what they're doing right now. And then I can easily just like change naming or descriptions from there. And then I do like, like current or before I keep it just so if someone comes with a question like, oh, this used to be this one. You can kind of have everybody on the same page with that.
So much goodness there. And yeah, I'm just gonna double down on. There's three tabs. Unused workflows, needs review and created in other tools that are going to be really helpful at the beginning of this journey. If it's created in another tool, go to that tool and see what, see what it's doing. Needs review. In other words, see what's kind of semi broke. Unused workflows, see if it even has a name like Max said. But then I love Max that you talked about. And again, you can, you can view the details of a workflow and you can go to view connections and if, if you haven't gone to a workflow and viewed connections and look at, you know, know this workflow uses these properties, uses this list, uses these tools. Man, you can start to really understand a lot when you have that context before you jump into the actual workflow that was built. So I love all of this. This is, this is good. Any last words of wisdom that you would leave the Hub Heroes audience with around just HubSpot workflows in general?
I would say if you're like new, try not to feel like overwhelmed, especially if you're coming from a different product. And I, and I say this, and I always say this because I just love the HubSpot community. Go to the HubSpot community because 9 times out of 10 your question will be answered there already and someone probably has a solution accepted. It's probably that guy who has like 5,000. I can't think of his name right now. And the workflow will basically be done for you. And so just really utilize that network because it'll help you more than you can know.
Don't automatically create deals and work. Oh my God.
Don't we almost.
All right. Just because you can automate it doesn't mean you should. Right? And a bunch of stick figures working together is always better than a giant Christmas tree. I'll leave you with that.
Oh, wow. All right, so keep it simple, baby. That's, that's gonna be my take words of wisdom to keep it simple. Use those features that are to my favorite features Next Action and enroll in new workflow. Please don't get lost in the wilderness of branches that might be at your feet. But here's our special treat, by the way, because today is Friday 692023 at 3:59 mind it was only several hours ago that I reached out to Christina K and said we're in trouble because we needed some help on this episode because we lost two of our Hub Heroes. And so Christina, because you were such a great, great human and joined us on the podcast, I feel like we should yeah, and a legend. I feel like we should exit with this Hub Heroes beacons. Christina's voice shines brightly. Wisdom in each word.
Let's go.
Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next next episode, make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag Hub Heroes Podcast on any of the socials and let us know know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.
