In today's digital age, marketing automation software has become an essential tool for businesses...
Congratulations, you've invested in an automation platform for your business or department and are now ready to start creating workflows! But did you consider how your automation workflows will be structured before you signed the SaaS contract? If not -- or if you've already implemented automation but are looking to improve your setup, here are four tips for structuring your workflows that will help you build an automation implementation that's both reliable and easy to maintain, regardless of which automation platform you use.
One workflow, one purpose
One of the toughest decisions to make is deciding whether to do one large workflow that performs multiple functions or to break things up into one.
In general, large workflows are harder to manage and are more likely to fall victim to errors when changes are made in the future -- but it is not always practical to use multiple workflows in place of one.
A philosophical approach that can help make this decision easy is "one workflow, one purpose." That is, each workflow only serves one purpose - and each specific task only gets one workflow.
For example, you would create a single workflow to process inbound leads regardless of how complex your lead qualification flow is. Not only does this prevent errors in the qualification process, any future admin will know exactly which workflow to look at to make changes or troubleshoot errors.
Create and maintain documentation
One task that often gets neglected as part of an automation implementation is documentation. Typically, its not seen as necessary in the early stages and then nobody has time to deal with it in later stages. Of course, eventually, a lack of documentation will result in a significant undertaking to regain an understanding of an implementation build years ago by people no longer with the company, so creating and maintaining documentation for your workflows should not be neglected.
This is even more important for large organizations that have multiple operations team members and complex processes that can be challenging to understand.
Avoid user-specific rules
Even with the best documentation, keeping track of all user-specific rules in your automation implementation will be challenging, especially as your organization grows. Instead, make use of more general objects available in your platform. Within HubSpot, for example, you can use "owner" properties and user teams instead of specific users for assigning contacts or sending notifications.
By avoiding user-specific rules, you'll reduce the amount of effort needed to update workflows when a person leaves or joins your company. There's even a good chance that some workflows won't be updated because nobody will remember that a certain notification was being sent to a user that is no longer valid. Using the above HubSpot example, in your lead processing workflow, if new contacts are to be rotated among your sales team, you'll want the assignment to use the Sales team instead of each individual sales team member in the round robin. Assigning/removing users to teams is a lot simpler than updating a workflow and is an easier task to remember.
Get expert assistance
If you're new to sales and marketing automation or don't have an experienced operations person on staff, you shouldn't try to set up your automation alone. A skilled consultant that can plan out and implement your automation workflows to suit your needs will save you a significant amount in time and headaches. Whether you need an initial implementation or a review of your existing setup, we can help. With nearly 10 years of experience across multiple platforms, we know what a good implementation looks like and how to build it. Contact us today for a free consultation!
