To create a workflow in HubSpot, open Automation and then Workflows, choose Create workflow, pick a template or start from scratch, define who enters and what happens next, and turn it on. The steps take minutes. The value comes from the work done before them, which is to decide which business process deserves automation, who owns it and how success will be measured.
Think of the commercial director of a regional logistics company who notices that quotation requests sent through the website wait an average of two days for a first reply. Three people share responsibility, two of them are on the road, and the requests land in a shared mailbox that nobody has formally taken ownership of. A competitor answers in twenty minutes. The director asks the marketing manager to automate the reply and gets back a request for a month of configuration time, because nobody has written down who should receive the request, what counts as qualified and when a manager must be alerted. The software was never the obstacle. The process was undefined, and a workflow can only automate a process that somebody has defined.
That is why creating workflows in HubSpot, the platform published at hubspot.com, can initially be a challenge for commercial teams in marketing, sales and customer service. It is harder still when a company finds itself in one of three situations. Process automation may be an unexplored topic. The company may never have implemented a CRM with omnichannel business management areas. Or its business may be new to HubSpot and its management modules. This article is written for the third situation and for leaders in the first two who want to understand what they are approving.
If workflows are a completely new concept and the company has not yet implemented a CRM, the companion article what are HubSpot workflows and how they can automate processes explains what they are, their functionalities, real use cases, benefits and how they improve customer experience. Leaders who are still choosing a platform can start with CRM platforms and how to choose the one that best fits your needs.
>> CRM Platforms: How to choose the one that best fits your needs <<
Workflows may seem challenging to set up, and the author is right to begin with preparation. Internally, the team has to understand its business processes, the problems or backlogs in the process chain and the complexity of the tasks that would address them. Only then does the configuration begin. Each user signs in to their HubSpot account and authenticates. Among the modules on the home screen there is an area called Automation, and a user who does not have access to every automation tool will find the entry named Workflows. ICX has described the wider automation module in how to automate business processes with HubSpot workflows and sequences.
>> How to automate business processes with HubSpot Workflows and Sequence <<
Inside the tool, the author describes a button labeled Create workflow. HubSpot's current documentation gives the path as Automation, then Workflows, then Create workflow, and offers three ways to proceed. A team can build from scratch by choosing the enrollment triggers and an object type in the editor, ask the Breeze assistant to draft one from a sentence of the form when this happens, then do this, or start from a template that can be searched and filtered by hub plan or objective and that opens in the editor with triggers and actions prefilled. The third option is the one the author illustrates, a library of templates organized by business area and by the problem to be solved.
Once the editor is open, the documentation explains the logic that every workflow shares. The enrollment trigger defines which records enter, and triggers can be filter-based, event-based, schedule-based or webhook-based, or records can be enrolled manually. Actions are added one after another and can use data from the record. Re-enrollment is off by default, which prevents the same contact from receiving the same treatment repeatedly. At the end, in the review and publish step, the team decides whether existing records that already meet the trigger should be enrolled, and then turns the workflow on. That last decision deserves attention, because enrolling a large existing database in a new workflow can send hundreds of emails in the first minutes.
These aspects vary with the industry, but the author offers initial recommendations, and they hold up. The first concerns licensing. The author states that the automation tool can be enabled only with Professional or Enterprise subscriptions of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub or Operations Hub, and that a company holding only one of these licenses can use workflows but will not have all the configurations of the other license types. The current documentation updates the list: workflows are available with Professional or Enterprise tiers of Marketing, Sales, Service, Data, Smart CRM and Revenue Hub, and some features require HubSpot credits or seats. Operations Hub is now called Data Hub, so a company reading the 2022 version of the list should substitute the new name.
The second recommendation is to start by defining the problem or process that will be the first starting point. The team or the person in charge of the configuration needs an initial idea of the situation, and the author is clear that the choice is made first and the tool second. The third is to target the problem or process of the business area that requires automation, since HubSpot recommends a type of workflow configuration according to the department or process. The fourth is roles and access. Users who will create, modify and develop workflows must have the necessary permissions, and the HubSpot user permissions guide explains how to verify them. The guide adds a detail that surprises many companies, which is that viewing, editing and publishing are separate permissions. A person can be allowed to build a workflow without being allowed to turn it on, which is a useful control when an automation will send messages to customers.
A fifth consideration, which the author does not develop, is maintenance. The documentation notes that the number of workflows depends on the subscription, that action logs are kept for ninety days and that enrollment history is kept for six months, so a team that wants to audit what an automation did last year cannot rely on the platform alone. A short register kept by the process owner, with the purpose of each workflow, its trigger, its owner and the date of the last review, costs almost nothing and prevents the slow accumulation of forgotten automations that contradict one another.
HubSpot offers many templates and configuration types, and even a company with no experience can learn to recognize them. The author divides them in two ways and cautions that not every type will be available in every account. The first division is by business process template. The author lists the nurturing of first conversions, the notification of a sales representative about a lead for follow-up prospecting, a notification when a meeting is scheduled, the assignment of new website leads, a welcome for new blog subscribers and new contacts, a re-engagement workflow for prospects and customers with no activity, a workflow for obtaining customer feedback, the promotion of a product or service, confirmation emails for events, workflows for festive dates, anniversaries and birthdays, and workflows for defining the ideal customer profile.
The second division is by business area, and here the workflows are tied to the records and properties that HubSpot manages by default. They can be used in many information channels such as forms and emails. The author names six. Contact-based workflows act on individuals or companies as contacts and can be created from scratch, from the calendar or from date properties. Company-based workflows follow companies. Deal-based workflows are triggered by commercial activity, lead generation and qualification. Ticket-based workflows follow service tickets and are, in the author's words, indispensable for the entire customer service area. Quote-based workflows are triggered by quotes. Conversation-based workflows respond to interactions in forms, emails, live chats, chatbots and tickets, including social networks such as Facebook. The documentation points out that quote-based and contract-based workflows require specific subscription types, so a company planning to automate quotations should confirm its plan.
The same machinery supports very different outcomes depending on the industry. A software company may use a deal-based workflow to assign inbound demo requests to the representative responsible for the prospect's region and to alert a manager if no one responds in an hour. A manufacturer may use a ticket-based workflow to escalate warranty claims that remain open beyond a service level. A private school may use a contact-based workflow to nurture families who requested information and to remind them of enrollment deadlines. In each case the technical configuration is modest, and the real work is the agreement on rules that the company had never written down.
The author argues that workflows are fundamental because few companies today maintain the processes they used twenty or thirty years ago, and that processes which are slow, consume too much of the teams' productive time, make the company expensive, are not automated and present too many challenges make it harder to stand out from the competition. That last claim is the author's judgment, and research on the potential of automation supports its direction. McKinsey Global Institute analysis of work activities found that more than 60 percent of the activity of collecting and processing data could be automated with currently demonstrated technology, while only 18 percent of the activity of applying expertise to decisions, planning or creative work could be. The study measures technical feasibility and not actual adoption, but the pattern is the one commercial teams see every day. The repetitive movement of information between systems, people and customers is where automation pays, and the judgment that closes a deal remains human.
For an executive, that is the useful way to think about a workflow. It does not replace the sales representative or the service agent. It removes the waiting, the forgetting and the copying that sit between their decisions, so that the quotation request is acknowledged in seconds, the lead is assigned in minutes and the unhappy customer is noticed on the day.
Consider how this looks in a company with several sales regions. Before automation, each regional manager keeps a private routine for assigning leads, and results depend on who happens to be at the desk. After it, the rule is visible, the same everywhere and open to improvement. When the leadership team decides that enterprise inquiries should be answered by a senior representative, the change is made once in the workflow instead of being explained in five meetings. That ability to change a commercial rule in one place and see its effect the next day is what makes automation a management tool, and not merely a convenience for the people who configure it.
For the chief executive, workflows are the means by which a commercial policy becomes behavior. A rule that every qualified lead is contacted within an hour is a sentence in a presentation until a workflow enforces it and a report shows how often it holds. For the chief revenue officer, workflows reduce the variation between the best and the average representative, because the routine tasks are done the same way every time. For the chief financial officer, the benefit is capacity, since the hours recovered from manual work can be redirected, although the claim should be tested with a baseline rather than assumed. For the chief information officer, workflows are also a governance matter. Automations that nobody owns accumulate, contradict each other and can send customers inconsistent messages, so the company needs a register of what is running, who built it and who answers for it.
The risk to avoid is automating a bad process. A workflow that sends the wrong message faster is not progress. The discipline of mapping the process, agreeing the rule and measuring the result belongs before the first trigger is configured.
A consultant would begin with one process and one number. Choose a process that is frequent, rule-based and visible to customers, such as the response to a web inquiry, and measure how long it takes today from the moment the customer writes to the moment a person replies. Write the rule in one sentence, including who is responsible, what qualifies the request and what happens when nobody acts. Check that the person who will build the workflow has the right permissions and that the subscription includes the needed object type. Build the simplest version, test it with a handful of internal records and turn it on for new records only, not for the whole database. After two weeks, compare the response time with the baseline and ask the team what the workflow did that surprised them.
Mapping the process on paper before building is the step most teams skip. The ICX Process Transformation Framework Toolkit gives leaders a structured way to document the current process, identify where automation will remove waiting and decide what should remain a human task.
ICX Consulting treats workflow automation as a business process discipline that happens to be implemented in HubSpot. We work with commercial leadership to map the processes that matter, define the rules and indicators, and then configure the automations so that they reflect decisions the company has made. Our workflow automation practice and our process mapping and analysis service cover the full path from design to operation. For examples of what is possible once the foundations are in place, read how companies automate the follow-up of business opportunities with workflows and automate payment management through workflows.
How long does a customer wait today between asking and being answered, and does anyone own that number? Request a workflow automation diagnostic with an ICX consultant and we will review your processes and show where HubSpot can remove the delays.
According to HubSpot's documentation, workflows are available with Professional or Enterprise tiers of Marketing, Sales, Service, Data, Smart CRM and Revenue Hub, and some features need credits or seats. Quote-based and contract-based workflows require specific subscription types. Confirm the plan before designing the automation.
Users need workflow edit permission or Super Admin status to build one, and a separate publish permission to turn it on, as the HubSpot permissions guide explains. Separating the two lets a company have specialists build automations and a manager approve them before customers receive anything.
Templates are a sensible start for common cases such as lead assignment, welcome messages or re-engagement, since they open with triggers and actions already filled in. Build from scratch when the process is specific to your company. In both cases, review every trigger and message, because a template reflects HubSpot's assumptions and not yours.
Turning it on for the entire existing database without testing. Enrolling existing records can trigger a burst of messages or tasks. Test with internal records, enroll new records only at first, and watch the results for a few days before widening the scope.
Automation rewards the companies that know their own processes well enough to explain them to a machine, and it exposes those that do not. ICX is ready to help your team put its processes in order and let HubSpot carry them out.