Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Honorable
Contributor

Hubspot onboarding, sequences and workflows

SOLVE

Hi there.

I am de/reconstructing our customer onboarding process and would like to borrow (steal?) from the Hubspot playbook. 🙂

 

The biggest area I am having trouble wrapping my head around is using workflows vs. sequences in the onboarding process.  Can you please shed light on what their (your?) process looks like in more depth?  Here's an example of what we do now:

Workflow:

Deal is closed won

Ticket is created

Email is sent with form link

Form is completed

Ticket is moved manually to stage 2

Email is sent requesting documents

Documents are received

Ticket is moved manually to stage 3... etc

 

What I'd like to do is cut out a lot of workflow steps that may or may not apply to clients, and also make our touches more personal based on specific circumstances clients have, which seems to me where cadences would fit.... but I need a blueprint or template I can see to better implement a version of it for ourselves.

Any thoughts/guidance/expertise/experience appreciated.  Thank you in advance!

2 Accepted solutions
karstenkoehler
Solution
Hall of Famer | Partner
Hall of Famer | Partner

Hubspot onboarding, sequences and workflows

SOLVE

Hi @Honorable,

 

Thanks for the added context. I think that depends a lot on your specific processes and requirements. Which parts of the onboarding need to be automated, which ones should or could stay manual? What needs to be actually personalized and what could be an automated email? Which input is required from the new customer, what's an ideal way for them providing those materials, are there feasible alternatives? I'd also start by asking yourself what patterns there are for those contacts who are not picked up by automation, for example. The answers for these questions vary from company to company. There isn't one-size-fits-all approach.

 

Best regards!

Karsten Köhler
HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer

Beratungstermin mit Karsten vereinbaren

 

Did my post help answer your query? Help the community by marking it as a solution.

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DanielZarick
Solution
Contributor

Hubspot onboarding, sequences and workflows

SOLVE

Hey @Honorable! This is super interesting problem, and it's very common from companies we talk to (we obsess over customer onboarding).

 

Have you changed anything in the past year about how you handle customer onboarding in HubSpot?

 

Just in case you're still dealing with the problem, here are a few ideas I think might work for you...

 

  1. We wrote a guide for using HubSpot deal pipelines to track onboarding, but I think much of it is relevant if you apply the same thinking to tickets as well: https://arrows.to/resources/hubspot-deal-pipelines-customer-onboarding-process/
  2. Similarly, we've seen companies use tags on tickets as a way to track which items are complete/incomplete. It's a little hacky, but if you have a tag field for Complete and Incomplete, you can move the tags between each field to track the status (i.e. which files you've received, etc)
  3. Instead of an automated sequence, have you considered creating an internal task  for your team to manually send the first email? Here's a guide to show how: https://arrows.to/resources/hubspot-tips/#handoffs-hubspot-crm
  4. If you create tasks, we've seen Task Queues being super powerful for your team to just keep focused on the next action and not digging around to figure out who they should email next: https://arrows.to/resources/hubspot-tips/#hubspot-task-queues-customer-onboarding

 

One last thing that can be super powerful: creating a goal for "every customer in onboarding is emailed at least once every X days" and creating internal workflows that hold your team accontable to that. We can show you how to set this up, if you want. Just let me know.

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5 Replies 5
karstenkoehler
Solution
Hall of Famer | Partner
Hall of Famer | Partner

Hubspot onboarding, sequences and workflows

SOLVE

Hi @Honorable,

 

Thanks for the added context. I think that depends a lot on your specific processes and requirements. Which parts of the onboarding need to be automated, which ones should or could stay manual? What needs to be actually personalized and what could be an automated email? Which input is required from the new customer, what's an ideal way for them providing those materials, are there feasible alternatives? I'd also start by asking yourself what patterns there are for those contacts who are not picked up by automation, for example. The answers for these questions vary from company to company. There isn't one-size-fits-all approach.

 

Best regards!

Karsten Köhler
HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer

Beratungstermin mit Karsten vereinbaren

 

Did my post help answer your query? Help the community by marking it as a solution.

karstenkoehler
Hall of Famer | Partner
Hall of Famer | Partner

Hubspot onboarding, sequences and workflows

SOLVE

Hi @Honorable,

 

A lot of the manual steps can indeed be automated with workflows.

 

After deal creation, you can automatically create the ticket record and trigger the email send. If you want to personalize this email or send a different email based on a record property, using if/then branches:

 

karstenkoehler_0-1625024868253.png

 

Tickets can be updated easily after a form submission with a workflow like this:

 

karstenkoehler_1-1625024904392.png

 

If there are customers which you want to handle manually, that is of course possible. In that case, simply use a custom property to "label" them accordingly and suppress them from these workflows by excluding records with a value in that custom property.

 

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

 

Karsten Köhler
HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer

Beratungstermin mit Karsten vereinbaren

 

Did my post help answer your query? Help the community by marking it as a solution.

Honorable
Contributor

Hubspot onboarding, sequences and workflows

SOLVE

Thank you @karstenkoehler- I think what I am trying to get at is to understand how Hubspot and others are using other techniques beyond workflows to handle unique processes or situations that fall outside or are independent of those (so what happens for example those that are supressed in the workflow).

Although we do use workflows as described, and they work great, and Hubspot is great for those, not every situation is going to benefit from a workflow- because the variables are either too messy or too many to manage that way.  

With sequences I know you can more reflexively personalize client outreach on an individual basis.  So for example:

Client ticket is moved to "Setup" status

Client enters "Setup" workflow

Workflow sends client email.

Email asks client to reply with attachments (uploading them through a form is too messy for us)

Client receives email and sends one attachment, but not all required attachments because he needs more time or data first

At that point we could do any number of automated things as part of the workflow to keep or re-engage the client and get them to provide all attachments- BUT

- It is a lot less messy for a rep to reach out to the client and say "hey, we got form A from you, but we still need form B so that we can get things going for you" and I see how sequences could work there..... there's a balance that I am weighing and am looking for any comparisions or similar experiences. 🙂

 

I'm just 

 

0 Upvotes
DanielZarick
Solution
Contributor

Hubspot onboarding, sequences and workflows

SOLVE

Hey @Honorable! This is super interesting problem, and it's very common from companies we talk to (we obsess over customer onboarding).

 

Have you changed anything in the past year about how you handle customer onboarding in HubSpot?

 

Just in case you're still dealing with the problem, here are a few ideas I think might work for you...

 

  1. We wrote a guide for using HubSpot deal pipelines to track onboarding, but I think much of it is relevant if you apply the same thinking to tickets as well: https://arrows.to/resources/hubspot-deal-pipelines-customer-onboarding-process/
  2. Similarly, we've seen companies use tags on tickets as a way to track which items are complete/incomplete. It's a little hacky, but if you have a tag field for Complete and Incomplete, you can move the tags between each field to track the status (i.e. which files you've received, etc)
  3. Instead of an automated sequence, have you considered creating an internal task  for your team to manually send the first email? Here's a guide to show how: https://arrows.to/resources/hubspot-tips/#handoffs-hubspot-crm
  4. If you create tasks, we've seen Task Queues being super powerful for your team to just keep focused on the next action and not digging around to figure out who they should email next: https://arrows.to/resources/hubspot-tips/#hubspot-task-queues-customer-onboarding

 

One last thing that can be super powerful: creating a goal for "every customer in onboarding is emailed at least once every X days" and creating internal workflows that hold your team accontable to that. We can show you how to set this up, if you want. Just let me know.

kvlschaefer
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hubspot onboarding, sequences and workflows

SOLVE

Thanks for sharing, @DanielZarick!


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