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Do you know the main workflows you should set up in HubSpot to improve lead management? In this blog post, we explore ten workflows that every enterprise should have to help automate their internal and external processes.

If you’re using HubSpot Professional or Enterprise, you have access to a key tool which isn’t included with any of the smaller versions of HubSpot — the workflow tool.

HubSpot’s workflow tool allows you to automate repetitive marketing, sales and customer service tasks to scale up your activities. Using workflows can allow you to be more efficient, productive and consistent. 

But if you’re a brand-new HubSpot user — or perhaps you haven’t delved into HubSpot’s workflow tool or automation just yet — don’t fear, we can help! 

In this blog post, we will provide you with the best workflows for successful lead management, all of which you can utilise today and will automatically improve your use of HubSpot.


Related: Did you know that HubSpot training is vital for CRM success? Read our blog post to learn how to guarantee a seamless HubSpot implementation.

Example 1: Assigning lead owners

What happens to new leads that are generated through HubSpot? First of all, you should have form submission notifications set up to notify your marketing, sales and customer success teams when new contacts are generated.


But how do you make sure the right person will then follow up on the lead? This is where assigning lead owners is important; by setting up a simple workflow in HubSpot, you can automatically assign leads to the relevant person in your team. There’s nothing worse than losing a hot lead due to poor lead rotation.


So, how do you set these workflows up? Well, this depends on the size of your team and everyone’s roles and responsibilities. Many of our global clients, for example, assign contact owners based on the lead’s country.


Or, if you have a list of qualified leads and want to automatically split and distribute them amongst your sales team, you can use the Rotate Leads action. This action works in a “round-robin” style — it allows you to add any number of owners to the rotation and they will be assigned the leads evenly.

Example 2: Updating lifecycle stage

Lifecycle stages define where your contacts are in the buyer's journey. The stages are typically defined as subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales qualified lead (SQL), opportunity, customer, evangelist and others — unless you’re using your own custom lifecycle stages of course.

So to make sure you are sending the right content to the right contacts at the right time, it’s essential to keep those stages updated. Luckily this is another process you can easily automate in HubSpot!

For example, if one of the criteria for your MQLs is that they are working in a specific industry, you can update this through a workflow. Or, you could update your contact’s lifecycle stage to SQL if they have reached a specific deal stage.

Example 3: Qualifying out leads

Sending the same emails to different customers can be time-consuming. However, the automated email workflow is the perfect solution! Once the automation is set you no longer have to invest time creating similar emails, it can now be automatic. 

 

Using the email tool you can create automated emails either using the standard editor or the drag and drop editor.

Example 4: Set up score properties

You can customise the default HubSpot score contact property to qualify leads based on custom criteria. You can also create custom score properties for your contacts, companies and deals. 

Score properties are continuously updated by HubSpot, but below are a few examples:

  • If a record meets the criteria set in the Positive section, points are added to the score. Once they no longer meet the criteria, points will be removed from the score. 

  • If a record meets the criteria set in the Negative section, points are removed from the score. Once they don’t meet the criteria, those points will be credited back. 

  • If the criteria are removed, all records will be re-evaluated. This means if you remove criteria from the Positive section, points may be removed from your records and vice versa.

Lifecycle

Example 5: Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is one of the key activities we use HubSpot workflows for. Nurturing your leads with relevant content is essential to help move them further along the buyer’s journey. Afterall, 79% of all marketing leads never convert to sales. 

For example, your lead could first convert to your website by downloading a high-level eBook called “Inbound Marketing 101”. Perhaps you would like to follow up with that lead a week later to see if they are interested in another piece of useful content, such as a comparison sheet of different Inbound Marketing tools.

But you also want to ensure your contacts never receive a piece of content that they’ve already read previously. A simple way to avoid this is by adding if/then branches to your workflow, which you can set up so the contact skips an email if they’ve already downloaded the piece of content.

Example 6: Internal notifications

Sending internal notifications to your team is another great example of how HubSpot’s workflows can help you not only automate your external processes (like lead nurture emails) but also your internal processes running in the background.

Internal notifications can be sent either via email, via text, or in-app when a follow up is required.

But if you are, like us, big fans of the messaging app Slack, HubSpot allows for seamless connection and to send notifications straight to your Slack channel

This integration allows you to not only send notifications to follow up with prospects but also send automated messages to your team channel whenever you close new deals. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Example 7: Create and assign tasks

Another great yet simple way to utilise workflows in HubSpot is to set up tasks. HubSpot allows you to create tasks and assign them to users in your portal (you can learn more about this here). By using workflows, you can trigger these tasks to be created automatically based on specific actions.

Let’s use our example of a new deal you have just closed. One of the next follow-up actions will be to pass over the deal from sales to your client success team to begin the onboarding process. A simple notification can be set up through a workflow to assign a task to the relevant team member.

Example 8: Deal stage automation

If a deal is reached with a prospect, a HubSpot workflow can be set to automate the deal stage and assign a task to the next person in line to complete. This tool is extremely useful for large-scale sales teams as it ensures that someone is always following up on opportunities. 

This automation workflow helps deals move from stage to stage and is beneficial for operational processes in your business as it generates tasks and automatically increases efficiency.

Related: Learn why business process automation goes hand in hand with excellent customer service.

Learn more about ABM and HubSpot in this guide.

Example 9: Format your data

By using the Format data workflow action you can automatically format, fix and maintain your CRM data. For example, if you want to standardise contact’s names, the workflow can automatically capitalise letters in a name. 

The workflow ensures you’re always viewing a standardised set of data. Once you have standardised your data you can it can be copied into single-line or multi-line text properties or added to a google spreadsheet.

Formatting workflow-1

Example 10: Event promotion reminders

Our last workflow example is based on a specific event or webinar. Similar to your lead nurture workflows, you might want to set up a workflow to send out a series of email reminders to your contacts. The only difference is that you want to make sure these emails all go out at a specific date or time. 

Luckily, HubSpot’s workflow features have you covered, so you can prepare and schedule your workflow actions. Simply select the action “delay until a day or time” to trigger the next action in your workflow.

For example, you could send out an invite to your (virtual) event 30 days in advance. And to anyone who didn’t open it, you might want to send it again. As the event gets closer, you could set up a workflow to send a reminder two days before to all of your attendees. Also, after the event, wouldn’t it be nice to send out a little thank you email, linking to the event content? You can do that, too!

As you can see, there are lots of workflows you can build to manage your leads in HubSpot based on different scenarios and possibilities. The best way to think about workflows is to picture someone converting on one of your forms, or submitting a ticket, and then try and work out what’s needed at each step to move them further into the buyer’s journey.

You should have workflows in place to manage every aspect of the process, whether that’s managing new leads, handing leads over to sales, updating lead statuses or moving leads from an opportunity to closed or won. You want to reduce the amount of manual data entry wherever possible and let HubSpot do the work for you.

If you still need help, reach out to the Huble Digital team for additional support and let us show how we can help increase your team's efficiency.

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