Automate Sequences via workflows

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Good news everyone! HubSpot has released the ability to automate Sequences via workflows. Woohoo! 

With over 700 upvotes on the HubSpot Ideas Forum, connecting sequences and workflows has been a long-awaited feature for our customers. Now that it’s live, we’re here to share some ways you can use this capacity to scale your processes, as well as some potential pitfalls you should avoid. Let’s go!

The HubSpot product team has a very simple goal: build the tools our customers need to make their jobs (and lives) easier. Sometimes this is a cutting-edge development that reshapes the business landscape, while other times it’s a simple alteration or connection to simply alleviate friction and save time.

When it comes to linking sequences and workflows, our team built this to stop sales reps from having to do what a machine can do. No longer will reps have to waste precious selling hours enrolling and unenrolling contacts from sequences. Instead, sales managers (or ops teams) can easily construct a workflow to automate these actions, enabling reps to escape the clicking and start the calling.

How does it work?

There are a few ways to utilize this connection. We’ll start with the workflow that’s been embedded in sequences. Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you have a form on your landing page, and you want to automatically enroll contacts that submit this form into a sequence. First, you’ll build your sequence with the desired emails and tasks. Now if you look at the top of your sequence page, you’ll see a newly-added “automation” tab. Click it, and you’ll see the workflow feature has been embedded directly into your sequence builder! 

Go ahead and build the workflow as you normally would. For this scenario, we’ll want the enrollment criteria to be “form submission” and the action to be “enroll in sequence.”

Voila! Now your sales team can focus on selling instead of spending hours enrolling contacts in sequences. Next, we’ll look at how you can enroll and unenroll in sequences through the workflow builder.

Start a new workflow and choose “form submission” as the enrollment trigger. Now, when you click “add action” you’ll see two new options: enroll in sequence and unenroll in sequence. 

For our form submission scenario, we’ll want to choose “enroll in sequence” and select the desired sequence. As the contact is likely converting for the first time, you’ll want your sequence to welcome them to your correspondence. Now, whenever a new form submission comes in, that contact will be automatically enrolled in your outreach sequence, saving you time while scaling your team’s impact.

Now some of you are probably saying: “I don’t want to automate sequence enrollment, but rather unenrollment? How do I do that?”

To which I’d say: “Great question! Let’s take a look.”

Build a workflow with the enrollment trigger of when you want a sequence to stop. A common scenario we hear from HubSpot users is the desire to unenroll a contact in a sequence upon form submission. If a contact re-converts and submits a form, continuing any sequence the contact is currently in will leave them with a clunky impression of your organization, which we want to avoid at all costs.  

Go ahead and choose “form submission” as the enrollment trigger. Next, you’ll add the action “unenroll from sequence.” (Because contacts can only be in one sequence at a time, there’s no need to specify which sequence.) And that’s it! You can rest assured knowing contacts won’t be receiving automated 1:1 emails after they’ve shown interest in your org by opening a marketing email.

Good Uses and Risky Uses

To set you up for success with this new feature, we wanted to provide some guidelines on how to best use the sequence to workflow connection, as well as some use cases to avoid. By following these outlines, you’ll be sure to reach maximal success while respecting your contact’s inbox.

First, here are some points on when you should be using automated sequences:

• You have enough context or information about that contact, that you can set automation that is segmented and personal. 
• There is a scenario in which timeliness is more important than personalization, or lack of personalization can be offset by a contact’s eagerness to work with you

Here are some uses to avoid to ensure you don’t flood your contact’s inbox and create an unpleasant experience:

• Enrolling a list of recently imported cold leads in a sequence to see which leads are active.
• Enrolling any list of 100 or more contacts into a sequence using a workflow.
• Enrolling contacts into sequences using unpersonalized criteria such as Create date is today.

By following these guidelines you and your team will be able to leverage the sequence and workflow automation to scale your outreach, maximize your chance of success, and ensure every customer has a positive image of your brand.

You can learn more about this feature in the knowledge base here.