Key Account Management Workflow

[BYow]

Hi there! Im wondering if anyone has any tips or tricks on how best to set up a workflow to remind Account Managers/Customer Success Managers to reach out to their contacts every 30 days. 

I'm a little overwhelmed on exactly where to start so any help would be greatly appreciated. 

In an ideal world, I would love for Hubspot to send an email or task to our AM/CSM saying "hey, you haven't reached out to this company in 30 days, schedule some time to do so." 

Thanks a ton! 

[DStaat]

Hey @BYow and @PamCotton,

I'm Dave from the hapily support team! We just launched an app that can help with your use case. It's called Tick Tock Today and adds a today's date property to your object records.

 

Using this, you can create a time between property that would allow you to track how much time has passed since a company was last contacted. I go over how to set this up in this blog post.

You can check out the app for yourself here. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I'd be happy to hop on a call with you!

Best,

-David Staat

[BrettloweAUS]

Hey @DStaat 

This is awesome, I'll have to check this out. I currently run a daily workflow to achieve this. 

Can your app help set a future date?

Here is my use case. 

I want the CSM to book a call with the customer every 6 months. The CSM should get a task created 30 days before the next due call. So what I need is the date of the last call; this is easy we have this already. 

But when I got to create a work flow, you can't future date the next call. Ie last call date + X number of days. Sure you could run a delay, but you want the CSM to filter on the date and have sight of what's approaching. 

Can your app help, or do you know how others solve for this?

[DStaat]

Hey @BrettloweAUS,

Thanks for the message! If I'm understanding your use case correctly, you need to create a task 30 days before the next call is due?

In that case, I would make use of the time between property I mentioned in my earlier message. Name it something along the lines of Time since last call.

Set your workflow trigger to be Time since last call is greater than or equal to 150 days (5 months roughly). You can then set your task from there.

Let me know if this helps or you need further assistance! 

Best,

-David Staat 

[BrettloweAUS]

Hi @DStaat , 

This makes sense, thank you. 

The part I can't work out is if you can future date the next call as a field. 

So for example. The call is completed say today 18/08/2023, I want to run a workflow on completion of the call to set a "next call date" (date of step + 180 days) 
Can you do this with a custom code? or a calculation property? 

[DStaat]

Hey @BrettloweAUS,

Unfortunately, there's not currently a way to add days to a date property in HubSpot (i.e. you couldn't take the Tick Tock Today property and add 180 days to it to generate a next call date).

What I would recommend is have whoever is on the call set the date manually afterwards. Not ideal, but it would allow you to continue using the time between property to send alerts.

Let me know if you have any further questions!

Best,

-David Staat

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @BYow, thanks for reaching out! And thanks for the mention, @PamCotton!

There are a few different approaches you can take here depending on your current nurturing process and how you're using HubSpot. I know that you mentioned tracking outreach to both contacts and companies — determining which object you want to center on is an important first step.

Using company or contact records

If you want to use company records, you'll want to look at the following company properties (pulled from this HubSpot Knowledge Base article on default company properties) :

1. Last contacted: the timestamp from the most recent chat conversation, call, email, or meeting logged for this company. This is set automatically by HubSpot.
2. Last activity date: the last date and time of a note, call, sales email, meeting, task, or chat on the company record. This is set automatically by HubSpot based on the date/time set for an activity when it's logged on the record. For example, if a user logs a call today for a call that occurred previously, the Last activity date property in the record will show today's date.

Just keep in mind that these properties will be updated based on the associated contacts, so it may be difficult to stay on top of all contacts here if you're relying on the company record (unless you'll be designating a small number of target accounts).

Otherwise, the contac record will be the way to go using pretty much the same properties (pulled from this HubSpot Knowledge Base article on default contact proeprties) :

1. Last contacted: the last date and time a chat conversation, call, sales email, meeting, or message was logged for the contact. This is set automatically by HubSpot based on the latest date of activities in the record. For example, the Last contacted property in the record will show yesterday's date when a user logs a call that occurred the day before.
2. Last activity date: the last date and time a note, call, tracked and logged sales email, meeting, message, task, or chat was logged on the contact's record. This is set automatically by HubSpot based on the most recent date/time set for activity. For example, if a user logs a call and indicates that it occurred the day before, the Last activity date property will show yesterday's date.

Using the contact record will allow you to track individual outreach to specific contacts, so this would be my recommendation for ensuring that your contacts are followed up with appropriately.

Narrowing down the company or contact records

Next up, you'll need to determine which records you want to trigger these reminders. Since it sounds like these notifications are meant for key accounts, hopefully you have those categorized in HubSpot through a property or deal stage like:

1. Contact/company type
2. Contact/company lead status
3. Contact/company lifecycle stage
4. Contact/company score
5. Contact/company number of associated deals
6. List membership

Defining the eligibility here will be key for creating your workflow and ensuring that these reminder notifications aren't overwhelming. You want to be sure that only high-priority records are sending notifications here so your sales team can reasonably follow up with all of them.

Creating your workflow

Once you have the object type and criteria figured out, you can create your workflow (centered on whichever contact/company date property suits you best). From there, you can create a workflow like:

• "Last activity date" is more than 30 days ago
• Create task/send internal email notification
• Delay 30 days
• If/then branch that checks if "Last activity date" is more tha 60 days ago
• If yes, send another notification/task or alert the sales manager

Your timelines may vary, but I would try to create the workflow so that it will continue sending notifications if there isn't any logged outreach to that object.

Alternative approach thoughts

Hopefully the aboce process helps you figure out the approach thart will work best for you and your team! I want to share some additional thoughts in case they're helpful.

Are you currently leveraging lead scoring within HubSpot? Honestly, I think that may be your best bet for contacts who aren't yet in the deal pipeline. Rather than requiring a rep to think of a new reason to reach out to them every 30 days (especially if that outreach doesn't provide a ton of value), you could track engagement from those contacts as they explore at their own pace. These contacts can also potentially be included in ongoing email marketing or nurturing efforts to give them more opportunities to engage with you outside of cold emails from the sales team.

Then if a key contact reaches a target lead score or engages with a particular asset, that can be the trigger for your sales team to reach out personally. 

This approach may help automate some of this outreach and make it more contextual for your key contacts. 

Just wanted to throw that out there in case it's helpful!!

[PamCotton]

Hello, @BYow that's a great question! I want to invite to this conversation some of our top experts to share their thoughts @jolle @RJaglan @NicoleSengers any recommendations to @BYow?

Thank you,

Pam

[BYow]

Awesome! Looking forward to it! So pumped to get us using HS in a new way!