HubSpot and Workflows: 5 Core Ways to Automate RevOps

Revenue Operations (RevOps) helps companies drive revenue growth by aligning sales, marketing, and customer service operations. 

HubSpot workflow automation handles the difficult and repetitive parts of RevOps. In this blog post, you’ll learn what HubSpot workflow automation is and how it optimizes RevOps in five core areas.

What Is HubSpot Workflow Automation?

HubSpot workflow automation connects objects, actions, and events to automatically perform your RevOps tasks. Think of it as a series of building blocks that bring your work actions together. When an event happens, the workflow performs a job for you, and you can link those events and jobs. 

The benefits of this technology include:

• All-day automation: Think of workflow automation as the fuel that powers your 24/7 RevOps engine. HubSpot will automatically handle your responsibilities around the clock to keep your sales, marketing, and customer service departments running even when your team is off-duty.
• Seamless customer experience: Workflows help RevOps teams stay on top of their repetitive lead nurturing and customer retention duties. Tools like follow-up reminders, automated email promotion, and automatic service ticket creation assignments simplify the process. Thanks to HubSpot handling those actions, your sales team will engage leads and customers seamlessly.
• Happier, more productive salespeople: When HubSpot workflows handle monotonous work, it puts time back in your hands. This allows your RevOps team to deliver better results. Plus, your team will have improved morale from their HubSpot tools’ ease of adoption.

You’ll find HubSpot workflows in Professional and Enterprise plans. Go to Automation > Workflows to start building your own.

The Five Main Areas of HubSpot Workflow Automation

HubSpot Workflow automation will help your RevOps team in five areas of their work:

1. Sales

Sales workflows in HubSpot take care of sales tasks like engaging leads, creating quality contact data sets, managing campaigns, and connecting with customers. They help salespeople focus on building quality relationships with leads and closing deals.

Here are three examples of sales workflows you can use in your HubSpot Sales Hub:

Cross-Sell and Upsell

If you notice that a few of your products could appeal to someone with certain interests, try upselling or cross-selling when a customer buys one of them. This workflow shared on LinkedIn by HubSpot’s Principal Solutions Engineer, Jack Coldrick, checks for orders in a certain timespan with items matching a name. Then, the workflow sends a pre-written email suggesting similar products to people who made those orders.

Email Leads Who Revisit Your Page

Here’s another workflow from Jack Coldrick’s LinkedIn post. Salespeople who have a HubSpot tracking code on their website can automatically contact leads who keep viewing a certain page. After checking for people who have visited a page URL at least five times with at least one view in the past day, this workflow sends an email reminding them of that page’s topic.

Source: Jack Coldrick

Assign Leads

HubSpot can use workflows to automatically assign leads to your staff members, so no new lead goes missed. You can assign new leads to a specific person who manually assigns leads.

Want to fully automate lead assignments? You can also automatically rotate new leads among your staff members or assign leads based on factors like region.

2. Data Hygiene

Data cleaning — removing or changing data in your database — is a critical but intensive job for RevOps teams to handle in their data management. HubSpot’s data hygiene workflows automatically format and validate data for easier cleaning.

Look how these example workflows assist with the data cleaning process:

Turn a Full Name Into a First and Last Name

A classic data error is putting someone’s first and last name in the “First Name” field. Using a custom workflow, you can split that full name into a first and last name, then populate each field correctly. Create a workflow that checks for entries with no last name and set it to divide the two words between the First Name and Last Name fields.

Validate Email Address Through a Validation Service

Invalid emails can easily slip through data cleaning when they seem legitimate. With a custom-coded workflow from HubSpot, you can run emails through a validation service before you send out a campaign. Simply connect HubSpot to any email verification service with an API, like Kickbox or ZeroBounce.

Format U.S. Phone Numbers

Proper phone number formatting helps salespeople read and clean data more easily. This custom workflow changes 10-digit U.S. phone numbers to the standard format. So, for example, a number that reads “5558675309” would become “(555) 867-5309.”

3. Data Enrichment

While data cleaning involves changing or taking away data, data enrichment requires you to add data. During the data enrichment process, a RevOps Specialist inputs contact details from other services to serve leads more effectively. HubSpot workflows for data enrichment reference other services to fill out a contact’s profile.

Source: HubSpot

Since HubSpot’s data enrichment workflows connect to outside platforms, they use custom code. A member of your development team or a HubSpot management service can set up these workflows for you.

Two of the most popular data enrichment platforms to connect to HubSpot through workflows are Clearbit and ZoomInfo. They add data to contacts based on machine learning and existing databases. Both Clearbit and ZoomInfo are geared toward B2B businesses.

Try installing the LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration in your HubSpot CRM on top of your custom data enrichment workflows. It provides a tab for each contact that shows their LinkedIn information.

4. Marketing

HubSpot’s marketing workflows can reduce some of the workload for your RevOps team’s marketers. They help you set up successful marketing campaigns in Marketing Hub to increase lead generation.

These three examples of marketing workflows will show you what HubSpot’s automation features are capable of:

Send lead nurturing emails

It can take multiple touchpoints to qualify a lead for sales. This workflow by mbudo uses if/then logic to follow up with marketing-qualified leads depending on their response to previous follow-ups. If the lead doesn’t respond to the first follow-up, the workflow will send a second follow-up.

Source: mbudo

Deliver marketing assets

Many companies have lead magnets — downloadable assets available after a lead fills out a form. One of Smark Labs’ marketing workflows automatically sends content to someone who fills out a lead magnet form. Then, it follows up with the recipient with an email that promotes related content to keep the lead nurturing process going. 

Promote events

Have trouble regularly promoting events like webinars? Set emails to send at specific times before the event to keep leads in the loop. Add if/then triggers to avoid sending further emails to people who have already responded.

5. Customer Service

HubSpot’s Service Hub workflows keep your RevOps going strong after your leads become customers with easier customer service.

Learn how HubSpot workflows simplify customer service with these examples:

Create a help ticket

If you have an external source for customer help requests, HubSpot can have that source generate a ticket in Service Hub. Set the trigger as your customer’s interaction with that tool and have HubSpot create a ticket using the customer’s message. Try this workflow for emails or form entries you get outside of your Service Hub.

Onboard customers

Keep your onboarding process smooth by automatically creating tickets for customers waiting on the onboarding process. Build a workflow that checks for customers in a certain stage of onboarding without activity within the last day. Then, create a ticket to continue onboarding.

Source: HubSpot

Welcome new customers

Companies that run ecommerce stores can also onboard their customers by sending a welcome email after someone’s first purchase. This workflow from Jack Coldrick’s LinkedIn post we shared earlier evaluates if a deal comes from a new customer. Then, it sends an email thanking them for their purchase. If you try this workflow, your email can include information on your company and products.

Set Up a 24/7 RevOps Engine With Bayard Bradford

Now that you know what HubSpot automation workflows will do for your company, it’s time to implement them. Add workflows to your HubSpot tools to streamline the processes among your team’s RevOps duties.

The most efficient HubSpot setups have workflows that work in harmony to move leads down the sales and marketing pipeline 24/7. HubSpot Solutions Partners know how to coordinate HubSpot workflows to automate every aspect of RevOps.

As a Diamond HubSpot Solutions Partner, Bayard Bradford assists mid-sized B2B industrial, manufacturing, and energy companies with developing effective HubSpot ecosystems. Contact us using our online form to learn how we can serve you.