Batch method or automation to 'Follow' many records?

Smart CRM & Sales Hub CRM
1

Hello,

As a Sales Manager building a new sales team, I have found HubSpot traditionally quite lacking in ‘collaboration’ tools that make it easy for me to ‘monitor’ the activity of our new, junior reps.

In the past, we’ve built standalone workflows to notify us when a new contact is created, a new deal, etc but the number of events that can happen on a contact record has scaled and continues to grow, making this a bit of an administrative nightmare.

Sure, I could do some of this with dashboards and reports, but I actually want to be notified by email in real time when there’s activity on a record that I’m interested in.

I’ve recently discovered the “Follow a record” functionality in HubSpot:

and it seems to mostly meet my needs. It has a few limitations that I would probably call defects -- for instance it will notify me of new notes on a contact record but not new comments someone makes on that note, but it’s a lot better than building a bunch of record-specific workflows and allows users to either choose to follow, or unfollow records of their choosing.

One problem with ‘Follow a record’ though, is that the act of choosing to follow a record seems to be a fully manual process. I don’t see how I can follow a contact record via a workflow. Unless I am constantly watching for new contacts, Companies, Deals and Tickets and following them, I don’t think this feature is going to be very useful.

Am I missing anything with ‘follow a record’ here? Is there a better way to somehow get notified of any records certain sales reps (or even all sales reps, or the sales team) created? Is there not ‘team selling’ handbook that addresses this scenario at all? It has to be a common need … if you have sales resources you’re inevitably going to have to supervise them … no?

2

Hi, @dazza ,

from what I’ve understood, you want to get a notification when there’s a new activity on a certain record and the deal owner is a specific person (even if there are multiple people). Is that correct?

If so, the way I see this can work is to have a workflow with enrolment trigger “record owner (you will need to create separate workflows for each object type) is X or Y or Z” AND “last activity date” property changed more than 1 day ago. This way, every record that is assigned to one of your junior reps and has had an update of any kind in the last day. Then in the actions, create an internal notification that’s sent to you with a link to the record in question.

Do you want to give that a go and let me know how you get on? :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks,

Eli

3

@dazza I think the “follow” feature is likely used for specific instances where you want to keep a close eye on a specific record - for example, a marketing team might select a handful of companies as a focus group and follow them so they can get real-time notifications.

As a sales manager, depending on the number of reps on your team, it would be overwhelming to receive a notification for every single activity happening for all of their clients/customers.

Instead, I would create a process that allows you to leverage filtered views and reports to identify outliers where you can still decide to manually follow the company, but otherwise you would work directly from those views/reports to evaluate their performance and review activity.