Pause a Workflow

[dkap]

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. 

[jayyeater]

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]

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]

great idea. 

[Riskified]

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

[mphnyc]

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

[mitchellkp]

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

[mphnyc]

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]

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]

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]

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

[blinkertoon]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

 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]

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]

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]

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]

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?