tl;dr HubSpot Academy just released an hour-long lesson that covers every aspect of the Workflows tool in nitty gritty detail. You can find it here.
Announcing a New Kind of Academy Lesson
Today, HubSpot launched Operations Hub. Operations Hub Professional includes two key upgrades for workflows:
- Programmable Automation - the ability to code your own custom workflow actions using Node and a variety of JavaScript libraries (details here)
- Data Quality Automation - workflow actions that standardize data formatting inside CRM properties (details here)
Together, these new actions unleash the workflows tool so that you can make it do pretty much anything you want it to. This fundamentally shifts the capabilities of HubSpot’s automation engine, so we thought it was time to fundamentally shift the way we teach people how to automate things in HubSpot. So I’m very excited to announce HubSpot Academy’s Workflows Deep Dive, the nittiest-grittiest lesson we’ve ever created about the workflows tool.
What Is a “Deep Dive,” Anyway?
Operations Hub’s new workflow actions bring the total number of options inside HubSpot’s automation tool to a pretty dizzying number. Depending on how you count, there are at least seven types of workflows, at least sixteen types of enrollment triggers (with innumerable filtering options), and at least twenty-seven actions, to say nothing of all the settings, reports, and other bells and whistles that are included in the tool--and then there’s a whole layer of additional features that are available in various integrations! Chances are, even if you’re a seasoned workflows user, there are features you aren’t using just because they’re lost in a sea of available options.
We here at HubSpot Academy wanted to solve this problem by creating a lesson that would show every single thing workflows can do. So we set out to create an end-to-end product demo that showcased every feature and explained every option in every part of the tool.
This quickly became overwhelming. On the one hand, a video that names and describes every single filter, action, and setting would be hours long and excruciatingly boring to watch. On the other hand, our existing content already has a few two-minute examples, but these are too specific to give someone a sense of the full scale of HubSpot’s automation capabilities. What to do?
The solution we arrived at was to identify filters and actions that were representative of the whole (for example, one action from the “Property Management” actions, one from the “Internal communication” actions, etc.) and then design a hypothetical workflow that would use all of them. Figuring out what is representative took some thinking, but the solution turned out to be pretty simple: Throughout our end-to-end product demo, we would sprinkle in short explainer videos that would use broad principles to fill in the gaps between specific examples. And that’s great because those are exactly the sort of videos HubSpot Academy prides itself on creating! So in the example of enrollment criteria, we have a video where I group all those millions of filters into a few coherent categories to help you understand what’s available and how to find what you’re looking for, and then we go back to the demo and use just enough filters to show how AND and OR groupings work in enrollment criteria.
Throughout the lesson, there are times where I come on screen to explain that a feature is tied to a particular subscription or to explain an especially tricky concept, so you can understand exactly which features you do or don’t have access to, and then we go back to the workflow and show the parts of the tool that are best at demonstrating a particular capability. In the end, I think we hit on a perfect balance of broad principles and specific examples--the best of both worlds.
So What Does This Deep Dive Look Like?
A really massive lesson! To give you some context, the typical HubSpot Academy lesson has three to five videos in it. I just did some searching, and the longest lessons I could find have eight or nine. Any guesses how many videos are in this deep dive lesson?
Ten? Twenty? More than that?
The correct answer is thirty-four! Eleven on-camera videos, and twenty-three screen recordings! This is completely unprecedented in the history of HubSpot Academy. But even though it’s a ton of videos, the runtime isn’t crazy: The whole thing’s about an hour long. So the average video is less than two minutes long, and they each have a clear name explaining what they cover. If you want to watch the whole deep dive, you can (and I hope you will!), but if you just want to know how to send a marketing email or how to create a CRM record or how to use “Go to other action,” you can hop to a specific video and see how just that one feature works.
As we worked on designing the lesson, it quickly became clear that we didn’t necessarily want a workflow that someone might want to copy and create verbatim in their own portal, but we didn’t want a workflow that was just a tangled mess of unrelated actions, either. The goal was to land somewhere in the middle and create a workflow that was sensible enough to provide a narrative thread to the lesson and also flexible enough to allow us to explore every corner of the tool. I think we’ve struck that balance nicely, and I hope you’ll think so, too.
So What Happens Now?
Hopefully, you go take the lesson! Since this is the first time we’ve ever created a lesson like this, we are eager for feedback. We’ve included a survey at the end of the lesson to hear your thoughts. Please take the lesson and then fill out the survey. Then tell your friends to take the lesson and fill out the survey, too! We’d love to get as many eyeballs on this as possible to figure out if this is something we should do more of in the future.
So what are you waiting for? Click here to go to the lesson right now!
