This week, our classroom looks a bit like Hogwarts on Halloween night. Candles flicker, AI spells whisper through the data halls, and your workflows wait to be cast to make your portals Automagical. You are no longer Muggles in the CRM world—you are full-fledged Super Admin sorcerers learning to weave the perfect blend of logic and magic to make your systems come alive. ⚡
💭“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” – Dumbledore
Automation is your spellbook. Each workflow, sequence, and agent you summon shapes how your platform performs. Whether you wield Breeze Assistants, AI agents, or custom workflows, remember: the best magic always serves a purpose—and never backfires on the caster.
👉 For Week 5, share in the comments below:
🏆 Wins – Which “spell” did you master this week that made your HubSpot portal feel truly enchanted?
💎 Hidden Gems – What HubSpot feature, automation, or AI assistant felt like discovering a secret passage in Hogwarts?
🕳 Potholes – Which cursed situation or automation or tricky process has got you feeling stuck, trapped or spellbound?
💡 [BONUS] Reflection – If you had a magic wand that could grant one wish for your HubSpot portal, what would it be and why?
💬 Remember, every wizard needs a good spell team. Hogwarts didn’t run on wands alone—there was teamwork, trust, and a touch of controlled chaos. So share your discoveries, celebrate your “Patronus moments,” and learn from one another.
🙌 As your instructors @ChrisBabelquest , @AliSchwanke , and I @MuseDebbie, we’re here to help you channel your inner Dumbledore (or Hermione on a deadline) and bring your automations to life the smart way.
Ready to levitate your workflows and cast your final automagical spell? Say Hubracadabra🔮✨
Drop your Week 5 reflections or questions below ⬇️
(This is the Week 5 thread. Look out for our special Graduation celebration next week as we wrap up our Bootcamp journey and honor our newly minted Super Admin Wizards!)
Win - gaining traction in getting my company to upgrade to marketing hub professional
Pothole - having trouble completing the Dynamic Sequence activity from the workbook because I don't have a sales team/use case for anything other than an email sequence
Win - I've been tasked to build an AI agent/prompt that researches a client company on behalf of our sales team! This will be a massive time saver for our team.
Hidden gem - Not sure how hidden this is, but in case anyone doesn't know... its super useful. If you're trying to find a workflow that, say, is sending a notification to your team, you can filter by "Action type" in the workflow index and choose "send internal email" or "send in-app notification". This will narrow your search signifcantly!
Pothole - 1. I learned this week that workflow folders are a thing! 2. While learning this, I noticed our company isn't using them at all. And there's over 1,000 workflows in our system now. 😱
🏆 Wins – I was able to delete almost 60 unused dashboards and 450 reports
💎 Hidden Gems – Conditional properties! We're using them, especially for deals. For example, you can use it to say: If property X has value Y, then the property Z is mandatory to move a deal forward. This is really helpful, especially with properties that have a "please specify" option,as it allows you to make the associated free-text field mandatory.
🕳 Potholes – Still struggling to automate data cleanup
💡 Reflection - A view and update history for dashboards and reports. At the moment, you only see "last viewed" and "last updated" but no history. For cleaning up unused dashboards and reports it would be really useful to have better insights.
Win - Improved order visibility by creating a new card on the company page and setting up a custom list view.
Hidden Gem - Developed property syncs to gather more details about related objects, which can now be used as filters in views, reports, or automations.
Pothole - Encountered challenges managing two co-existing ticket pipelines in Help Desk when both email channels are part of the same email thread.
🏆 Win: Set up forwarding rules for a shared inbox that wasn’t connected to HubSpot. Now new enquiries automatically create contacts and trigger workflows, so the team gets Slack notifications and no leads are missed.
💎 Hidden Gem: The Health Tab in the Automation menu. It is such a useful way to keep track of workflow performance and potential issues!
🕳️ Pothole: Syncing the Industry property between contacts and companies. The contact property is a single-line text field, while the company one was a dropdown. I had to export, map, clear, update the property type, and re-import the data to align them. A lot of work for what feels like a basic setup. I wish HubSpot handled this more consistently.
💡 Reflection: If I had a magic wand, I’d add an easy way to see how each record value was populated, whether it came from a form, import, workflow, or manual update, without opening every property history one by one. It would make troubleshooting and data audits so much faster.
Super Admin Fall 2025 Bootcamp - Week 5: Making HubSpot Automagical
Wins - Built an automated follow-up workflow for leads that adjusts email timing based on engagement. It’s already improving response rates.
Hidden Gems - Discovered that the AI Assistant in workflows can suggest trigger conditions I hadn’t considered. It’s a great time-saver when building automations.
Potholes - Found that too many enrollment triggers can cause loops and duplicate actions. Simplifying the logic solved the issue, but it took a bit of testing to catch it.
🏆Wins – Finished setting up and configuring Koalify to perform bulk merges of duplciate records, client has over 417K duplicates detected.
💎Hidden Gems – HubSpot will not allow you to email a Contact who has hard bounced 3x in other HubSpot instances...but you won't know it until you try to email them.
🕳Potholes –
If you have a one-click unsubscribe in your Marketing email footer - if a Contact clicks it they unsubscribe to ALL emails not that specific subscription type: community.hubspot.com/t5/Email-Marketing-Tool/Custom-Unsubscribe-Link-For-Specific-Subscription-Types/m-p/1096858
Use the Email Preferences Center instead!!
💡Reflection - I would like Campaign Member Statuses like in Salesforce, the HubSpot Campaign Object has very limited reporting available and we can't report on email conversion % to registered for an event (Registration is a custom Object). I will need to create another Custom Object to report on this.
Also: this comment is a lot shorter, my previous comment here was flagged as abuse/spam for NO reason and the page reloaded and I lost everything I wrote. 😠
🏆Wins – finished setting up Koalify for managing bulk merging of duplicates...client has 417K duplicates detected!
💎Hidden Gems – HubSpot hard bounce Contact info: If a Contact has hard bounced in 3 other HubSpot instances, you will not be able to send email to them. BUT you have them in your HubSpot and are PAYING for them as a Marketing Contact...until the moment you try to send email to them. Then Email Hard Bounce Reason will show up as Other in your HubSpot - with the date that it hard bounced in the other HubSpot portal. This will be extremely confusing as you will have no records of ever sending them an email at that time, the data is coming from elsewhere but won't fill in until you try emailing. So this is an argument for emailing ALL of your database on a frequent basis, otherwise keeping as non-Marketing contacts so as to not have to pay for records that are potentially unemailable.
🕳Potholes –
If you have a one-click unsubscribe in your Marketing email footer - if a Contact clicks it they unsubscribe to ALL emails not that specific subscription type:
Link those words to the Email Preferences Center instead so you don't allow the Contact to mess up all their subscriptions!
💡Reflection – I would LOVE there to be Campaign Member Statuses (like Salesforce) on the Campaign Object so I can track how far someone got in the Campaign (instead of having to create Email Reports, Lifecycle Reports, Custom Properties, and use Google Sheets!)
🏆Wins – I was able to create a sequence for our renewal emails
💎Hidden Gems – I'm all into Manage Duplicates this week. I have been able to get rid of a lot of bad data this way as well
🕳Potholes – back into duplicates - when we came over from Salesforce, a lot of data was imported incorrectly, but maybe it was bad to begin with. I've been cleaning it up slowly but surely
💡 Reflection – again - I would magically clean up data.
Wins – This week I was working on some reports and I felt I had a better grasp on what to include and what not to include and making things easier for user adoption.
Hidden Gems – Colors! I enjoy that they can be applied in more places in HubSpot to make things cleaner and easier to understand. They provide some context and interest.
Potholes – Finding the right balance of notifications to help keep data clean and up to date and also not overwhelm users. Making notifications meaningful.
Reflection – I would love for my portal to cleanly organize itself into internal and external opportunities/contacts/companies. I would also like it to cleanly link to and integrate with internal sources used for daily user workflows so HubSpot would have more information to pull from and keep up to date.
🏆Wins – Created a chatbot to answer common questions we get about the portal and sales pipeline.
💎Hidden Gems – Segments has been amazing for working with clients without Data Studio. I am working with a client who had data hydration issues between their data warehouse. I set up different segment lists to automate the associations as they come in.
🕳Potholes – I wish webhook coding was available as a separate subscription. We ran an issue of using a webhook without someone having Data Studio. We had to connect their form authenticator with HubSpot. In order to make it work, we had to put the code into the website itself. It would be much an easier process if webhooks were available as an additional add-on.
🏆 Win: Finally got our data structure and naming conventions aligned across all 17 business units, and this has been sent round to all our internal marketing teams!
💎Hidden gem: Property history view has been my unsung hero lately. Being able to trace where and when a value changed has saved so much time troubleshooting.
🕳️ Pothole: Managing user permissions for a growing team, just when I think everything's set, someone needs access to a specific tool.
💡Reflection: I wish I could get a do-over and be involved in the setup of our account right from the beginning!
🏆Wins – I finished up a big project of updating user permissions and customizing sidebars! Hello organization!
💎Hidden Gems – I used conditional logic in the project above, which was a big win. Now our Sales team sees a sidebar spefically designed for them with the information they need, and our CX team has their own sidebar with the info they need to see.
🕳Potholes – Duplicates! We had a team member do an import this week which caused a whole lot of duplicates 😐
💡Reflection – Organized properties! We have so many that were inherited, and to put it in simple terms, it's a mess!
