Customer Experience Insights

How to create a follow-up sequence on HubSpot?

Written by Alfonso Ramírez | Feb 18, 2022

Following up with customers often becomes a tedious task, and many companies today suffer from this problem. It affects the performance of the sales team. But there is a perfect solution to this problem, HubSpot's automated approach, and follow-up sequences.

If we took a closer look at the landscape 10 to 15 years ago, customer follow-up consistently stood about making calls and waiting for the prospect to give us an answer that time, many important details, such as their purchase intent, customer relations with your brand, products, and services, and with this the possibilities of a 1 to 1 approach with the prospect become brief.

Within this blog, we'll work on these aspects: How to create and use a follow-up sequence in HubSpot? For this, we'll materialize the following efforts that every company that makes use of CRM should know: 

  • How to create a follow-up sequence? 
  • How to use them within the CRM?
  • Benefits of sequence automation for sales teams.

How to Create a follow-up Sequence?

Within HubSpot's omnichannel qualities, the visualization of the activities and relationships with contacts is key to success.

In HubSpot, some modules take care of sales objectives, such as contacts, automation, and sales. Some companies ignore or have not yet understood that it also has modules and tools that work together with HubSpot's to automate the approach with prospects in the database, such as the automation module, where we find the sequence and workflows. 

We have explained within our blogs: What is HubSpot sequence, and what are they used? So we will contextualize their configuration and use it in the following three steps:

 

  • Create Sequences:

When you enter the tool, the following screen will appear: 

The Sequences tool has many attributes, performance qualifiers, activity management of enrolled contacts, responses, scheduled email sendings, and analysis according to each one of the team sequences. 

To create a sequence, you need to go to the orange button in the top right corner. Once inside, HubSpot, as with other tools such as templates, snippets, and forms, will show us a range of different configurations with which we will be able to direct our strategy for using sequences.

 

  • Ways to Configure a Sequence:


Within your options, there are different types of options such as: 

  • Create a sequence from scratch. 
  • Create one based on recently converted leads. 
  • Create one based on trades shows, events, or conference follow-ups. 
  • Create based on a product/service request or demo. 
  • Create sequences based on follow-up after a previous call or meeting. 
  • HubSpot sequences based on prospecting.
  • Sequences for contacts with no response to emails or calls.
  • HubSpot sequences with the goal of rescheduling meetings. 
  • Sequences to reconnect with prospects who had less interaction for a long time. 

Now, consider the elements above, there are three ways to create a sequence: 

  • Creating it from scratch.
  • Using one of the sequence template types. 
  • Cloning another existing template.

When creating a sequence from scratch, the following display will appear on the screen: 





The configuration of a sequence consists of 3 aspects: 

  1. Steps: The steps are a series of actions that we are going to define the sequence to perform, as steps are established, the sequence will show the number of days that it will contemplate as part of its execution.

    There are three types of actions: Automated emails, these are templates already existing within the CRM, which could be used, as part of the next steps. Then, there are the follow-up tasks (these can be calls, emails, or a very specific agent action) and the LinkedIn tasks, where you will seek to connect or contact the prospect via LinkedIn.

  2. Configuration: The configuration provides for sequence execution options such as: running the sequence on working days or not, generating direct emails to the executive who created the sequence automation, as part of their follow-up, an automatic email sending window when enrolling a contact, you can customize the specific emailing time and time zone (This can be edited) and reminder tasks.
  3. Automation: The Automation takes into account the enrolments in the sequence, with which you can make use of workflows to automatically enroll or not the contacts in the sequence automation.

    There are three types of workflow triggers in the sequence automation: If the contact enrolled replies to an email, if one of several contacts belonging to the same company or organization replies to an email, and if the enrolled contact has scheduled a meeting. 

    When creating a sequence from a template, the following visualization will appear in this video: 

 

Template sequences have defined steps, tasks, and configurations.  In these sequence templates, HubSpot demonstrates the content display, custom property tokens, which are custom fields of existing HubSpot properties, to automate the sequence content.

These template models can also be edited, HubSpot makes a test of each template.

How to use them within the CRM?

Sequences by nature, HubSpot created them as a support for sales teams. But it's a multi-purpose automation tool, supporting all commercial areas such as marketing, sales, and customer service. They could've been from the sequences tool, the contacts module, and a specific contact record.

When creating sequences, the HubSpot platform defines the following conditions for the user: 

  • In a single one, 50 contacts within the sequence tool. 
  • From the contacts module, up to 100 can be included.
  • Within the automated sequence tool, 500 per week.

The sequence won't be able to register emails that bounced before.

Benefits of sequence automation for sales teams

Sequences are undoubtedly fundamental aid for sales teams. This tool manages prospecting actions, customer outreach, lead nurturing with valuable content, establishing contact with qualified prospects in a 1 to 1 relationship.

The sequences can be used as a silent salesperson to support the sales team in generating more meetings, lead engagement, and eventually more sales. This tool analyses performance in conjunction with HubSpot's activity, and interaction analysis software shows contact responses and how they react to the content received.

If you would like to learn even more about HubSpot's sales automation tools and how you can increase the growth of your business, schedule a consulting meeting with our team.