topic Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

Sori — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 15:51:14 GMT

Hi! This is my first post, hence I am sorry if anything is wrong with it 🙂

What we are trying to solve for: We want to have different approval workflows in Hubspot depending on discounts granted by our sales reps on 2 different product offerings. Based on the discount on Product 1 and/or Product 2, whereby the higher discount is decisive, a different approver is assigned (less than 10% nobody, 10%-20% Sales Director of the respective market, above 20% CRO). For that i have created different deal properties (Product 1 Discount, Product 2 Discount) that in a workflow automation capture the data on discount on the specific products from the line items associated with the deal. Based on the higher discount, an approver is attached in the property “Discount Rate Approver” and the status in the property “Discount Approval Status” is set to “Pending”. An e-mail is sent to the approver who has the authority to adjust this field to “Approved”. So far so good. I have created the properties & set up the workflows and it seems to work. BUT I always have to manually enroll the deals into the workflow (by shutting it off and turning it on again, even though re-enrollment is turned on), because workflows do not get triggered by line items.
As a workaround I have created a deal property called “Line item created or updated” that has a “number” “field type”. I want to set up an automation in Zapier that has the trigger “Line_item Recently Created or Updated in HubSpot”. Whenever this trigger is pulled, I want the deal to increase the number in the deal property “Line item created or updated” by 1. And I want to include this field in the automations that I have created in Hubspot and in the re-enrollment so that the workflows start automatically, because they are based on deal properties. However, I do not find a way to connect line item information that is retrieved by Zapier to the respective deal. Can you help me with this or do you have an alternative that maybe is faster/better/more efficient?

Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

kvlschaefer — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 07:47:08 GMT

Hi @Sori,

Thanks for reaching out to the Community!

I wanted to invite our subject matter experts to this conversation.

Hi @HubDoPete, @Ben_M, @louischausse - Do you have any automation advice for @Sori?

Thank you!

Best,

Kristen

Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

Sori — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 07:56:17 GMT

I have now added a new deal property called "Deal value changed" and let it increase by 1 every time a deal value has changed. I have also included it into workflow automations for "Product 1 Discount" & "Product 2 Discount" and in their re-enrollment triggers.
Seems like this is a workaround, but somehow the automations always trigger delayed.

Like let's say the line item discount on Product 1 is 25% and on Product 2 it is 13%. Now when I change it to being 15% and 5%, respectively, the property values will be "Product 1 Discount" >20% and "Product 2 Discount" >10%. Always 1 step too late.

Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

HubDoPete — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 08:10:07 GMT

Ho @Sori welcome to being a "posting" community member!

Well done describing your desired outcomes and current approach so well. That makes it so much easier to help you by knowing what you have tried so far and what you need.

In Zapier, once you have detected a new/modified line item, you can use another Zap HubSpot action to find the deal associated with that line item. See "Find Associations: Find associations between objects"

With that deal ID in hand, you can execute the rest of your Zap actions & workflow steps to obtain approval on the deal.

Considerations:

A HubSpot line item can only be associated with one deal so you will get a single Deal ID response.
'Occasionally" there will be no associated deal found so the Zap fails. It's rare but I think happens when a line item is created and deleted during the 2mins between when it's created and when Zapier detects that it exists. The Line Item still exists in the API but with no deal and is not in the UI, so I think it's because HubSpot has removed the association.
If the deal flow is urgent, to remove the 2-minute Zapier trigger poll delay you would have to create a HubSpot Public App and trigger from a Webhook for Line Item created or modified. (We are thinking of writing a small public app "DoNow" to do those webhooks for Zapier users who want instant HubSpot triggers - let me know if you're interested and might want to try it)
Beware Zapier costs - triggers can mount up if you have a lot of line items.

Will that help?

best

Pete

Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

Sori — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 12:46:15 GMT

Hi Pete,

thank you for your quick answer!
I did not know about the "Find Associations" Action, but sounds good and I have been able to retrieve the Deal ID.

Now looking to find the deal seems like an issue, because I truly do not know what to plug in for "First search property name".
I have tried out a vast amount of "dealID", "deal_ID", "Line Item to Deal", etc. but have not been able to plug in the right name.
Thanks for your help!

🙂

Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

Sori — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 12:47:27 GMT

And @HubDoPete would you recommend rather staying in Hubspot and not making use of Zapier for this? If so, does this look like a workaround for you and would you have any idea why it seems to be lagging and how to solve for it?

Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

HubDoPete — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 13:27:17 GMT

Hi @Sori

Once you have the deal ID you do not have to search for it.

Just use that ID as the object ID in any following Zap actions to the deal object

Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

HubDoPete — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 13:43:11 GMT

Hi @Sori

Most Zap triggers have up to a 2-minute delay because Zapier is calling that API every two minutes to see "anything changed?"... "anything changed?"... (it's not notified by HubSpot as a webhook except for a limited number of instant triggers.

Only a handful of HubSpot triggers are "instant" such as new Contact.

You can see that indicated on the trigger.

So per your question: if you "can" do everything in HubSpot, great. That is preferred.

But as you have found, the triggers related to line_items and deals might not do all that you want. Line Items can be monitored and enrol the deal to the workflow, but not repeatedly. And there is no such thing (yet?) as a Line Item Workflow.

We wrote a HubSpot App called DoPricer, which will be on their app marketplace shortly. It looks up what discount a particular company is supposed to get on each product, and sets the discount on the line item. I mention it only as we had used other tools like Zapier, facing the same sort of problems you are seeing now. Not sure DoPricer solves your problem here though, as you want to escalate for approval. That is maybe a future feature for DoPricer... (thanks for the reminder idea 🙂

So, taking your delays into account, you will have a more predictable result if you extend your Zap to also take care of setting the Deal property to the level of approval required.

Do you think you could build the logic in your zap, to look at the line item discount and get the deal's current setting for approval required, then decide what the approval setting should be, and save it back to the deal? You would need to use Zapier branching logic, but it's safer to do it all in a HubSpot Workflow OR in a Zap, but tricky to manage both. What do you think? (I bet you can do it) 🙂

Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

Sori — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 14:24:16 GMT

Thank you @HubDoPete.

Just for my understanding:
I am trying to increase the value for the deal property "Line item created or updated Tracker" by 1 then every time.
To do so, wouldn't I need to plug in some kind of calculation into Zapier like {{step_4_field_line_item_created_or_updated + 1}} and hence need the info on the current value of the field?

Re: Deal approval & workflow automations with line-items

HubDoPete — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 15:02:57 GMT

Hi Sori,

Yes you need to read that counter property from the deal, then take another Zapier action to increment it, along with anything else you need to prepare to save back to the deal. Zapier Formatter action has Math Operations. You could use that to increment the current value.