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The Best Way to Keep Your HubSpot Automations Clean: The Health System

Written by Grégoire Bolnot | Jun 19, 2023 3:00:00 PM

The biggest challenge for a HubSpot admin in a high growth company is not to develop the HubSpot portal to align with the growth demands of the company but to manage to maintain a clean, organized portal without any conflicts. automation or data management.

A HubSpot portal is never set in stone and needs to be constantly redesigned to incorporate the new demands and needs of all teams. The operational load leads us to implement new processes without necessarily having the time to ensure that 100% of our operations are carried out as desired.

Are all leads filling out the correct forms?
Are 100% of the workflows working the right way for 100% of our leads?
Are all the necessary properties present for each of our leads?

The more complex our HubSpot portal becomes, the more control we lose over its quality and the more difficult it is to identify potential errors.

In this article, let's see how to create an automated Health System to keep a clear view of the state of our portal and be able to solve problems efficiently.

Summary :

  1. The Importance and Role of a HubSpot Portal Health System
  2. Identify the optimal user journey
    1. Define the journey
    2. List the properties and workflows concerned
    3. Rank these assets in order of importance
  3. Create properties and lists
    1. Health tracking properties
    2. Health tracking lists
  4. Create the Health System Workflow
    1. Correct Workflow Type
    2. Enrollment Triggers
    3. Workflow Building
  5. Clean and Re-qualify
  6. HubSpot Portal Health Dashboards
  7. Endnotes

 

The Importance and Role of a HubSpot Portal Health System

 

To guarantee efficiency in the generation and management of data as well as in the good realization of the operational automations managed by our HubSpot portal, it is essential to ensure that all the expected actions take place in the right way for the entire database.

As mentioned in the introduction, tracking the health of a HubSpot portal becomes increasingly difficult as your portal scales. It is therefore essential to put a system in place that will identify, segment and alert each potential error occurring on your portal.

The method that I have developed is called the "Health System" and consists, through a workflow, of tracing all the actions of a lead to check whether they comply with the operational processes put in place by the company.

This workflow will take care of identifying potential errors, classifying them in order of priority, creating lists of the contacts concerned and alerting a portal user of these concerns.

Implementing this system has two advantages:

  • Quickly identify an operational error and its cause
  • Guide the user in his resolution by directing his research

Now let's see how to set up this system on your portal.

 

Identify the optimal user journey

 

This system is based on the monitoring of actions affiliated with a lead, the generation of information, the processing of the latter and the resulting automations. The first step is therefore to put the entire journey on paper to constitute the skeleton of our workflow.

 

Define the journey

 

To illustrate the creation of this workflow, we will take the simple example of a basic system consisting of the following steps:

1. Gathering information on a new Lead Magnet form

We have just changed our qualification system by integrating new properties into our form that are not present on our old forms. It is important to collect this information for each new incoming lead. For this example let's say: Standardized Phone Number (+1 XX XX format), Country, Company Name and Company Domain Name.

2. Sending a confirmation email to download the Lead Magnet

Once the form has been submitted by the Lead, we send a confirmation email with the download link for our lead magnet. It is important that this email is correctly sent and received.

3. Registration in a qualification workflow

Each new lead downloading our lead magnet must be enrolled in a qualification workflow to be able to define it as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or identify it as “Unqualified”. It is important that each lead completes the workflow and the result corresponds to its properties.

4. Sending a Nurturing sequence

If the Lead is qualified, they must receive a nurturing sequence aimed at booking a sales call. It is important that the mail is correctly sent and received.

 

List the properties and workflows concerned

 

Now that our path is well defined, we just need to list all the actions concerned by this path to be able to identify them in our workflow.

In our example, we get this list of assets:

 

Rank these assets in order of importance

 

Errors occurring on our portal do not have the same importance and do not require the same urgency of intervention. We will distinguish two types of errors:

  • Operational errors: which block your lead in its journey and do not trigger the right automations.

  • Qualitative errors that prevent the data consistency of your portal and hinder the analytical capabilities and the speed of execution of your users.

To simplify the reading of health system reports and to brighten our day, we will translate operational errors as “😵” and qualitative errors as “😷”.

Going back to our list of assets, we can now add the right level of importance to each asset:

You are free to define your orders of importance and adapt them to your system.

 

Create properties and lists

 

Now that we have listed and theorized our different stages in the journey of our leads, we need to be able to identify them on our portal. To do this we will have to create two properties and an an identification list per error.

 

Health tracking properties

 

We will create two properties:

  • Process Health

The “Process Health” property is a visual barometer of a lead’s operational health. The property is of the “Multiple checkboxes” type and is made up of the following values:

🤩: The lead has all the necessary and optimized information and completes the entire journey intended for him. It's a healthy lead.

😷: The lead has issues that does not impact operations but reduce the management and segmentation capacity of our base.

😵: The lead is not adapted to the operational system of the portal and is unable to follow the planned journey.

  • Issue’s reasons

The “Issue’s reasons” property is a “Multiple checkboxes” type property aimed at indicating the cause of the problem for each lead. At each verification step of our workflow, if the lead does not match the conditions of a step, the “Issue”s reasons” property will be populated with the corresponding reason.

So we need to create one property value per verification step in our workflow. To do this, use the list defined in part 2:

You will have a property similar to this:

 

 

Health tracking lists

 

The last step before creating your Health System workflow is to create the Health tracking active lists.

The idea behind these lists is to be able to automatically segment all the leads corresponding to a particular error to simplify cleaning and have a visualization of the extent of the problem.

To do this, you simply need to create an active list by “Issue’s Reasons” property value and edit them as follows:

Repeat the operation for each of the values ​​of your property:

 

 

Create the Health System Workflow

 

Now that we have completed all the prerequisites for creating our system, we can focus on the Workflow.

 

Correct workflow type

 

In our case we want to check the conformity of a lead contact with his journey, so we will choose a Workflow from scratch, based on contacts and empty.

Enrollment Triggers

 

The enrollment triggers will depend on the part of your database that you want to diagnose. In our case, we want to be able to identify errors on our entire database, so we will take the most global criterion: Creation date = Known.

The most important part of our enrollment triggers settings is enabling re-enrollment. Indeed, the idea is to manually re-enroll the lists that we have created once the cleaning is done.

Workflow Building

 

Now that we have set up our enrollment triggers, the first step is to clear the values ​​of our two new properties. For what ? Because with each re-enrollment in the workflow, we want to reset the counters to 0 so that the results of the workflow are adapted to the new situation of our leads.

We also want to allow time for all of your automations to complete. For example, if the action time between the generation of a lead, its qualification and the sending of the first nurturing email is 20 minutes, then it is wise to wait at least 30 min to be sure that our Health System workflow takes into account all of the updated properties.

Now that our basic setting is done, all you have to do is reproduce the different stages of the path defined in part 2 and test with if/then branches all the actions listed.

In our example, our first test concerns the form submitted by our Leads (New Form 2023).

Going back to our list of importance, we note that the completion of a bad form is a qualitative error: 😷, we will therefore define the Process Health and Issue's Reasons properties with the corresponding values.

Attention, it is important to select “Append to current value” and not “Replace a value” in order not to lose the error history of a Lead.

In the same way as in an automated qualification workflow, create a new if/then branch per action in order to test all the different actions under the green branch of your Workflow.

Do not forget to add a “Go to action” step at the end of each definition of the “Issue's Reasons” property in order to redirect all the concerned leads to the rest of the workflow and thus obtain a global diagnosis for each Lead .

Repeat this exact logic for all the actions listed above, you will get a workflow similar to this:

The workflow can be very spread out depending on the number of criteria you want to test. However, its design and organization are ultimately very linear.

The last step is to indicate that, if at the end of the workflow the value Process Health is unknown, then define the lead as healthy by choosing the value: 🤩

To do this, just create a last If/Then branch with these parameters and connect the last red branch with a “go to action” step.

We want our workflow to tell us via a task when a lead is affected by an error, to do this add a task step and customize it as you see fit.

Publish your workflow and decide if you want to make it retroactive.

 

Clean and Re-qualify

 

Our workflow automatically sorts our leads requiring intervention and places them in the lists by reason that we created together at the beginning of the article.

Let's take a simple example, that of a badly formatted number.

We just need to clean the database (through an import export for example) and re-enroll the members of this list in our health system workflow.

 

HubSpot Portal Health Dashboards

 

A positive consequence of organizing our health system around two properties is the ease of reporting that this brings.

In just three reports, we can build a clear dashboard to diagnose the health of our portal at a glance.

 

 

Endnotes

 

I hope this tutorial for creating and implementing a HubSpot portal health system was clear enough.

If you want to deepen your HubSpot skills and find all the workflows created and presented by HS Simple, do not hesitate to request your free access to the workflow box. A private web page listing all the workflows requested by the community with an explanatory video and a simple action plan in the form of a "to-do list".