We’re trying out playbooks but I’m struggling with how data ‘persists.’ We’re capturing insights on the company’s latest thinking on the market, and come back and use the same playbook again and again.
Here’s the issue:
- against a company, I use the playbook to update company properties
- this includes some properties that are used to initiate workflows and are subsequently cleared
- when I come back to the same company to log the same playbook again, the playbook opens with the company properties ‘up to date’ / sync’d with any changes made APART from properties that have been cleared / are unknown!
- those properties open with the data that was entered last time the playbook was used (even though the actual properties on the company are now set to nothing) - this in turn means the workflows don’t work.
This seems a bit nuts. The playbook should open with those properties blank/unfilled. Any ideas if there is a method to clear them?
Just to confirm if I understand the issue here: property values in Playbooks are not auto populating if the Company property is set to Unknown/is cleared?
Could you confirm that these properties have the option “Use a set of answers that saves to a property” selected?
If everything is configured correctly – does this behaviour persist accross different browsers? Are other user experiencing this issue as well?
If yes, I’d like to ask you to work with our support team on this so you can have a look at specific cases in your account. Thank you!
Yes, the playbook is using properties that “Use a set of answers that saves to a property”.
Your understanding is correct - there is no problem with the refresh/update of properties that have been changed, but data persists in the playbook where any properties are cleared by workflow (set to unknown).
I haven’t tested on different browsers, but we’ve had some feedback from HubSpot support in the meantime that this is a ‘desired behaviour’ - i.e. by design. I guess there could be some use cases where that makes sense, but it doesn’t for us, so we have abandoned using the playbooks as intended and moved onto a Plan B.
I’m experiencing the same thing, or something quite similar here - did you ever find anything else out on this?
We’re looking to implement Playbooks in a variety of manners, but one of those specifically would be as an outline for particular types of calls. For instance, training sessions. When a customer gets started with our service, they receive custom, one-on-one training sessions with their success manager. These sessions occur over a number of weeks and follow the same general outline/playbook, although the specifics are different, of course. We wanted to set up a Playbook that could serve as a general guide through the session, however we’re finding that once the Playbook has been used for the Contact once, the info entered persists when we return to the Contact and attempt to use the Playbook again.
I’ve included a couple of screenshots for reference.
First, you can see I’ve successfully logged a training session about “how to create an Estimate.”
Now, I would like to use the Playbook again to log a training session about importing Contacts, but when I open the Playbook, all of the data from my “how to create an Estimate” call is still there!
Since I was testing this, I was able to determine that you can delete the persistent data and enter new info, and this does save as a new/separate log to the Contact record. That being said, it definitely seems to be a pretty major issue or glitch - I can’t see us implementing this with our team as long as it functions in this manner.
We actually had considered Playbooks months ago and ran into this very thing. We didn’t exhaust the time to test the functionality much and just took it as we were only able to use a Playbook once per record. That being said, we abandoned our exploration of Playbooks at that time because that was totally opposite of the functionality we needed. I returned today in hopes that it had been updated…I want this to work so badly for our team, so I invested the extra time in really testing the functionality and was surprised to see how strangely it performs.
Hi @cdorsey - sorry, I’d missed your comment here.
AFAIK this remains the same. The data persists in the playbook even after logging it even for notes that are not related to underlying properties. HubSpot told me this is desired behaviour, but as you mention means for all practical purposes the playbook can only be used once on a record. We just need a button for users to ‘clear’ unlinked fields.
