Most folks who are using HubSpot, or are interested in using HubSpot have heard how powerful the tool can be for a business aimed at growth. At the center of that horsepower lies automation. Automation when used correctly will give your team the ability to communicate with prospects, customers, and coworkers at scale. HubSpot’s automation abilities are typically harnessed through their workflow tool. Workflows are an automated process where tasks, emails, and notifications are sent based on identified rules and events. Workflow automation can be almost unlimited in possibilities and creativity. That’s why I decided to compile some of my favorite workflow examples for salespeople. Each sales organization will have unique requirements and processes, however, these examples below can help you brainstorm ways that you can use automation to supercharge your sales efforts.
Nurturing leads is a great way to stay in front of prospects or past customers. As any salesperson knows, not every conversation you have ends with a transaction. It’s very likely that you’ll have prospects who are still in the exploratory or information-gathering phase of their buyer’s journey. While it’s not a closed-won opportunity, you’ve had the ability to pitch your proposed approach, product, or service to someone who is or will be in the market. Now you can obviously remind yourself to follow up with this prospect, which we recommend, but if your organization compiles dozens, hundreds, or thousands of these over the years, you’ll want to consider an approach such as a lead nurture strategy to stay in front of these contacts.
Our agency’s approach to a lead nurture strategy is based upon our sales pipeline stage as a trigger. In our Hub, we’ve created a pipeline stage for deals where a client hasn’t told us yes or no, or hasn’t decided to move forward. We don’t want to classify this deal as lost, so we’ve decided to create a lead nurture category where we can host these, and then create a nurture workflow to stay in touch with them as time progresses. Depending upon your preference, you can build email communications, reminders to call and touch base, and a number of other communication styles to keep putting helpful and relevant content in your prospect's hands, to help position you as a trusted partner, whenever the time is appropriate for them to revisit. You can use lead nurture workflows for a variety of different instances, from tradeshow registrations to post-webinar attendance, and many more options. If you want some help brainstorming these ideas, we can help! (A simple example of a lead nurture workflow can be seen below.)
If you have a heavy influx of leads and inquiries, it can be difficult for a salesperson to stay on top of them all. Setting up automation to tag each deal and remind salespeople and managers is a great way to ensure you’re not missing the boat with your opportunities. Through automation, you can build automated deal tags that inform anyone on the deal board that a lead has not been communicated within X amount of days, a deal has been sitting in a pipeline stage for longer than a typical deal does, and a variety of over actions related to the sales cycle of your leads. This automated effort helps to communicate internally between sales staff, sales management, and even your marketing team if an SLA (service level agreement) is in place. Sunshine can be the best disinfectant if you’re missing the mark on follow-ups, or communications that help progress that deal to closed won. Ensuring that your sales team and managers have an active view of all of your opportunities helps to make sure that no deals fall unnoticed.
One of the easiest to use, and simple workflows you can deploy is one to create a new deal upon a form submission. Without a workflow like this in place, you’ll have to rely on your sales team to create a deal each time manually. This may work for some organizations, especially those with higher levels of criteria to meet in order to consider an opportunity a deal, but for most, this is an easy way to keep track of those new opportunities. By creating a deal automatically, your entire sales team can see if and when a prospect has been connected with a sales rep, how quickly that has happened, and also if a potential prospect has responded to the sales team's outreach. There are many considerations to take before turning this workflow on, especially if your organization has a high level of inquiries, it may get messy, but for most, this is a great way to make sure you are connecting with inquiries in a timely manner.
One of my favorite automations from a sales perspective is the ability to notify sales reps when a previous lead or customer has revisited your website. While this isn’t a traditional workflow in a sense, it is a prebuilt setting in HubSpot. If your business is like ours, once a project or job has been completed, you may not stay in regular contact with your customer for some time. Having an email notification go to your sales team, or contact owner whenever that previous client or prospect comes back to your website is a great sign that someone may be revisiting your previous proposal or exploring a new project. This is a great sales signal to reach out to someone with whom you’ve had prior conversations just to check in and see if you can help. Opportunities to cross-sell, and expand services greatly increase when you deploy a workflow like this. Be cognizant that you will get email notifications that may not be relevant as a sales signal, such as “Someone at Facebook revisited your website”. In a large company, it may be difficult to determine value, but in a smaller company this may be just the piece of information you need to slide back in and make another sale.
The last workflow I’m going to mention is not actually part of HubSpot Sales CRM, but rather their Service Hub. Feedback surveys are only an option at the Service Hub Pro level, however, I can’t forget to mention them. Feedback survey workflows are a critical tool when it comes to relationship selling. Ensuring your customers or clients are getting the best experience is the number one way to capture longer customer lifetime value. By using a feedback survey workflow, you can survey your clients or customers after a particular service or purchase, and then notify the sales team, or other key managers or team members when a client submits a survey with anything less than remarkable results. Hopefully, all of your customers are experiencing great results without this tool, but no one is perfect. Whenever you have a client who reports an unsatisfactory experience, being aware of this, and being able to reach out and talk things over can be the difference between losing a client or multiple, for reasons that may not have otherwise been known. Utilizing this strategy, you’ll position yourself as a resource to your clients who cares and is willing to make things right with them. Sometimes that’s all it takes to turn a less-than-happy client into a brand evangelist.
While workflows can be intimidating to start, we’ve hopefully given you some great ideas of ways to leverage them for your sales team. While each workflow may have its intricacies, benefits, and detractors, working with a seasoned HubSpot Partner can help you navigate your sales strategy in HubSpot. Hopefully, these ideas got your wheels turning, if you’d like to talk more about different ways you can benefit from sales and marketing automation, we’re always here to help, just reach out!