Fight the Summer Slowdown, Automate Associations, and Get Ready for Rest

In This Edition

1. On Your Radar: HubSpot's Week of Rest is Coming
2. Update Of The Week: New Workflow Actions for Associations
3. Admin's Assignment: Fight the Summer Slowdown

On Your Radar

HubSpot's Week of Rest is Coming

Once a year, HubSpot lets its employees enjoy the summer the way we used to as kids: with a well-deserved break. July 1st through 5th, HubSpot employees around the world will be participating in HubSpot's annual Global Week of Rest .

This likely won't impact most of us, but you should prepare for the following:

• Support requests will only be available via email (no chat or phone support).
• If you're in the middle of buying a HubSpot upgrade, get the quote issued before the end of the month if you're hoping to get into the new tools right away.
• If you have an inquiry about an outstanding account, it's recommended that you contact HubSpot's billing team about this prior to June 26th.
• If you have an upcoming renewal, it's recommended that you work with your customer success rep or team prior to the Global Week of Rest.

Helpful resources while the HubSpot team is away include:

• The HubSpot status page
• HubSpot Hacks for quick video tutorials
• The HubSpot knowledge base for thorough written instructions
• The HubSpot Community for asking a question
• The Pokemon Sleep Piano playlist on Spotify to help you get some rest of your own (we all know us admins need some rest too!)

Update Of The Week

New Workflow Actions for Associations

"Historically, managing associations and their labels was a tedious and manual process."

That quote from this week's update announcement says it best. Association labels are awesome, but their value has been severely limited by their reliance on manual input from users. Now with this new public beta , we can finally realize the true potential of association labels by automating them in workflows!

We can now:

• Apply labels to already-associated records
• Update existing association labels
• Remove existing association labels
• Create new associations between two records that have properties with exact matching values as long as those properties are single-line text, multi-line text, or phone number properties

Some of the many use cases for this new functionality include:

• Automating buying role labels on deal-contact associations based on job roles
• Applying a 'renewal deal' label on deal-deal associations as an action in a workflow that creates renewal deals
• Applying a 'former company' label on contact-company associations when a contact's email changes and a new company is associated to them
• Applying a 'user' label on contact-company associations when a contact was added via integration with your SaaS app after being invited/added as a user
• Associate and label referrals (contact-contact or contact-company) based on properties submitted in a form
• Automatically associate contacts with companies based on something other than email domain name, such as company name or company phone number
• Preserve/copy a contact-company 'decision maker' label when that contact is added to deals or tickets
• Replace third-party tools or custom coded actions that handle these functions for you today to reduce costs and/or maintenance

To get a rundown of all HubSpot's June updates + some practical and creative use cases for them, join me on July 3rd for our monthly New & Now webinar!

Admin's Assignment

Fight the Summer Slowdown

I don't know about you, but my pipeline always empties out a bit at the start of summer. As folks take more vacations, deal with kids at home, and take a breather from the pressures of Q4 and Q1, they're often less likely to be in buying mode. If you find that's true for your business too, I bet your sales team would appreciate some good leads to call on.

That's why the beginning of summer is the best time to tap into a pretty reliable source of good leads: your own HubSpot contacts.

To do this, I recommend leaning into the list tool to create a few lists (or one list with a lot of filters) of some low-hanging fruit in your database.

The first step is creating a list with a filter that'll exclude the folks you definitely don't want to reach out to as part of this effort. That'll include current customers and contacts your team is already pursuing (lifecycle stage exclusion works great for this), as well as anyone who clearly doesn't fit your ideal customer profile. I also like to add a filter that says their 'Last activity date' is more than 90 days ago to be sure we didn't recently hit them up with a sales email or call.

Then, add in filters that'll highlight the folks that are most likely to be receptive to a call or email from your sales team. These can include:

• Recent page views of high-intent webpages such as a product or service page (I don't recommend including top-of-funnel pages like blog posts)
• Recent clicks in a marketing email (especially if there are multiple clicks)
• Recently attended a webinar
• Recently downloaded a case study or similar lower-funnel content asset
• Has an older closed-lost deal and the closed-lost reason wasn't a permanent-disqualification reason (deals that were closed lost because of timing are usually best)
• Is a former customer that hasn't done business with you in a awhile

Once you have your list(s), share them with your sales team so they can work their magic. Make sure they know that these leads aren't as warm as a traditional MQL, so they should take a lower priority and the outreach needs to lead with value (don't pitch slap these people with a hard sell off the bat).

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 for their team every week. If you find it helpful, please subscribe and help spread the word !

Happy HubSpotting,

The Orange Admin