HubSpot Ideas

dkap

Pause a Workflow

I would like the ability to pause a workflow, thus keeping all users at the step they are in, and then unpause it a few days later.  Adding delay steps will not accomplish the same thing.  For example, I want to pause a campaign during a holiday week, but start it again the following week without losing anyone.  There is no way to successfully do this with a delay step unless every user is at the same step - which obviously will never be the case. 

HubSpot Updates
Being Reviewed
March 25, 2020 10:11 AM

Hi everyone,

 

I’m Megan, a Product Manager for the Automation team. I’d like to thank you all for taking the time to submit, upvote, and comment on this Idea. I wanted to give an update on this feature request, given the gravity of the current COVID-19 situation, and how it's impacting your business.

 

To be transparent, this “Pause” workflow feature won’t be delivered in the immediate future, as other highly-requested features have been ahead of it on our roadmap. Given the current situation though, we would like to dig into the problems outlined here a bit deeper, as we need more information to determine the best solution. When we’ve researched this request in the past, we’ve found a wide variation in needs, and haven’t been able to find the right solution to meet the majority of those needs.

 

Some of the comments above mention delay centered challenges, and there have been changes to delay behavior that can be impactful in some of the scenarios outlined here. For example, in our upgraded contact workflows, editing the length of a delay will automatically update that delay time for all contacts already active in the workflow (this now matches the behavior of the other workflow types). Read more about the impact of editing a delay here.

 

And there are a few things currently on the roadmap that may help some of the problems here like:

  • Wait until actions: Utilizing event delays to trigger actions in workflows. This way workflows aren’t solely reliant on arbitrary time delays and can be driven by customer behavior.
  • Improving time-based delays: Adding more options to time delays for more precise control.
  • Delay visibility: Seeing the objects (e.g. contact, company, deal, ticket, or quote) currently waiting in a workflow delay.

 

Otherwise, to make progress on evaluating this request, we request your help. What we need from you: If you have a minute, please fill out this form to provide additional feedback about the pause feature and your needs.

 

Thanks again for your time, I hope you and your families are safe and healthy.

Megan

60 Replies
jayyeater
Member

This is a huge flaw in Hubspot in my opinion. Essentially if you have a crisis communication plan and need to halt all outbound communications, Hubspot is unable to do that without completely restarting all workflows or going through the time involved task of cloning every workflow and creating all new lists. We need the ability to pause or extend/shorten delays based upon situations. 

Riskified
Member

Good call, this feature seems obvious, quite surprising it doesn't exist. Stopping mails from being sent on national holidays to avoid low engagement rates would be another use case. 

mphnyc
Participant

great idea. 

Riskified
Member

We need more votes to push this along...any ideas on how to get some traction?

mphnyc
Participant

Can we promote across the Inbound Community and/or link to this page on Twitter?

mitchellkp
Top Contributor

This and master pause - all WFs, ads, etc.

mphnyc
Participant

Exactly.  Marketing may need to pause everything, for one reason or another. This is a key requirement, as only way to do so now would be to blow up all workflows. 

dylant
Member

Not having a way to pause during holidays is a major oversite.  This is quite a mistake that shouldn't take a great mind of our time to figure out.

SarahN
Contributor

Agreed! I have a "no contact" workflow set up that gives us a window of time to attempt to contact a customer before moving on. But now that we'll have a 3-day break... that cuts into the window. 

dylant
Member

Honestly, the more I think about this the dumber I realize not having this feature is.

blinkertoon
Contributor

Just come across this thread when looking to understand what happens when you turn off a workflow.

 

In our case we have a simple goal: pause a workflow so any pending messages are put on hold until the workflow is resumed. New contacts enter the workflow during this time but equally do no receive messages until the workflow is unpaused.

 

Am I correct in thinking this is not how workflows function, and so it's not possible to effectively 'pause' and 'unpause' a workflow? The article below sounds like it's even more complicated:

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/workflows/what-happens-to-contacts-in-my-workflow...

 

Hoping for some clarity, if not good news 😉

 

Thanks.

dylant
Member

Sorry Blinkertoon, there's no good news here.  The best thing they have told people to do is to upvote this idea so the prodct people eventually see it, which is a joke.  Especially when during and around the holidays.  It makes me think they don't actually understand how sales work.

Riskified
Member

This feature is sorely needed during the holidays, for B2B organizations at least...perhaps thats why it's not a priority for HS. 

 

Charles_Groome
Participant

If possible, making this something that could be set within the Workflow configuration settings (like the schedule options for Business Days only and Suppression Lists) would make the most sense for a no-execution-on-holidays setting. 

heatheralvis
Member

Any updates on this feature in 2018?  We desperately need the ability to pause workflows for customers that are in payment bill fail remediation so we can halt the reminders and then start them again if needed.  Same issue for product drip emails, especially since we can't start someone in the middle of a workflow.  HubSpot, can you help us out?

ilarabinowitz
Participant

 It is thanksgiving tomorrow and instead of pausing a workflow, i have to add nonsense delays to ensure i don't bother prospects during a holiday....

dhayward
Participant

Just ran into this issue -- we got a note from a client to pause sending out emails for a specific campaign, and were surprised to find out that this isn't possible.

Rather than pausing, we had to sprinkle arbitrarily-large delay steps throughout the workflow.  That's really not how this ought to work. 

ZachC
Participant

I mentioned this same thing on the chat. When I have an employee on vacation, I need to be able to stop all tasks from being assigned so they don't return to thousands of overdue tasks. Turning the workflow off is not an option and adding a delay is not an option since it doesn't affect those actively enrolled in the workflow. Also, not everyone is at the same point in any given workflow, so it would take changing every single aspect of every workflow that that employee is currently assigned to. Plus, as mentioned, it wouldn't even take effect for the people already active in a workflow. This is a big issue IMO

mphnyc
Participant

It should be noted that tools like Outreach do this already.  I'm fighting an uphill battle to use more HubSpot Sales and less Outreach or Salesforce... the HS Product Dev Team has gotta help me out here!! 

Rob-NWB
Participant

Good to see this idea stalled out 2 years ago and never materialized as feature.

 

This seems so basic and so important as we approach US Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday season. 

 

@hubspot Moderator - When will this be developed?