Suppose you have access to the Professional or Enterprise tier or HubSpot Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, or Service Hub, or the Professional tier of HubSpot Operations Hub. In that case, you can use the Workflows app to get more done faster with perfect accuracy.
Like many kinds of businesses whose customers expect an immediate response to pre- and post-sales questions, B2B SaaS companies can be an especially great fit for Workflows. After all, as a B2B SaaS company itself, many HubSpot features often start as initiatives to solve internal challenges.
In this article, you’ll learn about HubSpot Workflow planning best practices to help your company get the most value out of your HubSpot software investment.
- Plan out what your workflows are supposed to accomplish. In other words, what is the workflow goal that you’ll be setting? You can plan with a pen and paper, dry erase marker and whiteboard, the electronic equivalent, markers and a flipchart, or an online diagramming tool. The method (usually) doesn’t matter. But what does: you’ve thought through the steps that get you from enrollment trigger to goal.
- Thoroughly test the workflow. If you’re ever heard the expression, “measure twice, cut once,” that approach doesn’t quite do justice to the damage that a half-baked workflow can do. Once you click the Review and Turn On buttons, there’s no going back. Really. So don’t just “measure” twice. Use the Test button as much as you need to, so you feel 200% confident before you Review and Turn On the workflow.
- Avoid editing active workflows. While not as risky as trying to repair an airplane that’s already flying or a car speeding down the interstate, try to avoid editing active workflows. So you can sidestep unintended consequences and keep your reporting data as clean as possible.
- Look around for potentially conflicting workflows. When more than one person on your team is constantly creating and managing workflows, especially in the same area of HubSpot, you may find that some workflows are conflicting with other workflows. Since it can be challenging to figure out which conflicting workflow should prevail, consider adopting some change management processes that place one person in charge of vetting and configuring new HubSpot Workflows, at least within the same Hub.
- Tap into the “delay for a set period of time” feature to ensure that workflows happen at the right time. While you may have planned and created an impressive 12 message lead nurturing sequence designed to accelerate more leads into marketing qualified leads (MQLs), if you accidentally send all 12 messages to a single recipient because you forgot to set delays, your prospects will likely become quite annoyed, unsubscribe, possibly report spam, and decide spontaneously to never do business with your company.
- Create and maintain an effective naming convention. Like most areas of your HubSpot portal, your HubSpot Workflows benefit tremendously from careful and thoughtful planning about naming conventions. And this best practice becomes even more important the moment you have a second (or subsequent) HubSpot Administrator setting up and maintaining your workflows.
How do you plan your HubSpot Workflows? And what’s your biggest challenge with Workflows? Let me know in the comments.