In the world of marketing automation, where HubSpot Workflows, Zapier, and other automation tools are the glue that ties our business processes, it’s easy to get tempted into thinking that you’re going to automate everything.
Soon, AI agents will start suggesting what processes to automate.
Think about how much time you’d save automating something you do 50 times a day! For the actual time saved over 5 years, see XKCD‘s table below.
But automation has its pitfalls, too: you bake some process with its business and validation rules into a HubSpot workflow, and suddenly, while it becomes easier to think about in the abstract, it becomes less transparent to everyone except the workflow maintainer.
How many things are going on inside that workflow? How many conditions regulate its behavior?
Over time, even the maintainer might forget all the properties a workflow touches and the logic branches it may go through.
Until one day, you start getting notifications that something stopped working.
Maybe the workflow was calling an external webhook, and the service it depended on broke down. Time to debug. How quickly will you be able to fix it? How many man-days will go to waste between now and then?
It happens even in the best cloud service families.
Another issue with automation is when you try applying it too soon. If your business processes are not well ironed out, some manual work at the beginning might give you the flexibility to try different approaches before you cement the rules, so to speak.
On the other hand, once you’re sure of how things should work, automating will start giving you the ROI you expect from HubSpot’s hefty monthly bill. 🫣
Think about all the time you’ll save onboarding a new sales employee who logs into the CRM and can just start working without going through a lengthy training first.
How does your company decide how and where automation is implemented?
Any automation horror stories you can share, past or present?
