15 New Workflow Possibilities With AI + How To Manage HubSpot Changes

The power of AI has finally made it into workflows - explore 15 ideas for putting it to use. Plus, see how you can learn whether now is the right time to move your website to HubSpot, and explore how to take much-needed control over updates and changes in your instance.

What's Inside:

1. On Your Radar: Is It Time To Move Your Website To HubSpot?
2. Update Of The Week: 'Ask Breeze' Action In Workflows
3. Admin's Assignment: Take Control of HubSpot Changes [Part 1]

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On Your Radar

Is It Time To Move Your Website To HubSpot?

Eight years ago when I joined Simple Strat, one of my first projects was to evaluate whether we should become a HubSpot partner agency. In doing so, I started asking around about people's experience with the tool. I wanted to be sure we were truly partnering with the best in class.

While most of the people I talked to were big fans of what HubSpot could do and how easy it was to use, I'll never forget one of the few calls where that was not the case. On that call, I was warned in no uncertain terms that we should not partner with HubSpot, or even use it ourselves. It was inflexible, outdated, unreliable, and very difficult to use.

I was surprised. Why was this person's experience so different from the other people I spoke to? Well, while most of the people I talked to were marketers, he was a developer. He wasn't sending email campaigns, he had built email and landing page templates. And in those days (3 years before even CMS Hub), building web assets on HubSpot was rough.

So rough in fact, that our standard recommendation for a long time was not to move your website to HubSpot. Blogs and landing pages were fine, but it wasn't ready for your whole site. The pros just didn't outweigh the cons for most situations. Even the Simple Strat website was on WordPress until last year!

But now, things are different. The advantages of a HubSpot-hosted website far outweigh any disadvantages for the majority of companies. So much so that we're hosting a whole hour-long webinar about it.

This Wednesday (February 19th) at noon Central, we'll break down why now's a good time to evaluate migrating your site to HubSpot (and the few situations when it's not a good idea), as well as some advice on getting the most out of Content Hub's features if you do make the move.

Sign up now to reserve your spot! Registering will get you access to the recording, but attend live if you can to participate in the Q&A.

Update Of The Week

'Ask Breeze' Action In Workflows

With this new beta, HubSpot users can now as AI questions inside of a workflow action, then save the response in a property, use it in branch logic, or, if you have Marketing Hub Enterprise, insert it into a marketing email! If this update lives up to its potential, I think it could be the most impactful update of 2025.

I'm still testing out the feature and haven't had a chance to put too many use cases through their paces. But for now, I wanted to share some of the possibilities this new feature could unlock so that you can do some testing of your own.

Note that there are some limitations to the beta (these could change with the live launch):

• Prompts must be 3,000 characters or less
• Responses are limited to 1,000 tokens (tokens are individual pieces of information that can be added into marketing emails if you have Marketing Hub Enterprise)
• The 'Ask Breeze' action can only be used 3,000 times per month (so be careful not to run too much of your database through a workflow while you're testing!)
• You cannot use the action to research contact information for contacts, such as email addresses or phone numbers
• In my testing, the action could not produce reliable personnel-related results, such identifying the name of someone who holds a specific role at a company, or reliably identify competitors of a provided company

Alright, now let's get into some use cases (in no particular order):

1. Industry categorization. If you've got a custom list of industries you serve, you could ask Breeze to research the domain to categorize a company into an industry from your list, then save that to a property.
2. Source categorization. Asking people how they heard about you is a great way to uncover the true sources of your leads. But if you ask an open ended question, their answers can be difficult to report on. Now, you can ask Breeze to sort those answers into categories of a provided list.
3. Job role categorization. Identify a job role category from an open text job title field (great for lead scoring).
4. Persona categorization. Provide Breeze with several fields about a contact, such as job title and product category interest, and ask Breeze which of your personas best describes the contact (great for segmentation).
5. State normalization. Transform an open-text state field, or full-spelling state dropdown into the correct two-letter abbreviation.
6. Buyer intent. Ask Breeze to review an inbound lead's message for buying intent and set a priority level accordingly.
7. Draft a sales email. Ask Breeze to draft a sales email based on properties you provide and additional research, then save that email to a task note and assign it to a salesperson to review and send.
8. Personalize a marketing email (Marketing Hub Enterprise only). Ask Breeze to research information about a contact and it's company, such as the city they're located and some recent company news, then add that into your marketing email.
9. Product interest classification. Supply a form message to Breeze and ask if it can identify a category of product interest based on a supplied list of product categories you offer.
10. Support ticket urgency detection. Ask Breeze to identify an urgency category for new tickets based on guidance you provide.
11. ICP matching. Provide known company properties and information about your ICP, then ask Breeze to identify whether the company is in your ICP or not.
12. Categorize numbers into ranges for reporting. Provide any number, such as revenue, deal amount, number of employees, etc., and Ask Breeze to identify a range value from a provided list so that you can update a dropdown property that can be used for reporting.
13. Categorize closed-lost reasons. I always recommend a dropdown property for deal closed-lost reasons. However, if you have historical closed-lost data in open-text fields or provide an 'Other' option with an additional open-text field, this new workflow action can categorize those answers.
14. Identify leads from contact us form submissions. Leads often fill out contact us forms, but not nearly as often as SEO companies, lead sellers, and others that have no interest in buying from you. Ask Breeze to evaluate whether a contact us form submission is likely to be spam or a buyer, then use that info to route contacts.
15. Identify "not interested" email responses. If you're using HubSpot or an integrated tool for cold outreach, you know that a portion of your responses are from people telling you they're not interested in a variety of ways. Breeze could help you identify the people who want to stop getting your emails based on their response.

To get a rundown of all HubSpot's February updates + some practical and creative use cases for them, join me Wednesday, March 5th, for my monthly New & Now webinar!

Admin's Assignment

Take Control of HubSpot Changes [Part 1]

One of the most common reasons a HubSpot instance gets messy and difficult to use is the lack of a system for making changes and updates.

When anyone can go in and make any change they want, your HubSpot instance will almost certainly end up with duplicative properties, reports, dashboards, lists, and workflows. Worse yet, important automations can get disrupted or turned off and critical reports (or their underlying data) can get adjusted and become inaccurate.

The first step to reigning all this in is proper documentation. I won't cover that here, but Jen Bergren, MBA is the person to follow if you're looking to step up your documentation game.

The second step is locking down your users' permissions. Stop letting everyone be a super admin and get selective about who can do what inside of HubSpot.

Once you do that, you need a system for allowing people to request changes and updates. While you may not want a salesperson making workflow edits, you do want to know if they've uncovered an automation issue. Likewise, a leader may not understand your HubSpot data well enough to build an accurate report, but you do need to make sure they have the information they need to make good decisions.

Thankfully, HubSpot gives us all the tools we need to set up that system. In this week's admin's assignment, we're going to set up a ticket pipeline you can use to allow users to make requests and keep track of all the changes and updates you're making in your CRM.

Next week, we'll use this pipeline to fuel a dashboard that users can use to make requests and you can use to keep everyone informed about your work!

Step 1: Create a HubSpot Management ticket pipeline.

• Navigate to Settings > Objects, Tickets > Pipelines tab
• Click the dropdown next to 'Select a pipeline' and click the 'Create pipeline' link at the bottom

• Name your pipeline 'HubSpot Management' or something similar
• Configure the pipeline with stages such as: New Request, Backlog, Planned, In Development, Testing, Complete, and Closed Without Changes (for unnecessary, unwise, or duplicative requests).
• Click the orange 'Save' button.

Step 2: Create necessary Ticket properties.

Create whatever properties you need to evaluate, organize, and report on these tickets. These will vary based on your organization's size, structure, and needs, but may include properties to store information such as the department it's for, seniority of the user who made the request, whether there's a date the request needs to be completed by to be helpful, and more.

At a minimum, I recommend adding a dropdown property for request type:

• Navigate to Settings > Properties
• Change the dropdown next to 'Select and object' to 'Ticket properties'
• Click the orange 'Create property' button

• Give the property a name like 'Internal Request Type'
• Change the field type to 'Dropdown select'
• Add options such as: Bug/Error, Access/Permissions, Automation, Data Cleanup/Enrichment, Integration, Reporting, Training, User Interface, Other

• Click the orange 'Create' button

Step 3: Create an intake form.

There are a couple ways you can manage the creation of these tickets:

One way is to use HubSpot's built-in mechanism for creating tickets. This allows users to click the plus icon next to the search bar, select 'Ticket', and create a ticket.

This option works really well if this is the only thing you're using tickets for. But if you also use tickets for other use cases, such as customer support tickets, it will require setting up some conditional properties on the 'create ticket' form or dealing with properties there that aren't always relevant.

Regardless, for this option, you'll need to navigate to Settings > Objects, Tickets, then click the 'Customize the Create Ticket form', then set up the properties you want filled out.

The other option is to create a HubSpot form that's connected to your conversations inbox or help desk (Service Hub Professional+). I tend to prefer this option.

• Navigate to Settings > Inboxes or Help Desk
• Click the orange 'Connect a channel' button

• Select 'Forms'
• Click the 'Create new form' button
• Set the form up with the properties you want to capture (you'll likely be adding most or all of the properties you created in step 2 above.
• Name your form something like 'Internal HubSpot Requests'

• Update the options tab with the confirmation message of your choice, a lifecycle stage of 'Other' or whatever you use to identify employees, and any internal notifications you'd like.
• Click the orange 'Update Form' button
• Click the orange 'Next' button
• If you're connecting to Help Desk, you'll see a link to 'Set ticket properties for this channel'. Click that, then set the pipeline and status fields so that the new ticket will populate in the first stage of the ticket pipeline you created in step 1 and click 'Save'. If you're connecting to the inbox, we'll do this in a moment.

• Set up your ticket assignment settings (you'll likely be routing these tickets to yourself).
• Click the orange 'Save' button.
• If you connected your form to the Inbox, hover over the form in the channels list, then click the 'Edit' button. Click the 'Edit ticket' link next to 'Treat incoming conversations as support tickets, then set the pipeline and status fields so that the new ticket will populate in the first stage of the ticket pipeline you created in step 1 and click 'Save'.

Now you have an easy way for users to make requests and report issues, and a pipeline to review and organize those requests! Check back next week for step-by-step instructions about how to make a dashboard that'll make it even easier for your team to submit tickets and for you to communicate the work you're doing.

I publish this newsletter to help HubSpot admins navigate the firehose of HubSpot updates and tips to get exactly what they need to make an impact. If you find it helpful, please subscribe and help spread the word!

Happy HubSpotting,

The Orange Admin