If you have ever watched someone on your team copy a lead’s info from a form, into a spreadsheet, then into a follow-up email… you already know why automation exists. It’s not really about fancy technology. It’s about giving people back the hours they lose doing things a computer could do in two seconds.
That’s the whole pitch behind HubSpot automation services, and once you see what it actually looks like day to day, it is a lot less abstract than it sounds.
What HubSpot automation actually means
HubSpot automation is the process of creating rules that allow the program to perform repeated operations automatically. When someone completes a form on your website, HubSpot immediately sends a welcome email, tags them with the appropriate lifecycle stage, and alerts a representative if they satisfy specific requirements, instead of having someone manually email them back.
You set the rule once. HubSpot runs it thousands of times.
That’s different from just “having HubSpot.” Plenty of businesses pay for the subscription and use maybe a tenth of what it can actually do, mostly as a fancy contact list. Automation is the part that makes the subscription worth it.
Say someone downloads your pricing guide at 11pm on a Sunday. That will not be answered by a human until Monday at the latest. The lead has already been tagged, scored, and put in the right person’s queue by the time your team logs back in. HubSpot may send a follow-up in a matter of minutes.
Where most businesses are quietly wasting time
Here is what most businesses are doing wrong.
Chasing leads that already went cold
When a representative calls a consumer who completed a form three days ago, they have often already spoken with two competitors. More than most sales teams would want to acknowledge, speed is important.
Typing the same information into three different tools
Marketing has its own spreadsheet, sales tracks deals in one location, and support records them in another. Someone ends up spending a Friday afternoon reconciling figures that should have matched from the beginning since nothing communicates with one another.
Marketing and sales blaming each other for bad leads
Marketing says sales aren’t following up fast enough. Sales says the leads are garbage. Half the time, both are a little right, because there’s no shared system automatically deciding which leads are actually ready to be called.
Where automation actually saves you time
Here is how you can save time with HubSpot automation services.
Email sequences that run themselves
A rep doesn’t even have to think about it because HubSpot automatically sends the follow-up emails on day one, three and seven and halts once the lead responds. It also does not need to be monitored.
Lead scoring, so reps stop guessing who to call first
For instance, someone that’s downloaded a case study and has visited your pricing page twice might be scored higher than someone that opened an email. When reps wake up they already know who to call first.
Tasks and alerts that fire without anyone asking
A deal sits untouched for five days? HubSpot can create a task for the rep automatically, or drop a note into a Slack channel. Nothing falls through the cracks just because someone got busy that week.
How automation helps you grow without hiring a bigger team
Handling more leads without adding more people
A five-person sales team with solid automation set up can often handle the lead volume of a team twice its size, simply because the system is doing the sorting and first-touch follow-up for them. That’s really what “scale” means here – growth without your payroll growing at the same rate.
Keeping things consistent as you get bigger
Whether a customer is your first or fifth lead of the year, they receive the same level of follow-up when everything is automated. Unless the system is doing some of the hard lifting, it becomes very challenging to maintain that level of consistency once a team reaches a certain size.
Mistakes businesses make when they automate too fast
The biggest one: automating a process that was already broken.Automation just speeds up a disorganized sales process. Before you create a single workflow, it is worthwhile to map out the real flow of leads through your company.
The second mistake is building fifteen workflows and letting nobody own them. After about six months, no one can remember a process’s goal, and it keeps running in the background silently, which frequently has more negative effects than positive ones.
Should you hire a HubSpot automation service or should you do it yourself?
HubSpot’s interface isn’t rocket science, so plenty of small businesses build their own basic workflows just fine. Where a HubSpot automation service tends to earn its cost is in the stuff that’s not obvious from the dashboard – proper lead scoring, and workflows built around how your specific sales team actually works instead of a generic template.
If you’ve got the time to learn it and a fairly simple process, doing it yourself is a reasonable call. If your process has a lot of moving parts, or you just don’t have the hours to spend figuring it out, bringing in someone who’s set this up dozens of times before will usually get you there faster. Either way, it’s worth asking to see an example of a workflow they’ve actually built before you sign anything – what a similar business’s setup looked like, not just a list of tools they know.
Conclusion
Automation won’t fix a business with no product-market fit, and it won’t replace an actual sales strategy. What it will do is stop good leads from slipping through cracks that were never supposed to be there in the first place, and free up your team to spend their time on the parts of the job that actually need a human. For most growing businesses, that trade is worth making. If you are looking for expert HubSpot automation services, contact 3 & four Technologies now!