Option to automatically add a product to a deal with workflows

[lalexander]

Hi team,

It would be great to be able to automatically add certain Products to Deals within Workflows. For example, if a customer comes in via a certain source and all of the customers from that source are purchasing Product A, all the Deals could then be automatically updated to have that product associated with them.

This would reduce friction for sales teams and allow more seamless Deal creation - the teams wouldn't have to go back and add Products later. Thank you!

[lalexander]

Hi everyone - just an update to respond to some of your questions about future work in this area! We definitely hear you and the additional functionality that you'd like to help solve some of these line item use cases. We, on the Automation team, will be working with the Payments team to figure out how we can continue to add more functionality within workflows, but at this point I don't have a clear timeline to share with you. Any updates about these feature requests will be relayed on this thread, though. 

Thanks,

Emma

[lalexander]

Hi All - We have just launched the ability to associate line items when creating a new deal in workflows to all portals with workflows access! I have closed the beta sign up form linked in this thread as you should now all have access. 

I'm going to keep this thread open as there are a few other deal and line item scenarios in workflows mentioned here that we haven't yet solved for.

Thanks,

Emma

[lalexander]

@SamB1 - This is definitely one of the next things we want to accomplish with line items in workflows. We don't have a timeline yet, but will let you know once we have updates to share!

@nwcarlson - I'm not sure I understand your use case here. Do you want to determine how many line items to add from this property? How would you determine which product to add as your line item? 

[lalexander]

@FMaher Correct, this only works when creating a new deal. This is just the first iteration, and we're aware of the need to add to existing deals and the team has started to evaluate how to solve that problem!

[lalexander]

Hi All - My name is Emma Golborne and I'm a Product Manager on the Automation/Workflows team. We've implemented the ability to add line items to deals when using the Create Record action to create a deal in workflows! The next step is to get some beta testers to test it out in private beta before we release more broadly. If you're interested in participating in the beta, please fill out this form. We will then give you access within 36 hours of you submitting the form, but will not let you know once we've given you access so be sure to check in your portal. There's more information in the form, but looking forward to getting your feedback and making this available to everyone.

As always, thanks for your feedback and your help!

[lalexander]

Hey folks - Ethan here, product manager for the Product Library. Apologies for the missed quarter of updates. I didn't mean to leave you hanging. We're very close with this feature, we just continue to hit snags in our testing, but we're actively working on this. I'm hopeful for sometime this quarter (Q3). I will update the thread as soon as the feature begins its rollout.

As I stated in the past, our first release for this feature will allow you to add line items to Deals when creating Deals using the "Create Record" workflow action. Hopefully that stems some of the pain. Later, we will open up Line Items as an object in the "Create Record" action. Though, I can't specify a timeline for that.

As a sidenote, I'll be updating the top Ideas associated with Products and Line Items ~once per quarter going forward. I will include (1) whether or not a feature is on the roadmap for that quarter or not and (2) what our rollout plan for that feature is (e.g. will there be a beta or not). If you have feedback about additional information I could include in these updates, drop a note here. If I see a theme, I'll adjust my updates to address that.

I won't be doing this for every idea, but most ideas above 100 kudos will get this treatment. Previously, I had been trying to do it for ideas greater than 25 upvotes, but unfortunately the volume is too high to be practical.

[lalexander]

Hey folks - Ethan here, product manager of the Product Library. We've decided to make a little pivot here and I wanted to keep you up to date. We're going to tackle this idea in two stages. The first stage is letting you add Line Items to Deals when they are created via Automation. Based on my research, this should address some of the pain here (not all), and it's an important infrastructure project for us too. <-- you should see this phase sometime in early Q2, though I can't say exactly when. It's being actively worked on, but we have a few internal dependencies so I can't say exactly when it will be released.

The second phase of this project will be adding Line Items to the "Create Record" action. This should address all the pain described above, but it is a bit more complicated given that Line Items need to be created with an association (i.e. to Deals, Quotes, or Payment Links). Line Items cannot exist by themselves, because they're aren't uniquely named and don't store information about when/how/if something was actually purchased. They just store what the item is (e.g. Marketing Hub Enterprise - Annual Subscription, $34,000, SKU: 84745435, Quantity: 1). <-- I can't say for sure when this will be released, but it's top of mind for us this year. 

I hope the "Add Line Item to Deal" via Automation addresses some of the use cases here while we work on "Create Line Item." 

As a sidenote, I'll be updating the top Ideas associated with Products and Line Items ~once per quarter going forward. I will include (1) whether or not a feature is on the roadmap for that quarter or not and (2) what our rollout plan for that feature is (e.g. will there be a beta or not). If you have feedback about additional information I could include in these updates, drop a note here. If I see a theme, I'll adjust my updates to address that.

I won't be doing this for every idea, but most ideas above 25 kudos will get that treatment. Looking forward to getting this feature into your hands!

[lalexander]

Hey folks - my name is Ethan and I'm the product manager for the Products and Line Items team. I just wanted to let you know that this is on our roadmap for this quarter and, while I can't give you an exact timeline for release, I would expect that within this quarter or early Q2, you will be able to add a Line Item to a Deal in Workflows. 

This particular feature probably won't have a wide beta. We'll test it it with a dozen or so teams, then we'll just roll it out to everyone on a percentage basis. I'll update this thread when we begin the percentage rollout. 

As a sidenote, I'll be updating the top Ideas associated with Products and Line Items ~once per quarter going forward. I will include (1) whether or not a feature is on the roadmap for that quarter or not and (2) what our rollout plan for that feature is (e.g. will there be a beta or not). If you have feedback about additional information I could include in these updates, drop a note here. If I see a theme, I'll adjust my updates to address that.

I won't be doing this for every idea, but most ideas above 25 kudos will get that treatment. Looking forward to getting this feature into your hands!

[lalexander]

Hi folks,

I’m Megan Legge, a product manager for HubSpot’s workflows tool. I’m coming to you today with an update, that I’ll be moving this idea from In Planning, back to Being Reviewed. We’ve unfortunately hit an unexpected development roadblock that means we’ll need more time before we can deliver this feature, so that when we do, we ensure it’s a high-quality feature that meets your expectations.

Any news about this feature request will be relayed on this thread, so stay tuned.

Best,
Megan

[lalexander]

Hi @abrow ,

In the upcoming change I mentioned, the functionality will be limited to the action to create deal record, and will create a new deal and add specific line items (not copying from another deal). However, we're still digging into other ways we can continue to add more robust line item/deal functionality to workflows, so these additional examples are super helpful. 

Thanks!

Megan

[lalexander]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your continued feedback and patience. We're actively working on developing this feature, which will be the ability to add line items to deals, when you create deals with workflows, through the Create record action.

I'll post another update when we have more specific information about the launch of this feature.

Thank you!

Megan

 

[lalexander]

Hey folks - my name is Ethan and I'm the Product Manager responsible for Quotes and the Product Library at HubSpot. This idea is something that's actively on our radar and I'm working with our team to prioritize it. I can't give you a definite date, but workflow actions for Quotes, Products, and Line Items is top of mind for us going into 2021.

[lalexander]

Hi all,

This is still on our radar, though there are a couple blockers we need to deal with before we could implement something like this. We'll continue to explore our options, as we know this is a need many of you have. I appreciate the continued feedback and use case specifics, which help us ensure we're working on the right solution.

Best,

Megan

[lalexander]

Hi everyone,

I’m Megan Legge, a product manager for HubSpot’s workflows tool. Thanks for the comments and feedback! We're currently investigating our options and ability to enable this requested feature. I will follow up when we have more information.

Best,

Megan

[HSUser34]

Looking forward to this! 🙏

[MW96]

+1 to this - we need this to clone recurring deals. At the moment, I need to workaround this with a fragile and quite complex automation in Zapier. Could be so much easier to do it in HubSpot directly!

[GEiselt]

Hi @ethankopit any updates from the team on this feature? See the most recent update mentioned Q3 as an approximate rollout, is there a revised date you can share for launch? Thanks!

[KSKostner]

Much needed. Also it would be useful to be able to copy line items/products from a deal in a workflow to a newly created deal - at least until it becomes possible to clone a deal in a workflow

[MW96]

+1 to the above!

@KSKostner, I built a workaround in Zapier to clone HubSpot deals, maybe that's interesting for you as well. 

[PPanbechi]

+1 here! Any update on timing for this?

[EGolborne]

Hi All - My name is Emma Golborne and I'm a Product Manager on the Automation/Workflows team. We've implemented the ability to add line items to deals when using the Create Record action to create a deal in workflows! The next step is to get some beta testers to test it out in private beta before we release more broadly. If you're interested in participating in the beta, please fill out this form. We will then give you access within 36 hours of you submitting the form, but will not let you know once we've given you access so be sure to check in your portal. There's more information in the form, but looking forward to getting your feedback and making this available to everyone.

As always, thanks for your feedback and your help!

[FMaher]

@EGolborne - does the workflow only run on deal creation? Our issue is that at the point of deal creation, we are guessing which product the prospect will want. After a demo, we will update a selection (product) from a custom field if required. I'm not sure if the beta will be suitable for us if it means users need to delete the line items and re-add if the product selected at deal creation needs to be changed.

[EGolborne]

@FMaher Correct, this only works when creating a new deal. This is just the first iteration, and we're aware of the need to add to existing deals and the team has started to evaluate how to solve that problem!

[nwcarlson]

@EGolborne In addition to needing to add line items to existing Deals, we also need the ability to add multiple line items.

In our example, we use line items to define sections of our Deals. So we have a `Number of sections` property which adds a section header line item. So if they set that property to 10, it should add 10 section header line items.

[SamB1]

@EGolborne I appreciate the Beta and it is a step forward - what we would love to be able to do is duplicate the line items attached to one deal to another - we have a sales pipeline, onboarding pipeline and renewals.  We have workflows that do this for us and duplicate the relevant information across - but the key thing for us to duplicate line items across.  Is this on the roadmap?  Or does anyone know of a work around?

[EGolborne]

@SamB1 - This is definitely one of the next things we want to accomplish with line items in workflows. We don't have a timeline yet, but will let you know once we have updates to share!

@nwcarlson - I'm not sure I understand your use case here. Do you want to determine how many line items to add from this property? How would you determine which product to add as your line item? 

[nwcarlson]

Yes we are. And in this case, it would be the same part number. We have a
product (###SECTION-HEADER) that we use to define sections on the
quote/deal. So we would want to add X iterations of this product to the
Deal.

We have many deals that have over 40 sections and it's very time
consuming to create all those line items manually.

[boydjk88]

@SamB1 We have a very similar process and we use a Hubspot add-on called Clone Attack as our workaround right now. When a sales deal is closed, we have a workflow that creates a copy of the deal and adds it to our renewal pipeline. The CS rep has a few data cleanup steps that have to be done that can't be automated through the workflow, one of which is to use Clone Attack to copy over the line items.

It's a really easy to use tool with a built-in widget on the deal. The rep will clone the original sales deal (which includes the line items) and merge the cloned version with the renewal deal that was created via workflow, which copies the line items over. 

You could theoretically skip the entire workflow process and just clone the sales deal and add it to the onboarding or renewal pipeline. The reason we don't do this is because we're worried about the human error of someone forgetting to do so, and then a renewal deal is never created. So we prefer to have the worklfow automation as the default method for creating the renewal deal, then our reps can leverage the Clone Attack + deal merge technique as a faster and more accurate way to recreate all the line items rather then adding them manually.

 https://app.hubspot.com/ecosystem/5952291/marketplace/apps/sales/crm/appchemist-clone-attack-229629 

[FMaher]

@SamB1 I actually move the original deal over to the onboarding pipeline. When doing sales reports - total actual sales is reported from the onboarding pipeline (any deal on any stage of onboarding pipeline).

[EGolborne]

Hi All - We have just launched the ability to associate line items when creating a new deal in workflows to all portals with workflows access! I have closed the beta sign up form linked in this thread as you should now all have access. 

I'm going to keep this thread open as there are a few other deal and line item scenarios in workflows mentioned here that we haven't yet solved for.

Thanks,

Emma

[SamB1]

Hi All

Thanks for your suggestions.  We really need it within Hubspot for now we have found a workaround that requires fewer steps however the ability to copy line items over to a new deal within a workflow as you can with a number of other properties would be really helpful and make life a lot easier.

Our workflow is closed won, create a deal in the onboarding pipeline and set the workflow to copy over details from the sales deal - the only thing missing is the line items. 

@EGolborne is this something you are looking at?

[CDouglas4]

@EGolborne we're chasing the same solution as SamB1 with copying line items from one deal to another on automatic creation. Great to see the initial steps, looking forward to some more updates

[EGolborne]

Hi everyone - just an update to respond to some of your questions about future work in this area! We definitely hear you and the additional functionality that you'd like to help solve some of these line item use cases. We, on the Automation team, will be working with the Payments team to figure out how we can continue to add more functionality within workflows, but at this point I don't have a clear timeline to share with you. Any updates about these feature requests will be relayed on this thread, though. 

Thanks,

Emma