In today's fast-paced business world, time is a precious commodity, and organisations need to find ways to maximise efficiency and productivity. One powerful tool that can help achieve this is HubSpot Workflows. HubSpot Workflows is an automated process that can help streamline repetitive tasks and free up valuable time for more critical projects.

In this article, we'll explore how HubSpot Workflows work, why you should use them, and the benefits they can bring to your business.
We'll also provide tips for creating effective workflows and highlight some examples of tasks that can be automated using this tool.
Whether you're a marketer, salesperson, or customer service representative, HubSpot Workflows can help you streamline processes and improve the effectiveness of your efforts. So, let's dive in and see how this powerful tool can transform the way you work.

What is the HubSpot Workflows Tool

HubSpot Workflows is a versatile automation tool that can empower users to automate mundane and repetitive tasks, streamline business processes, and enhance customer experience. By using a visual editor, users can easily create automated processes that can be triggered by specific events or conditions within the HubSpot platform. This can range from sending follow-up emails, updating contact records to creating tasks for sales representatives. 

HubSpot Workflows offers great flexibility in terms of triggers and actions, allowing users to customise automated processes that can adapt to various situations and execute different actions based on certain conditions. Additionally, HubSpot Workflows integrates seamlessly with many external tools and systems, thereby extending its capabilities beyond the HubSpot platform. 

With HubSpot Workflows, businesses can maximise their team's productivity by automating repetitive tasks and freeing up time for more valuable projects. This powerful tool can also aid in lead segmentation and nurturing, as well as providing personalised customer experiences. Overall, HubSpot Workflows can help businesses increase efficiency, reduce workload, improve communication and collaboration, and create a more engaging and rewarding customer experience.

Benefits of Using HubSpot Workflows 

Using HubSpot Workflows can provide numerous benefits for your organisation. Not only do they automate tedious and time-consuming tasks, but they also help to streamline processes and improve efficiency within the company. This can lead to increased productivity and reduced workload for employees, allowing them to allocate their time and efforts towards more important and value-adding activities.

Additionally, HubSpot Workflows can help to ensure that important tasks are not forgotten or overlooked, as they are automatically triggered based on predetermined conditions. This can help to reduce the risk of errors and improve the overall quality of work. Overall, the use of HubSpot Workflows can significantly improve the way that your company operates and allow your employees to work more effectively and efficiently. Here are some examples.

How do HubSpot Workflows work? 

HubSpot Workflows are automated processes that are triggered by specific conditions. Once these conditions are satisfied, an action is taken. For example, you can set up a Workflow that automatically adds a new lead to your mailing list when they download content from your website.

Workflows can also be used to automate tasks such as sending follow-up emails, adding contacts to your customer relationship management (CRM) system, or dispatching notifications to team members.

HubSpot Workflows operate using "triggers" and "actions." These are similar to the triggers and actions used in automation tools like Zapier. A standard Workflow is initiated by a trigger, which is then carried out by a set of actions. For example, a trigger could be someone subscribing to your email list. The corresponding action in response to this trigger might be sending them a welcome email. Another possibility is that someone downloads one of your eBooks. The action in response to this trigger could be adding them to a follow-up list.

HubSpot Workflows offer users a lot of flexibility in terms of triggers and actions. For example, a Workflow could be triggered if the recipient of an email has not opened it within 30 days, ensuring that your messages are always relevant and timely."

Tips for Creating an Effective Workflow

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you're building yours:  

The Best Workflows for HubSpot

Workflows can be created for a variety of reasons, making them convenient for different departments within a company.

Marketing Workflows

Re-engage cold leads and inactive customers

This workflow is designed to re-engage leads or customers who have become inactive or unresponsive. It might include actions such as sending a series of emails with special offers or incentives to encourage them to re-engage with your business.

Promote a new product or service

This workflow is designed to promote a new product or service offering to prospects and customers. It might include actions such as sending promotional emails, posting updates on social media, or running ad campaigns to promote the new offering.

Nurture first conversions

This workflow is designed to nurture and engage new customers or leads who have recently converted. It might include actions such as sending a welcome email, offering a special deal or promotion, or sending educational content to help them get the most out of their purchase.

Welcome new blog subscribers

This workflow is designed to welcome new subscribers to your blog and give them a taste of what they can expect from your content. It might include actions such as sending a welcome email, sharing a list of popular blog posts, or offering a free resource or tool.

Welcome new contacts

his workflow is designed to welcome new HubSpot contacts and make a lasting first impression. It might include actions such as sending a personalised welcome email, introducing key team members, or sharing resources or information that will help them get to know your business.

Send confirmation emails for events

This workflow is designed to confirm registrations for an upcoming event and provide details about the event to attendees. It might include actions such as sending a confirmation email, sharing the event agenda, or providing directions to the event location.

Celebrate anniversaries

This workflow is designed to celebrate and show appreciation to customers on the anniversary of their first purchase or interaction with your business. It might include actions such as sending a special offer or promotion, highlighting favourite moments from the past year, or thanking customers for their business.

Define an Ideal Customer Profile

This workflow is designed to help businesses identify and prioritise their best-fit prospects. It might include actions such as creating a customer profile based on characteristics, behaviours, or interests and segmenting leads or customers based on their fit with the ideal profile.

Send a notification when a meeting is scheduled

This workflow is designed to notify a team member when a new prospect or customer books a meeting. It might include actions such as sending an email or Slack notification to the appropriate team member or adding a task to their to-do list.

Updating lifecycle stage

HubSpot Lifecycle stages are effective in determining where your contacts stand in the buyer's journey. The most commonly used stages include subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales qualified lead (SQL), opportunity, customer, evangelist and others. Of course, you always have the option to customise these lifecycle stages to better match your needs.

This workflow is designed to update the lifecycle stage of a contact based on their progress through the customer journey. It might include actions such as updating a contact's stage based on specific actions they have taken or milestones they have reached, and sending targeted content or offers based on their stage.

Lead nurturing

With HubSpot workflows, lead nurturing is easy and effective. Nurturing your leads with relevant content keeps them moving along the buyer’s journey; after all, 79% of all marketing leads never convert to sales.

For example, if a lead downloads a high-level eBook called “Inbound Marketing 101” from your website, you can follow up with them a week later to see if they might be interested in another piece of useful content—like a comparison sheet of different Inbound Marketing tools.

You want to make sure your contacts never receive duplicate content, right? A way to do this is by adding if/then branches to your workflow so that a contact who has already downloaded a piece of content will automatically skip over it the next time they're scrolling through their work emails.

Webinar reminders

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. 

Say you have a virtual Coming Soon page up for an event. You could create a segment of people who visit that page but don't sign up, and send them an invitation to the event 30 days in advance. And if they still haven't opened it, you can always try again! As the date of your event approaches, set up automation to remind everyone two days before- this way nobody has an excuse to miss it! Plus, after the event is done, include a Thank You email with content from the event (like photos or videos).

As you can see, there are endless possibilities when it comes to creating workflows. The best way to find out what works for your business is to experiment and see what gets the best results.

Operations Workflows

 Internal notifications

Send internal notifications to your team members to help automate your company's processes. Internal notifications can be sent either via email, text, or in-app when follow-up is required. This integration allows you not only to send reminders and updates to prospects but also to automatically generate messages in your team channel whenever new deals are closed. That's just the beginning of what this tool can do for you.

Format your data

By utilising the Format data workflow action, you can automatically format, fix and maintain your CRM data. For example, if you want to standardise contact names, the workflow can automatically capitalise letters in a name This workflow assures accuracy by allowing only standardised data to be copied into single-line or multi-line text properties or added to a google spreadsheet.

Employee onboarding:

This workflow is designed to help new employees get up to speed with the company's policies, procedures, and systems. It might include actions such as sending onboarding emails, scheduling training sessions or providing access to necessary resources and tools.

Project management:

This workflow is designed to automate and optimise project management processes. It might include actions such as assigning tasks to team members, setting deadlines, and tracking progress.

Sales Workflows

Lead capture and qualification:

This workflow is designed to capture and qualify leads by offering valuable content and resources in exchange for contact information. It might include actions such as sending opt-in forms, sending lead-nurturing emails, and routing leads to the appropriate sales reps.

Deal stage progression:

This workflow is designed to track and advance deals through the sales process. It might include actions such as updating the stage of a deal based on specific actions or milestones, sending alerts or notifications to sales reps when a deal reaches a certain stage, and generating reports to track the progress of deals in HubSpot.

Lead reassignment:

This workflow is designed to redistribute leads among sales reps based on their availability or areas of expertise. It might include actions such as reassigning leads when a sales rep becomes unavailable or distributing leads evenly among team members. 

Sales forecasting:

This workflow is designed to automate and optimise sales forecasting processes. It might include actions such as tracking the progress of deals, estimating the likelihood of deals closing, and generating forecasts in HubSpot based on this data.

Account management:

This workflow is designed to automate and optimise account management processes. It might include actions such as assigning accounts to specific sales reps, tracking HubSpot activity, and sending alerts or notifications when specific actions or milestones are reached.

Upselling and cross-selling:

This workflow is designed to encourage customers to upgrade their products or services or purchase additional products or services. It might include actions such as sending personalised recommendations, offering special deals or promotions or scheduling follow-up calls to discuss upgrade options.

Define an Ideal Customer Profile

Auto-select your most promising prospects for extra attention.

Notify your sales reps about a lead

When a contact shows signs of purchase intent on your website, send an email to a sales representative.

Send a notification when a meeting is scheduled

When a new prospect or customer books a meeting, send out a notification to the team.

Create and assign tasks

You can create tasks and assign them to users in HubSpot by using workflows. This triggers the task to be created automatically based on a specific action, such as closing a deal.

For example, after you close a new deal, one of the follow-up actions will be to pass it from sales over to your client success team so they can begin the onboarding process. You can set up a notification through a workflow that assigns this task to the relevant team member.

Deal stage automation

If a deal is successfully closed with a prospect, HubSpot can be set to automate the next stage of the deal and assign tasks accordingly. This automation workflow helps deals move efficiently from one stage to another without any missed opportunities.

Qualifying out leads

Would you like to stop wasting time by sending the same emails to different customers? There is a solution to that! Automated email workflow can take over once it's set so that you don't have to keep creating similar emails--it can all be done automatically.

Assigning lead owners

Once a new lead is generated through HubSpot, you should immediately set up form submission notifications to notify your sales team. But how do you make sure the right person will follow up on the lead? Assigning lead owners is key; by setting up an automatic workflow in HubSpot, you can assign leads to different people in your team as they come in. This way, no hot leads get lost due to poor rotation practices.

Workflow setup depends on various conditions, such as the size of your team, what roles everyone plays, and responsibilities. For our global clients who want to assign contact owners based on the lead’s country, we use a round-robin style. This allows you to add any number of owners to the rotation and they will be assigned leads evenly.

The Rotate Leads action is perfect if you have a list of qualified leads and want to automatically split and distribute them evenly amongst your sales team.

Set up lead score properties

You can alter the HubSpot score contact property to qualify leads based on personalised criteria. You can also generate custom score properties for your contacts, companies and deals. Score properties are regularly updated by HubSpot, but a few examples are below:

If a record meets the conditions set in the Positive section, points are added to its score. Once it no longer meets those criteria, points will be removed from its total score. Records that meet the Negative section's criteria have points removed from their score. If these records no longer meet the criteria, the points will be credited back. On the other hand, if you remove a criterion from either section, all records will be re-evaluated. For instance, removing a criterion from the Positive section may lead to point deductions for some records.

Customer service Workflows

Assign new web leads

When you receive a new web lead, it will automatically be assigned to an owner.

Send a notification when a meeting is scheduled

Send a notification to a team member when a new prospect or customer schedules a meeting.

Get customer feedback

Use customer satisfaction feedback surveys to ensure your customers are always happy.

Workflow Triggers

You can find the Workflow Builder in your HubSpot account under Automation & Workflows. Clicking the "Create workflow" button starts the process. After you name your workflow and choose a start trigger, contacts will enter the workflow according to the trigger chosen

1. Event Based
2. Property Value
3. Date-based
4. Manual enrolment.

Date-based triggers enrol contacts into the workflow on one or more specific days.
For example, you could use a date-based trigger to enrol Monday subscribers into your newsletter workflow so they receive that week's edition. If no trigger is selected, contacts will enter the workflow as soon it is published. Once you have chosen your start trigger(s), remember to click "Save."

After you finish creating your workflow, it's time to add some actions. Actions are events that occur automatically when a contact enters the workflow. For example, maybe you want to send an email or assign a task to someone on your team. To add an action, click the "Add an action" button and select from one of the five action types: email, meeting, task, wait until date-based, or wait until property-based.

After you select your desired actions, click "Save." Some available options include emailing the contact, sending a meeting invitation, assigning task(s), or pausing the workflow until a specific date or property is updated.

Step by Step for Creating workflows in HubSpot

1. Decide on your goals for what you want to automate
2. Log in to your HubSpot account and navigate to Automation - Workflows tab 
3. Click the "Create workflow" button.
4. Give your workflow a name and select a trigger event.
   This is the action or event that will start the workflow. For example, you might choose "Form submission" as the trigger event if you want the workflow to start when someone fills out a form on your website.
5. Define the criteria for the trigger event. This is the condition that must be met for the workflow to start.
   For example, you might specify that the workflow should only start when a form is submitted by a specific type of contact or when a specific field is completed on the form.
6. Add actions to your workflow. These are the tasks or activities that will be carried out as part of the workflow.
   For example, you might add an action to send an email to a contact, update a contact property, or add a task to a team member's to-do list.
7. Set up branching logic if needed. This is a way to specify different actions or outcomes depending on certain conditions.
   For example, you might add an if/then branch to send a different email to contacts who have a specific property value.
8. Set up enrollment limits if needed. This is a way to specify how many times a contact can enter or exit the workflow.
9. Test your workflow to make sure it is working as expected.
10. Activate your workflow when you are ready for it to start running.
11. That's it! You have now created a workflow in HubSpot. You can edit or delete the workflow at any time by clicking on the workflow and using the options in the top right corner.

Conclusion: 

In this article, we showed you how to create workflows in HubSpot and what types of tasks you can automate.
If you're looking for a way to save time and automate repetitive tasks, then HubSpot Workflows are a great option for you. They're easy to use and can help you nurture your leads and keep them engaged with your brand.

Workflows are an important part of any marketing automation strategy as they allow you to automate repetitive tasks so that you can focus on more important things. They are automated processes that help businesses streamline and optimise tasks and processes.
Workflows can be created for a variety of purposes, including marketing, sales, customer service, and operations.
Workflows are triggered by specific events or actions and can include a range of actions such as sending emails, updating contact properties, or adding tasks to team members' to-do lists.

Workflows can also include branching logic and enrollment limits to specify different actions or outcomes depending on certain conditions. Businesses can use workflows to improve efficiency, personalise interactions with customers and prospects, and better understand and analyse their data.