HubSpot Ideas

BrianR

Pausing a Sequence

I think it would be good to be able to pause a sequence. Sometimes you put a prospect on a sequence and things happen... illness, weather (hurricanes) and there is no sense continuing sending them emails and making calls when you know they aren't going to be there. I think it would be good to be able to pause them and schedule them to restart at a later date... Thoughts?

Mises à jour HubSpot
Statut mis à jour : Delivered
February 05, 2021 09:01 AM

Hi Community,

 

The ability to pause and resume sequences is now live to all portals with access to sequences! You will be able to do this from the enrollment table of the specific sequence.

 

View a gif of sequences being paused

View of gif of sequences being resumed

 

When paused, sequences retain the time delay before the next step. So if a sequence that was scheduled to send on Tuesday is paused on Monday, and resumed on Wednesday, the next step will send on Thursday.

 

For those following this issue, the infrastructure changes needed to make this change were beyond our initial anticipation, so we appologize for the time spent waiting.

 

For those following our roadmap of priorities in sequences, we are currently focused on improving the visibility of contacts engaging with seqyences (opens and clicks)  and making improvements to the experience in the management of enrollments (better bulk management for pausing, unenrolling, etc.) 

 

Thanks,

Glen

 

Statut mis à jour : In Beta
November 24, 2020 08:00 AM

Some details on this beta for folks that are looking to get access:

 

We have finished the ability to bulk pause sequence enrollments, but at the moment we are still working on the ability to bulk resume sequence enrollments (which technically is actually the more complex part of the work!). There are also several usability issues that we are working to resolve. We hope to have the ability to bulk resume ready in the week following Thanksgiving. So for folks that do need access, this is how it will look:

https://www.loom.com/share/5b66bdd74a334380abb73f250cbb9547

Statut mis à jour : In Beta
November 16, 2020 06:27 PM

Statut mis à jour : In Planning
April 19, 2020 04:54 PM

Hi Community,

 

We are now taking some calls to plan the scope of this project, and I am updating the status now to "In planning". If you would like to participate in our discovery and research, you can fill this short form and I will reach out about our next steps.

(this is an updated link from the one provided when we this item was "being reviewed")

 

As we learn more and make progress, I will update this issue, thanks everyone for your feedback and looking forward to hearing from some of you!

 

Best,

Glen 

Statut mis à jour : Being Reviewed
April 06, 2020 10:35 AM

Hi Community,

 

We are now reviewing this with our team. If you would like to participate in our discovery and research, you can fill this short form and I will reach out about our next steps: https://forms.gle/oE5veMh4mLRzoMZX7

 

As we learn more and make progress, I will update this issue, thanks everyone for your feedback!

 

Best,

Glen 

103 Commentaires
rruain
Membre

Agree it is great we can finally pause a sequence, but doing 10 at a time is quite time consuming.  Would be great if the "pause" feature appeared when we do a filter on entire contact list of "Now in Sequence is equal to True".  This way we can pause everyone over  a holiday weekend when they are not checking their email!

CBoon
Participant

First off I want to say that the HSpot team has done a great job making their UX very digestible, easy on the eyes, non-clunky, and pleasant. That said, there are about 5-10 features that I'm amazed HSpot sales hub does not support. This is my first HSpot experience and there definite holes that other programs (in my past I've mainly worked with SalesForce (clunky), Outreach.io (best-in-class IMO), SalesLoft (rebounded nicely since getting spanked by Linkedin in 2014-15), YesWare (remember when we were young?), InsidesSales (always impressive but expensive), Marketo (see SalesForce comments), Pardot (Boooooo, nuf said), and others . That said, even the basic sales features that were available years ago in a best-in-class platform like Outreach.io seem far from possible here:

 

- Pause/Resume an entire Sequence with a button is a simple, basic function for OOTO periods like the last 1-2 weeks of December.  

- Customizing a Sequence's schedule per day (i.e. Sequence-A should only go out Tues-Thurs evenings, Sat mornings, avoid Mon, Fri, Sun)

- Offering multiple options for any given step in a sequence (A/B/C tests) so that we could load 3 different templates into Step-1 of Sequence-XYZ, for instance, to test out 3 messaging statements for a new product launch. The contacts then enrolled into that Sequence-XYZ would be split evenly across Step-1A template, Step-1B template, Step-1C template.  Then, after a few weeks, we can see which Step-1ABC works best. If Step-1B worked best, then would should be easily allowed to turn off Step1A and Step1C as options with a button so that all new contacts would only receive Step-1B going fwd.

- Default Sequence Settings: As a sales leader I have to say the Settings offered for HSpot Sequences are extremely elementary and weak. We need to be able to tweak the throttling (how many emails max can go out each day), sequence schedules (see above), adding an automatic delay to all Step-1 launches so no jr level seller or SDRs accidentally start launching emails out to our lists simply b/c the SDR enrolled some new Contacts into a Sequence (sometimes you want to see the distribution of Contacts across diff Sequences before anything is launched), set permissions so employees who are not the Contact Owner can/can't enroll those Contacts into a sequence or launch a sequence with those Contacts in it, set up and lock-in default settings for any new Sequences that are to be created so future Sequences adhere to our company policy. The fact that every new Sequence has to be set up individually from scratch, unless Cloned, is very unimpressive.  

- Contact mgmt and gatekeeping needs a lot of work. At the moment if we have a prospect Contact named Kerrie Kerrwood, who is owned in our CRM by our AE named Jim Johnson, then Jim should be the full gatekeeper for all contact with Kerrie. As HSpot stands Kerrie can be sequenced by anyone else in our company without Jim even being alerted. This means if Jim is communicating with Kerrie, or even has a proposal on Kerrie's desk, any other person at our company can still target Kerrie, and even sequence Kerrie at any given time. I realize there are very (weak) permission settings that would only allow Kerrie to be only contacted by Jim, but that doesn't help if Jim's SDR, Sam, is running outbound for Jim's prospects. Honestly, this is ridiculous, especially when you work on larger sales teams with poor leadership where thing can get very competitive and dirty. I've seen shady sales ppl steal prospects, contacts, accounts and deals from their collegues, but contact ownership is one way to protect against this.  What's the point of Contact Ownership if it does't do anything other than tell others in your company who is "supposed" to be owning a specific contact?

- Inbound Automation for Sequences: Since HSpot is a unified platform (MAP, CRM, Comms Accelerator, etc) you would assume that an inbound lead that fills out a form on our website could be automatically enrolled into our "Inbound FormFill" sequence. The fact that Sequences have so many restrictions like all enrollments or launches have to be manually performed stinks. I realize that form fill leads can get an auto mktg email, but then how do we program automatic follow up (tasks are manual, not automatic)?  We need our mktg+sales tech stack to be as close to "Set it and forget it" as possible. "Set it and then we will remind you to do in a few days what a calendar or planner already can do" is no improvement, especially when GoogleCalendars are free.

 

IN CLOSING...

I realize HSpot's legacy comes from being a strong, user-friendly, marketing automation platform, but if on avg mktg budgets are approx 5%-10% of a company's annual sales revenue, then I would expect much more investment going into the HSpot sales tools than what I'm seeing.

 

Thank you, HSpot team, and Happy Friday 🙂

beckylimina
Membre

This idea has been knocking around for years. Any chance of being able to pause sequences on specific dates or in line with a reps calendar if they're out of the office?