What advice would you give to someone who's managing their organization's automation in HubSpot?

[lalexander]

Our session of Building Your HubSpot Operations Manual on August 26 is all about managing your automation in HubSpot. 

Let's say there's someone new on your team who's responsible for overseeing all of the workflows and other automation in HubSpot. What advice would you give them?

[Rolf]

@karstenkoehler's comment is excellent! There is only thing I'd like to add.

To align all our departments we created very detailed process narratives. Where one department's narrative ends, another begins. Often there is overlap between narratives, which is also reflected in both.

When sales (finally) started working with Sales Hub and we updated our narratives, we found many areas ripe for automation.

Instead of automating everything at once, we started small in order to understand whether automation was actually helping us. This wasn't always the case, but because we took small steps we were able to pinpoint what worked and what didn't.

For instance, we were able to cut down the days it took for new contacts to become opportunities from 30 to only 9. This was realized by following up on certain contacts completely manually and not automated. We would not have found out if we just automated the whole thing to "save time".

By creating an as-much-as-possible controlled environment, we laser-focused the automation, leading to a 200% increase of Opportunities and 88% increased revenue YTD compared to 2019.

So my advice: Make sure you understand the impact of every little thing you automate. And one way to achieve this is to start with very clear process narratives to see where automation might be beneficial.

[karstenkoehler]

Hey @LA,

Here's what I'd suggest:

• Take inventory of all existing workflows. Depending the organization's size, HubSpot might not be the best place to get an overview, especially if you want to be able to filter by workflows that are on/off, personas, purpose of the workflow, type of the workflow etc. In my experience, the best tool for this is Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. This is also a way to get an understanding of dependencies between workflows.
• Get an understanding of who owns existing workflows / review roles and permissions. This person's work will be a lot harder if other users are still creating or updating workflows without being aware that there is now centralized role or a structured approach to workflow creation and optimization. If needed, this new team member should review workflow permissions.
• Analyze performance of existing workflows. Workflows don't always achieve the goals they were set up to achieve. Some might be outdated, some might not perform at all and removing the clutter should be one of the first steps. The new team member should also get an understanding of which workflows are important but don't perform well (and need some optimization) and which ones perform well and could be adapted for other areas of the business.
• Align with marketing, sales and services leadership for the bigger picture. There's no point automation on a micro level if the macro level vision is not clear. All relelvant teams should share an understanding of the goals of automation and define (ideally SMART) goals.
• Reach out to stakeholders in marketing, sales and services and develop a communication plan. Workflows affect the daily work of other teams so they should know what's going on. Either through email updates or recurring meetings. It's this person's responsibility to make sure everyone is in the loop.

Looking forward to suggestions from other users!