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!
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
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)
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.
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
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:
Tickets can be updated easily after a form submission with a workflow like this:
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
Jun 30, 202112:28 AM - edited Jun 30, 202112:31 AM
Contributor
Hubspot onboarding, sequences and workflows
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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. 🙂
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)
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.