Use timestamps in emails, SMS and for workflows

[tobiasn]

Hi,

We're trying to integrate Hubspot into our workflow, but I'm blocked by an inability to use timestamps (time of day) both as triggers for actions/workflows, as well as inability to insert timestamps in emails. 

The problem I'm trying to solve is this:

We let customers book meetings through custom forms on our webpage, which also includes important metadata. 

At the day of the meeting, I want to send a reminder to our sales rep about the meeting, along with the relevant metadata. The email should among other information include the exact time of the meeting. 

At a predefined time before the meeting, I want to send a reminder to the customer, along with a video call URL. Ideally this should be X minutes before the meeting, but I can live with sending this at a fixed time. The reminder should be sent as SMS and email. 

I've read personalization token docs, including the part about filters not working in emails, and tried working with meetings, tasks, moving fields between deals and customers, etc. I can't seem to find any combination of values/properties that enables this workflow. It's a bit surprising- as far as workflows goes I think this is pretty vanilla? I would be grateful for any pointers! 

-Tobias

[kvonloesecke]

Hi @tobiasn,

Thanks for the information provided. This is very helpful! 🙂 

I'll invite a few experts to our conversation.

Hey @Josh, @jforte, @Kevin-C, @Bryantworks, @AdamLPW do you have any thoughts or suggestions?

Thank you,

Kristen 

[tobiasn]

Hi @kvonloesecke , thanks for bringing some experts into the discussion!

I've now solved this temporarily by stringing together different triggers and technologies:

1. Before sending the meeting time to Hubspot, we stringify the timestamp in different ways and save this to custom fields on the deal. This enables us to use the time of day in communication, as well as comunicating the date in a user friendly way (Thursday, March 22nd as opposed to the default 2022-03-22). I also save the timestamp in ISO format in a single line textfield to use in step 5.
2. We create a task for the meeting and connect this to both the contact and the deal. This auto-sets the "Next activity date", which can be used as a trigger i workflows. But it's brittle: if a deal gets another task or meeting set with a date before the meeting in this workflow, it falls apart.
3. I have to run a contact based workflow in order to use the "next activity date" as a trigger (delay until specific date that is read from a property -- not available in deal flows as far as I can tell). This should be a completely unnecessary step, as deals also have a next activity date.
4. I need to send deal-centric notifications, so my contact based workflow triggers a deal based workflow by changing a property - this happens on all connected deals, and I filter out any unconnected deals in the corresponding deal workflow. In this step, I send the necessary emails.
5. A seperate, Zapier based workflow also reads the property change on the deal(s) that happens in step 4, has the same filter mechanism. I can here use the ISO formatted timestamp to modify when (time of day) the SMS notifications get sent -- this is triggered via a webhook from Zapier.

As you can see, it's much ado about not a whole lot. My needs are fairly basic I would say, and could be solved entirely in Hubspot with a few changes:

1. Enable filters to be used in emails, or at least in custom email components such as HTML blocks.
2. Enable custom datetime fields - not just "datepicker", and enable users to trigger events based on/relative to datetime properties
3. Unify more workflows/triggers between deals and contacts. My need to do steps 3 to 4 is baffling in all honesty, it seems pretty arbritrary that contact flows can be delayed relative to "Next activity", but deals cannot. I hope that this is a misunderstanding on my part, and that I've overlooked something -- do tell me if that's the case.

Thanks again for bringing more eyes on this, I really appreciate it.

Best, Tobias