HubSpot Workflows: 10 Time-Saving Examples | HIVE Hub

HubSpot's workflows are a robust and powerful series of automations that initiate and complete tasks based on actions your customers take. Using workflows is an easy way to improve your marketing efforts since they allow you to perform actions in the background while working on other tasks. Workflows can perform a number of tasks simultaneously to alleviate the need to complete manual work. Check out the list below of 10 HubSpot workflow examples that can save you time and improve your marketing efforts. 

Here's What the Power of Workflows Can Do For You!

Rotating Records

Rotating records in a workflow is a simple way to ensure that HubSpot objects are equally distributed among team or organization members. For instance, sales qualified leads (SQLs) can be rotated between different sales team members to ensure equitable distribution of new contacts. 

The Benefit:

This ensures that everyone is on a level playing field when a new lead arrives in the system. Rotating these records is like dealing a deck of cards — no special treatment, you have the same odds as everyone at the table. 

Updating Properties

Updating properties through HubSpot workflows allows for easy maintenance of information. For example, a HubSpot workflow can edit a contact's lead status based on their activity. If a contact replies to a marketing email or submits a form, their status can be changed to "active." If a lead goes a few months without activity, it can be marked as "inactive." 

The Benefit:

This type of data maintenance and updating takes away the need for users to manually update these properties that impact so many other operations within HubSpot.

Managing Lists

HubSpot's active lists update based on properties set within its different records. Whenever an object's property is updated to align with an active list's filters, it can be added to or removed from the list based on its new property value. By updating properties through workflows, you can also manage active list membership. You can also update static lists in HubSpot with workflows. One of the available workflow actions is "Add to static list." This action can add a contact to a list that doesn't rely on properties for membership.

The Benefit:

This kind of workflow eliminates the need for manually updating lists when changes occur to keep lists current.

Formatting Data and Fixing Typos

HubSpot workflows can be a useful tool for managing pesky data inconsistencies. Everyone hates when a name isn't capitalized, or a company's name has missing spaces. Typos are annoying, but they can be easily fixed en masse with HubSpot workflows' "format data" action. When a lead comes into the system and is enrolled in a workflow, HubSpot can actively fix errors like name title cases, extra spaces, and mis-formatted numbers like dates.

The Benefit:

The ability to fix, format, and maintain your CRM data keeps data consistent across the board and helps with data hygiene.

Enrollment in Sequences

HubSpot workflows and HubSpot sequences are similar tools, but function in slightly different ways. Sequences are used for sending automated sales communication (think one-to-one) to contacts. While HubSpot workflows can also send out automated sales and marketing communication (think one-to-many), they can also update data, notify internal team members, and complete a bevy of other actions, including enrolling contacts in a sequence. Using workflows to trigger sequences can streamline the process of handing a lead off from marketing to sales.

The Benefit:

This allows sales and marketing emails to be automated simultaneously, creating a diverse and unintrusive flow of communication from your company to your leads.

Enrollment in Other Workflows

HubSpot's workflows can also, unsurprisingly, enroll contacts into other workflows! Workflows are useful for a number of different reasons during a contact's journey to becoming a customer. But not all steps of the journey are equal. A contact may need different levels of outreach depending on what product they're interested in. For example, they may need additional levels of communication over time based on their activity. Because of this, it doesn't make sense to house every possible path of a buyer's journey into a single workflow. 

The Benefit:

By creating different workflows that enroll leads into other complementary workflows, you can easily manage the different steps of the buying process and fine-tune them to best serve your customer's needs.

Setting Date Properties

Everything happens at a specific time, and tracking these events is important. HubSpot workflows can set a date stamp whenever a lead takes an action that needs to be noted. In doing this, you can create additional properties that label how long a lead has been in a certain deal stage or lead status. 

The Benefit:

This provides data that allows for powerful management of your internal sales processes and your leads' average response times.

Syncing Company and Contact Records

Sometimes a company and a contact are related, but their records look nothing alike. HubSpot workflows can fix this by copying data from a company to a contact and vice versa. For instance, a company's phone number can be copied to its respective point of contact's record, or a contact's region can be copied to a company's record. HubSpot can also copy properties in single records, so a mobile phone number can be copied to a plain phone number property.

The Benefit:

Identifies associated contact and company data and adds it to the corresponding record, providing more complete information in your database. 

Moving Deals Along a Pipeline

Keeping track of deals in HubSpot is an essential step in using the CRM to manage sales. Deal stages are used to keep track of the different stages of a customer's buying journey. The different stages of a deal must correspond to a customer's actions or a sales manager's outreach.

The Benefit:

By automating processes that move deals between different stages, HubSpot workflows allow for simple and easy maintenance of each customer's journey.

Utilizing Integrations

HubSpot's workflows are not only limited to actions taken in the HubSpot system itself. Many other products or services that integrate with HubSpot offer workflow actions that help close the gap between HubSpot and their own respective software. Through these integrations, you can send mass SMS messages to leads, deliver documents for leads to sign, or update and sync data between third-party platforms.

The Benefit:

By integrating different tools with HubSpot, you can simplify and streamline processes, keeping them connected and relevant.

Overall, HubSpot's workflows are dynamic and impressive sets of tools and actions for managing data and improving sales and marketing processes. Through the examples listed above and countless others in HubSpot, you can use workflows to complete necessary tasks, manage data, and automate actions to save time and effort.