Quick Guide to Workflow Automation with HubSpot

How workflows work in Hubspot

In HubSpot, workflows are the shared automation engine that teams use across Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and other Hubs. You access them from Automation → Workflows, where you decide which records to automate, when they should enroll, and what should happen next. When a record enters a workflow, it’s considered “enrolled” — that just means HubSpot has added it to the workflow so the workflow can start running actions on that record."

Instead of each team using its own disconnected automation tool, everyone works from the same place on top of the same CRM data.

What you can automate with workflows

Workflows are founded on your customer platform and data, which means you can automate processes for many different record types, teams, and use cases.

Marketing automation:

• Records: Contacts, lists, companies

• Triggers: Form submissions, page views, campaign engagement, list membership changes

• Actions: Send nurture emails, update lifecycle stages, manage list memberships, sync to ad audiences

Sales automation:

• Records: Deals, contacts, companies, tasks

• Triggers: Deal stage changes, contact property updates, form submissions, meeting bookings

• Actions: Create and assign deals, rotate lead ownership, enroll in sequences, update pipeline stages, create follow-up tasks

Service automation:

• Records: Tickets, contacts, conversations, feedback submissions

• Triggers: Ticket status changes, SLA breaches, CSAT/NPS responses, conversation properties

• Actions: Route and escalate tickets, send follow-up surveys, create tasks for support reps, update ticket properties
  
  

Operations & data automation:

• Records: Subscriptions, payments, invoices, custom objects, and more (depending on Hubs and tier)

• Triggers: Property changes, custom object updates, payment status changes, integration events

• Actions: Format and clean data, sync properties across records, trigger webhooks to integrated apps and systems, update custom object associations

Where workflows are available

Full workflow automation is available across multiple Hubs at the Professional and Enterprise tiers:

• Marketing Hub

• Sales Hub
  

• Service Hub

• Data Hub
  

• HubSpot Smart CRM
  

• Commerce Hub

Ways to create workflows

When you click Create workflow, you can start in a few different ways:

• Build workflows from scratch: Start with a blank canvas, choose your object type, set enrollment triggers, and add actions step by step. Best when you know exactly what you want to automate.
• With AI (Breeze Assistant): Describe your goal in natural language (for example, “When someone requests a demo, rotate it to the right sales rep based on region and industry, send confirmation, and create a task if no meeting is booked in 3 days”). Breeze proposes triggers and actions you can refine in the visual editor.
• From a template: Use pre‑built templates for common goals — like lead nurture, onboarding, or ticket management — with suggested enrollment triggers and placeholder actions you can customize.
  
  

How record enrollment works for workflow automation

Once you’ve decided what a workflow should do, you tell HubSpot which records should enter and when. That’s called enrollment.

Most of the time, records are enrolled automatically when they meet certain conditions. For example, you might create a workflow to automatically enroll any contact who submits your “Request a demo” form so they get instant follow‑up and routing.

You can also choose to enroll records manually (for one‑off sends or ‌targeted lists), instead of having HubSpot add them automatically. For example, you might manually enroll a curated list of strategic accounts into a one‑time outreach workflow built for a specific campaign.

Two simple choices that give you extra control:

• When to bring in records that already match your criteria when you first turn the workflow on.
• When to let records enter again later if they meet the criteria more than once (for example, every time they fill out a certain form).

The Workflows FAQ article has more examples of how enrollment and re‑enrollment behave in different situations.

Choosing actions and adding logic

After you decide who should enter a workflow, you choose what should happen for those records.

At a high level, workflows can:

• Communicate
• Send automated marketing emails (where available).
• Send internal notifications to reps or teams.
  
• Update your CRM
• Create or update contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects.
• Rotate owners, assign to teams, and update key properties.
  
• Create follow‑up work
• Create and assign tasks so nothing gets missed.
  
• Connect other tools
• Trigger actions in marketplace apps (for example, creating tasks in third-party apps like Jira or Asana)
• Use webhooks to send data to other systems.

You can control how these actions run with:

• Delays: Wait a certain amount of time or until a specific date/condition is met.
• If/then branches: Send records down different paths based on properties or behavior.
• “Go to” actions: Connect parts of a workflow so you don’t repeat the same steps in multiple places.

Reviewing and turning workflows on (simplified)

Before a workflow goes live, HubSpot walks you through a quick “Review and publish” step to:

• Confirm who can enroll, including whether to bring in existing records and whether re‑enrollment is allowed.
• Review timing and notifications, so you understand when actions will fire and who will get alerts.
• Fix any placeholder actions you saved for later — these need to be completed before you can turn the workflow on.

Once your workflow is live, you can:

• Check enrollment history to see how a specific record moved through each step.
• Use performance and health views to monitor enrollments, completions, and any errors or bottlenecks.

Most teams follow the same process: define enrollment, add actions and logic, review and publish, then watch and improve. They slowly grow from simple automations into a more complex workflow that includes many functions.