Episode 206: Workflow Actions you may not know about

Welcome to HubShots Episode 206: Workflow Actions you may not know about

This episode we discuss workflow actions, starting with the new workflow delays action.

Listen to the episode here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/206-workflow-actions-you-may-not-know-about

Welcome to HubShots - APAC's number 1 HubSpot focussed podcast - where we discuss HubSpot tips & tricks, new features, and strategies for growing your marketing results.

HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

Recorded: Thursday 04 June 2020 | Published: Friday 12 June 2020

Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

We’re aiming to have shorter episodes, ideally around 15 minutes. Let us know if you like this format better. With so many more podcasts becoming available everyday, we want to stay as compact, efficient and useful to you as possible.

How to Be an Antiracist

The New York Times bestselling book by Ibram X Kendi.

Shot 2: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Workflow Actions You May Not Know About

There’s a bunch of workflow Actions that are often overlooked, including sending internal email notifications, creating tasks, and copying properties.

HubSpot is also regularly releasing new Actions for workflows.

This episode were mentioning the new delay action which allows you to delay a workflow until a specific day and/or time:

It allows you to use the contact’s time zone as well (assuming the IP of the contact is available)

It also includes a quick tab view of the contacts that are currently in that delay.

Some example scenarios where this is useful:

• Time specific company announcements
• Daily updates that you want to set to a specific time eg end of day updates

Can’t Add Note to Contact from Workflow

Speaking of workflow actions, here’s one for the wishlist - be aware that you cannot create a note on a contact from a workflow!

Shot 3: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Protecting HubSpot Owner field and Notifying on it changing

Talking to the head of sales at one of our clients they mentioned they wanted to stop people from updating the Owner field in HubSpot Marketing Pro. You can do this, Enterprise! (we chatted about this in episode 202).

So we looked for a way to notify the sales manager of a contact owner change.  Found this good post that explains how to do it!

How to Use Workflows to Set Up Lead Ownership Change Notifications in HubSpot

Thank you Aditya Shah and Kevin O’Dea!

This will help in the case of the gotcha we mentioned in episode 204 where importing from contacts in your phone into the HubSpot app will update the Owner.

Shot 4: HubSpot Feedback of the Week

HubSpot won’t be implementing the option to block a specific email address anytime soon

This HubSpot community post is a good example of HubSpot being clear about priorities, even when it won’t make people happy. I really appreciate HubSpot being clear when a feature isn’t going to be actioned anytime soon. In this case we are keen to have the ability to block specific email addresses (as opposed to email domains), but HubSpot has indicated they won’t be implementing it.

Shot 5: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week

HubSpot Work Email Field Confusion

If you have Facebook connected via HubSpot Ads, and you use Facebook Lead Ads you will have a field created called ‘work email’. Make sure you don’t accidentally import contacts emails into that field (instead of the main ‘email’ field)

Shot 6: HubShots Throwback of the Week

Here’s What HubSpot was announcing a year ago

HubSpot announced changes to their Social Media Tools with new social reports.

Shot 7: Resource of the Week

Sige Learning Content Marketing deal on AppSumo

Get the Siege Learning Content Marketing course for just $69.

Shot 8: Quote of the Week

Leadership

“Leadership is not about titles, positions or flowcharts. It is about one life influencing another.”

– John Maxwell

Shot 9: Bonus Links of the Week

Getting feedback on Twitter

Good example of asking for feedback on Twitter, and being gracious and appreciative when some of the replies are negative.

Follow Us on the Socials

Connect with HubShots here: HubShots YouTube channel - HubShots Spotify channel - HubShots Facebook group - HubShots Twitter - HubShots Instagram - HubShots LinkedIn

Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn

Please rate and leave us some feedback as this helps us improve and reach more marketers.

Full Transcript of the Episode

- Hi everyone, welcome to HubShots, Episode 206. In this episode we discuss workflow actions and starting with new workflow delay actions. You're listening to Asia Pacific's a number one HubSpot-focused Podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks and strategies for growing your sales, marketing and service results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems. How are you Craig?

- I'm really well. Surprisingly awake and alert. This week, normally, I'm really tired. But perhaps it's because I know we're only gonna do brief episodes. We're aiming for 15 minutes per episode, aren't we in?

- That's right, we are Craig and we'd love our listeners to give us feedback and say if do you like the 15 minute episodes?

- By the way, I'll just mention the reason behind it. One of the podcasts I listen to is Dithering, which is a new podcast, John Gruber and Ben Thompson. I really like it, 15 minutes. But I myself, I'm noticing, there so many more podcasts every day, there's more podcasts. So I am skewing my listing towards the short punchy ones. And so perhaps listeners are as well. And we wanna make these shows as efficient and useful to you as possible.

- All right, Craig. On to HubSpot marketing feature of the week. And this is about the new workflow actions that you may not know about.

- Yeah, well, I thought, about firstly, one new action, which is just popped in this week, but also just a reminder about workflow actions in general. When we chat with clients, they quite often just limit their thinking in workflow actions to, "I'm just sending an email." So they only think about a delay, and then sending an email. But I just wanted to remind listeners, there's plenty more, I mean, there's tons of actions are always adding more with the integrations as well, but just some of the simple ones that are often overlooked, sending internal email notifications. That's a really key one that we don't see in many workflows, strangely enough. Also creating tasks and copying properties and we've covered that in recent episodes as well. However, tonight I just wanted to talk about the new delay actions. So most portals will have this by now, we all know about that delay for a set amount of time, set delay for an hour or a day or et cetera. But there's a new one which is delay until a day or time. And when you choose that delay, you can actually say, delay until a day of the week, or until a time of day. And we've got some screenshots in the show notes as well. One of the things I really like about it, is you can say delay until this time of the day, you might say odd goes out, last thing of the day 5:00pm, and you can actually set it to send it at the contact timezone. So not just your account timezone. So I think this is really good. Typical scenario for that might be your daily updates. Or here's another one, what if you're planning a specific company announcements to go out and you just wanna get the workflow in place and then maybe you say, "Oh, that's going out on Thursday afternoon." That kind of stuff. And just a little preview, there's some more coming out. We'll be discussing them in future episodes.

- All right, Craig, and we've got another one where we can add a note to a contact from a workflow.

- And this is actually just a reminder, one of the actions that isn't there, but it's on the wish list is adding a note to a contact. So in a workflow go through, maybe it passes a certain stage and you're, "Okay, I just wanna add a note to the context." Can't do that yet. There's probably a community request for it. We should go vote it up.

- All right, Craig, our HubSpot sales feature of the week, and this is protecting HubSpot owner fields, sorry, should I just say protecting fields in HubSpot? And why this came up was I had somebody in sales. And I think this happens quite often, people changing contact owners without notifying the person that actually owns the contact and then taking that contact from them essentially. And so I got asked by the head of sales saying, "Hey, how do I stop this from happening "so that only I can edit it "or other business or the owners "or the head of operations can update it?" And I said, "Look, not on your HubSpot subscription, "which is a marketing and sales professional." But I said, "How about if I could inform you "when contact owner has been changed, "so you're aware of what's happened." And he goes, "Oh that sounds really good." So I was like, "Okay, now I need to go "find out how to do this." And there is actually a really good article on the HubSpot user blog from Aditya Shah and Kevin O'Dea, O'Dea I think. So basically creating the workflow and what property to look at, the author had to create another custom property, one of the things he did was copy the last user on their own a property into this property, so you didn't have to go look at the history quickly. And it's a part of the workflow. So I've included a link in there, but it's a really good thing to have, and think about implementing in your portal, especially when you have a big sales team with sales managers, and sales professionals within the team.

- I wonder if that'll help us overcome that issue that you highlighted back in Episode 204. Where if you have the mobile app and you import your contacts, it updates the owner on the contacts. So with this workflow catch, then?

- It would actually Craig. That's a very good point. I think that you just highlighted a solution to the problem we had before. I have to go try it out, but that's the little feature for sales.

- I just wanna mention one thing related to this, when we've got this in the show notes. You've actually linked out to a HubSpot blog post, which explains how to do this. I was chatting with Fran, he kinda called me a business owner saying, "Look, we're getting into HubSpot. "I might need you to give me some help "on how to get up to speed with HubSpot, "and just give me an overview and how to do the basics." I was like, "You don't need me man, "I'm just gonna show you the HubSpot Academy "and the HubSpot blog. "And in fact, here do this, just go to Google "and just search this." And he was like, "Oh, well, I want to know, "is there a plugin, "is there a HubSpot plugin for WordPress?" I said just, "Google HubSpot, WordPress plugin." Bang, like it's all there. And this is the thing about HubSpot. Well, two things, one, they've got everything covered. But two, they keep it up-to-date. We've said this many times in the show, I can't believe how well they update their documentation, so it's not out of date.

- 100% agreed, Craig. I had the similar experience this week, where we're onboarding a customer for sales professional, it was just so easy. They had all these questions and I pointed them to a project, I pointed them to Academy lessons, and we were just able to get up and going really quickly. So thank you HubSpot Academy. All right, our HubSpot feedback of the week, Craig, this is something interesting you found.

- Okay, so there's a HubSpot community post which I'm fired up ages ago. And the post was a feature request to be able to exclude or block specific email addresses from submitting a form. Now currently, as you probably aware, you can block email domains, email domains, or domains.

- And free emails, right?

- And free emails, but you can, there's a field where you can say this domain, for just block anyone with email address, but they request is can we block specific email addresses. So we've all experienced that spam and that comes in with a Gmail address and just spams, the contact form every week and like I kinda creates contact or I delete them or whatever. So wouldn't it be great if we could just block that one Gmail address, we don't wanna block the whole Gmail domain. Anyway, heaps of people have voted up. It's a pretty common problem. What I really like is that HubSpot have come in on this community request, and they've said, "Just letting you know, we have no plans to do this." Correct . So, all they go no, and I was trying to think why I suspect there might be some specific discriminatory use cases in place that they don't wanna get caught up in. But what I really liked is that they just said, they just made it clear. "We're not, we have no plans to do this, not..." Well, and they're essentially saying, "Look, we're not gonna do it." And rather than us hanging out for it, and going, "Oh, when's this happening?" And winching like all the people, through our man's community by sides, it's two years now, this is outrageous. They've just come in and said, "We're not gonna do it." And I really appreciate that. So put that as a shot for HubSpot feedback of the week. And I wish they just did that for all of the things that they've got no plans to do, just 'cause they feel it's so important. I think it's really useful. And although I don't like it in this case, I'm really grateful that I know what's happening.

- Fantastic. Unto our hustle gotcha of the week Craig, and this is what I discovered this week, is there is a HubSpot work email field. And what one of my customers did was when they loaded data, they selected this email field as the email field that they were in putting it into, now because they've got Facebook connected, this is an ad property in the Facebook lead ad. He loaded in, I had a look and I'm like, "Where are all the emails?" This is really odd, there are no email addresses, any way, I deleted all the contacts. As you reload it, in the process of reloading, I scanned it and, oh that all looks right. And the second time it loaded, I was like. "Those emails is still missing. "What might I have done wrong?" Anyway, there's a work email field. And I'm like, "What's going on here?" I'd never, I've never seen this field before. Anyway, this is what got us caught out. The work email field is a lead ad property. So just so you don't get caught out, this field, it does not look for duplicates, or does not let you insert in contacts that may be duplicates. Just be aware of that and don't use that, you should be using the email field.

- Okay, so just that I understand this. Normally a contact, every contact would have email, there's a field called email. But if you've got Facebook connected, and you're using lead ads, it's created a new field called work email under the Facebook lead ad properties. I've got a screenshot in the show notes. So when you're importing, you're searching for the field to import the email in, like a CSV import. So naturally, you see work email, and you think, "Oh, of course, that's the one." And it's not, you actually got to look for the one just called email.

- All right, on to a throwback of the week, Craig. And this week, a year ago, HubSpot was announcing changes to their social media tools. And one of the biggest things in that was the new social media reports. When you connected your social media accounts, it pulled in 60 days of data from the date backwards from when you connected. So I know we've talked about this a few times on episodes and how great it is that it has to do that, even if you're not publishing directly out of HubSpot, and here we go again one of those incremental improvements that's changed the way we work and changed how we operate in HubSpot. Craig, you've got a great resource of the week.

- Yes, this is an AppSumo deal. Now normally wouldn't put AppSumo in options, you've bought bits stuff on AppSumo, haven't you?

- I have Craig.

- I think most of our listeners would know what AppSumo is. In case you're not aware, AppSumo is a site where you sign up and they have deals, I don't know if it's daily, it's probably weekly deals. And you'll often get really good deals on software or courses. And in this case, there's a good offer on the siege learning content marketing course, which is normally 700 bucks or so. AppSumo have it for $69 lifetime access, so grab that. We've got a link in the show notes. It's a link to AppSumo, not my referral link or anything, that's just a clean link. I just think it's a really good deal. You and I are both getting the course. And that's Ross Hudgens from Sage Mania, who we often refer to in the show. So a great deal gang, grab it while it's there.

- Yeah, and it's to do with content marketing. So I would encourage people to... It's very highly regarded. And you've probably heard Craig talk about it lots of times, a great way to get skilled up with your SEO and content.

- All right, Craig, our quote of the week, and it's about leadership, and leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts, it's about one life influencing another. And that's from John Maxwell.

- Well, how timely do we need that? Oh, my goodness.

- That's right. Now we've got a bonus thing of the week, Craig, and listeners, I'd encourage everybody to go have a look at this. And this is a good example of ask for feedback on Twitter, and being gracious and appreciative when some of the replies are negative, and this was from Brian Halligan. And I think you said, "You asked me earlier in this show Craig, "Have you looked at it?" And I'm like "No, hang on, I did." Because I actually replied to some of this, I replied to someone else's comment have a really good suggestion. Like you rightly say, he has responded really well. And I'd encourage users to go and have a look at this. Well, listeners here ended the show. Connect with us on LinkedIn and follow us on the socials. And Craig, we shall see you next week. Catch you later. And thank you for listening to this episode of HubShots. For show notes, resources, HubSpot news, including practical strategies you can implement, visit us at hubshots.com.