The three workflows every services team should build on day one

3 Essential HubSpot Workflows You Should Include in Every Implementation

No two HubSpot implementations are exactly alike. The right setup depends on your business, your processes and what you need your CRM to achieve.

That said, there are a few workflows we recommend setting up in almost every HubSpot portal. They help keep your contact database clean, ensure leads receive timely follow-up and improve the quality of your CRM data.

If you're setting up HubSpot yourself, here are three essential workflows to consider adding to your portal.

1. Contact management: Keep your Marketing Contacts under control

One of the first workflows we recommend building is an automated process for managing your contact database and Marketing Contact status.

Why? Because HubSpot doesn't automatically switch every unsubscribed or undeliverable contact to non-marketing status. Email subscription status and Marketing Contact status are separate, so contacts can remain billable Marketing Contacts even when you can no longer email them.

If left unchecked, this can mean paying for contacts who aren't contributing to your marketing efforts.

What should the workflow do?

Create a contact-based workflow to identify contacts who meet your criteria for becoming non-marketing. Depending on your data and business rules, this could include contacts who:

• Have unsubscribed from all relevant email subscriptions.
• Have hard-bounced or repeatedly soft-bounced emails.
• Have no email address.
• Have an invalid email address.

Where appropriate, use the workflow to set these contacts as non-marketing, subject to your suppression rules and the limitations of your HubSpot subscription.

Pro tip: Build a sunset policy into your contact management process.

Your contact management workflow shouldn't just deal with invalid contact data. It should also help you manage contacts who have stopped engaging with your marketing.

A sunset policy defines when an unengaged contact should be removed from your active marketing audience. For example, you might consider contacts who haven't engaged with your marketing emails in six months for review.

Before automatically changing their status, consider your engagement criteria carefully. Email opens can be unreliable, and a lack of email engagement doesn't necessarily mean a contact has no value. Depending on your business, you may want to consider clicks, website activity, sales engagement or other meaningful signals.

Once you've defined your criteria, you can automate the process of identifying eligible contacts and switching them to non-marketing status where appropriate.

The result? Better control over your Marketing Contact count, less unnecessary spend and more room for the contacts you actually want to reach.

2. Lead follow-up: Acknowledge form submissions and notify sales

When someone fills out a form on your website, two things should happen: the person submitting the form should know their enquiry has been received, and the right person in your team should know they need to follow up.

This is a simple workflow, but it's easy to overlook when setting up HubSpot. Without it, enquiries can sit in an inbox unnoticed, or prospects can be left wondering whether anyone received their submission.

What should the workflow do?

Create a contact-based workflow triggered by the relevant form submission. The workflow should:

• Send an acknowledgement email. Confirm receipt of the enquiry and explain what happens next.
• Notify the right sales representative. Use branch logic to direct the notification based on the form, enquiry type, territory or other relevant criteria.
• Assign the contact owner. Where appropriate, make sure the correct sales representative is recorded as the contact owner so responsibility is clear.
• Create a deal when the enquiry qualifies. If the submission meets your qualification criteria, create a deal and assign it to the appropriate owner. Avoid creating deals for every form submission if many of those enquiries aren't qualified opportunities.

You can also use this workflow to set follow-up tasks or notify a team channel, depending on how your sales team operates.

Pro tip: Don't make every acknowledgement email sound the same.

A generic “Thanks for getting in touch” email is better than silence, but a tailored response is more useful.

For example, someone requesting a product demo should receive different next steps from someone downloading a guide or enquiring about customer support. Use your form fields and branch logic to make the response relevant to the enquiry.

The goal isn't just to automate an email. It's to make sure every enquiry has a clear next step and an accountable person behind it.

3. Data quality: Automatically format and validate phone numbers

If your team uses HubSpot to make calls, or you trigger SMS messages through workflows and integrations, inconsistent phone number formatting can create unnecessary headaches.

You might have one contact recorded as 021 123 4567, another as +64 21 123 4567 and another with spaces, brackets or other formatting variations.

These differences can cause issues when data is passed between systems or used by calling and messaging tools.

HubSpot has introduced workflow functionality for phone number validation and formatting, making it easier to standardise phone number data without relying on manual clean-up.

How do you set it up?

The exact configuration depends on the workflow actions available in your HubSpot subscription, but the general process is:

1. Choose your phone number property. Decide whether you're standardising the default Phone number property, Mobile phone number or a custom property.
2. Add the phone number validation action. Use the workflow action to validate and format the phone number, following the available configuration options.
3. Update the contact record. Add an Edit record action to write the formatted output back to the relevant phone number property.
4. Test before rolling it out. Check numbers from your key markets, including country codes, mobile numbers and invalid or incomplete values.

Pro tip: Consider where your contacts are based.

If you work across New Zealand, Australia or other markets, make sure your process accounts for international dialling codes. A number that looks valid in one country may not be usable in another context.

Also, don't overwrite a valid original number with an empty or invalid output. Test the workflow against a sample of records first and decide how you want to handle numbers that can't be validated.

Once configured correctly, this workflow can help improve consistency across your CRM and reduce friction when using calling tools, SMS integrations and other systems that rely on phone number data.

Are these the only HubSpot workflows you need?

Definitely not. These three workflows are a useful starting point, but the best automation setup depends on how your business operates.

Other workflows worth considering include:

• Lead assignment and routing based on territory, service line or company size.
• Internal notifications when important deal properties change.
• Task creation when deals reach specific pipeline stages.
• Data quality checks for missing or inconsistent CRM properties.
• Customer onboarding workflows triggered when a deal is closed-won.

The important thing is to avoid building automation for the sake of it. Every workflow should solve a clear problem, support a defined process or improve the quality of your data.

At Zippily, we tailor each HubSpot implementation to the business we're working with, but we always look for opportunities to get the fundamentals right. Clean data, consistent follow-up and reliable processes give your team a much stronger foundation to build on.

If you're setting up HubSpot yourself and want to make sure you're not missing anything important, or you'd like help getting more from an existing portal, get in touch with Zippily to discuss your CRM setup.