On November 22, 2022, Matthew Shepherd of HubSpot’s professional services team and Megan Legge of HubSpot’s product team taught us some advanced strategies for using workflows.
Watch the recording and download the deck here!
Because so many people were in attendance, we weren’t able to answer all of your questions live. This community thread will be the place we post your questions along with our answers. It will likely take us a few days to work through all of them, but we will continue adding to this thread until we have answered them all.
Question: When are we going to have date based triggers? Is it in consideration?
Answer: Date based triggers are certainly something we want to explore. I would recommend checking out the new Delay until a date action and seeing if you can use that to support your use case in the meantime. You might also find success using an enrollment criteria like “{{property date}} is less than/more than 1 day from now.
In addition to this, if it’s a recurring date e.g. 1st day of the month, you can use Scheduled Workflows if you have Operations Hub Professional or Enterprise.
Question: Is it possible for contacts to restart workflows from the beginning even after re-enrolment?
Answer: It’s not currently possible to loop a record back to the beginning of a workflow. You’d want to build this into your trigger. Scheduled triggers might be the right tool, or thinking about adjusting your triggers & re-erollment so they run for each instance where you want a repeat enrollment.
Question: Is it possible to create a workflow trigger on social media likes ?
Answer: It’s not currently possible, but with our new Triggers beta you can trigger workflows with custom behavioral events, which you might find helpful. If you’re using CBEs and want to check out the triggers beta sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdiH6eNtdadd9HvwXllhiTK3FLZSd12sRCTZoNBbE2BnJRJ_w/viewform
Question: Is it possible to create a Workflow for a C-SAT Survey which just needs to go out once (1) a Month?
Answer: Scheduled triggers is a great way to do this if its something you want to happen every single month, for example you can set up a workflow to run on the 1st of every month, and send that survey. Alternatively, if you want to send out a survey on a specific date, use Delay until a Date to queue up the survey to send on a particular date of the month, like Nov. 30th, 2022.
Question: How to trigger based on a meeting booked? Seems today is only possible to trigger based on latest activity date, which includes also notes and other things?
Answer: Meeting scheduling pages are actually HubSpot forms, so you can create a “form submission” trigger and select the scheduling page you’re interested in.
Question: We’d like to create a workflow to generate an active list from form fills that begin with the same name i.e #password_reset. Have been told that each form fill needs to be added individually
Answer: This doesn’t necessarily require a workflow. While you can’t create active lists based on form submission name contains, you could perhaps create a custom contact property to use in each of your relevant forms that stores your form name as the default value and add it as hidden field. Now each submission will contain the name of the form in a property and you can use this to create an active list where contact property contains or has ever contained (only in cases where this property might get overwritten by any other value) #password_reset. If you need to do this for existing form submissions you could create a workflow that lists submissions to each of those password reset forms as enrollment criteria and run it once to set the custom contact property for past submissions.
Question: is the “delete contact” wf action going to be accessible to other objects in the future?
Answer: That’s not currently planned, but you might upvote some of these ideas if you’d like to see it in the future: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Archive-Objects-contacts-companies-deals-tickets/idi-p/13564
https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Delete-Records-via-Workflow/idi-p/587183
Question: Are you looking into creating a workflow trigger that compares 2 properties?
Answer: This isn’t something we have currently planned, but please add your vote and feedback to this idea: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Compare-Properties-in-Workflow-To-Trigger-Behaviour/idi-p/382456
Question: How can we avoid the error of creating a cycle when we are reenrolling contacts in the same workflows? (Even with lists).
Answer: If you’re trying to avoid an unintentional looping behavior, add a delay to the end of the workflow, so that workflow updates are creating changes that accidentally trigger the workflow again. Or, try to make your enrollment criteria more specific and limited.
Question: You can configure a workflow to run on specific days (in the UK say Monday to Friday) However if your workflow has a wait of 4 days in it, and the wait starts on a Thursday … Saturday and Sunday are seen as waiting days. If the workflow isn’t running why are Saturday and Sunday seen as waiting days?
Answer: Upvote this idea on the ideas forum: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Counting-business-days-only-in-workflows-and-sequences/idi-p/354510
Question: Does strategic consultant cost extra?
Answer: Yes, this is a paid consulting service. Details here HubSpot Premium Support | Proactive Guidance and Priority Support
Question: what is best way to get help with wehbooks and third party API that request token access?
Answer: You can create a custom code action in Operations Hub to do this.
Question: When we will get unmerge availabe?
Answer: Upvote the idea on the idea forum: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Un-merging-contacts/idi-p/321397
Question: Are workflows triggered only for paid users?
Answer: The workflows tool is available with Professional and Enterprise accounts, though there is automation functionality also available for Starter.
Question: Is it possible to auto-generate an email to go out every time a deal is moved from one stage to another if the email needs to include personalisations? We can’t seem to manage to create a workflow for this..
Answer: Deal stage automation exists, learn more here. As far as personalization, it depends what type of data you are looking to include. Deal data should always be possible to include.
Question: can you use a Hubspot file with a UTM or HubSpot tracking as a trigger in a workflow? Want everyone who sees that specific URL to enroll in a workflow.
Answer: You can use page views to trigger workflows, though I’m not totally sure if that serves your purpose, check it out. Also, with our new Triggers beta you can trigger workflows with custom behavioral events, which you might find helpful. If you’re using CBEs and want to check out the triggers beta sign up here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdiH6eNtdadd9HvwXllhiTK3FLZSd12sRCTZoNBbE2BnJRJ_w/viewform
Question: copying data from one object to another or picking which associated record to update is always extremely hard and pushes us to use the API instead of workflows, which is not ideal for clients. Is there anything in the pipeline to address this?
Answer: We have functionality coming to beta soon that should help with this! If you want to participate in the beta when it’s ready, email Megan at mlegge@hubspot.com
Question: is it possible to let contacts schedule a demo through a round robin that incorporates all SDRs calendars? (or all SDR calendars within a certain region, etc?)
Answer: Yes! And you don’t need a workflow to do it. You can create round robin scheduling in the meetings tool: Understand group and round robin meeting availability