Using a single Playbook multiple times on the same record?

[cdorsey]

We’re looking to implement Playbooks as a way to support new employees and deliver a more consistent client experience. One of the ways we would like to do this is by using Playbooks to outline different types of calls, like training sessions, for instance. However, we’ve discovered an issue when attempting to use a single Playbook (i.e. “Training Session”) on the same Contact record multiple times.

For context - 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, although the specific topics covered vary, of course. We would like to have a Playbook that could serve as a general guide through any given training 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, logged this training session

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!

Previously entered notes do not clear from Playbook

I was able to determine that you can delete/override the persistent data and enter new info, and this does save as a new/separate log to the Contact record. However, that’s not clear and I believe would be very confusing/disorienting for less seasoned HubSpot users.

In fact, we actually considered implementing Playbooks months ago until we ran into this very issue. It caused us to entirely abandon our exploration of Playbooks at that time because we didn’t realize that there was any way to use the Playbook more than once per record - and 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. Seems like a major glitch - or am I just missing something?

[DianaGomez]

Hello @cdorsey, thank you very much for your question. specially thanks for providing more details about your case and for sharing images.

I would like to invite some of our experts to see if they have experienced something similar or have found any options to resolve the situation.

Hi @danmoyle, @Shadab_Khan, @HubDoPete. Do any of you happen to have any suggestions for @cdorsey ?

Thank you all for your contributions.

Best regards,

Diana

[danmoyle]

Thanks for the tag @DianaGomez

[Shadab_Khan]

Hi @cdorsey ,

This is a very correct concern here - I believe after saving the values in the playbook should get cleared or it should have a button “clear all”. Might be the reason it’s this way because you also enter property values in the playbook and they cannot be blank once set.

Your post is super detailed - can you raise this as an Idea HERE?

Here’s an alternative “Workaround Solution”, Once you have finalized building a playbook (e.g: “Sales Playbook”) - and based on your use-case if you think there will be a total of 3 uses for the same playbook make 3 clones:

• Sales Playbook 1
• Sales Playbook #2
• Sales Playbook #3

Or just simply train the team to clear those values after every use a 5 minute Async loom would do and you can embed the same in the playbook itself as hyper link.

Stay Awesome & Keep Doing it BIG

[danmoyle]

Hi @cdorsey. I don’t believe you’re missing anything, no. As I understand Playbooks, they’re used once typically for scripts or other sales needs (like a sales handoff from the service team for an upsell), not in the training way you’ve envisioned. I love it by the way. Great use case for them.

Instead of Playbooks, we actually use HubSpot Projects for this. We’ve created templates (from HubSpot bases) complete with custom resources so there’s a consistent experience for our training/onboarding clients.

While your clients aren’t in HubSpot, you could certainly use these and title them with the client name so your team knows where they stand in the training.

HubSpot Projects