HubSpot has a lot of tools that are designed to empower and make users live easier. Of those tools, ‘Sequences’ is probably one of my favorites. So, the question to start with then is ‘what is ‘Sequences’ and how do we use them?”

The tool allows you to string together a combination of emails and tasks like calls and to-dos to make sure that a prospect goes through the full sales outreach process. Inside of sequences, you can choose to send emails based off templates you or your team members might have built with personalization also built into those emails.

The tool also allows you to set up reminders for calls and other tasks in order to vary out reach types and make sure that specific actions occur with leads.

Finally, arguably the most beautiful part of the tool, when a contact that is enrolled in a sequence responds to an email or books a meeting they then get unenrolled from the sequences so you don’t have to worry about them continuing to receive emails from the tool.

So, you might be thinking “well that’s great and useful in and of itself, but how do I get the most out of the tool?” or “you promised us interesting use cases!”. Well now it’s time to get to those.

5 Interesting Use Cases for HubSpot ‘Sequences’

1. Post-Sale Follow Up to Position for Up or Cross Sell

Sequences has a feature built in allowing you to delay an action for a certain amount of time. Help, obviously, because you don’t want contacts getting 5 messages all in a row that you intended to be spread out over 20 days. You’d just look stupid if that happened.

But what if I told you that this feature can be more useful than making it look like you know how to use email?

Sequences, depending on your industry and the product you’re selling, offer a perfect opportunity to position yourself, your sales team, or your customer service team for a cross or upsell. How so you might ask? Well let me explain.

Say you have a product like a 3D printer that your company sells, as well as the different products surrounding the printers like nozzles and printing material. Once a deal closes and a client gets their printer installed, you could enroll that contact into a sequence(s) to check in at 3 months to see how they are doing and then check in again at 1 year to see if they need material or to let them know about a new nozzle. If you also know the average lifespan of the printer they bought, you could have a scheduled sequence to check in – say in three years – when the printer becomes outdated and begin the conversation again,

By utilizing sequences in this way you’ve not only established multiple touch points with a customer, building your relationship and providing customer service, but you are also presenting the opportunity to cross sell the customer on refill printing material as well as an update on their machine and keeping them from going with a competitor.

That’s some serious opportunity to drive revenue as well as create loyal customers, all by setting up the sequence and then having a workflow automatically enroll them based off a deal stage or simply manually enrolling the contact.

2. Engaging Disengaged Customers

Nothing is worse, and arguably more boring, than trying to re-engage a customer or lead that appears to be disengaged. It’s boring for the rep and can be really frustrating until you get a response. It can often can anywhere between five and 12 touch points in order to get that response or connect (obviously though, this varies business to business and industry to industry).

Sequences is a great tool for this because you can set up multiple emails to go out until you hit that average amount of touch points and – depending on your role – you can also even schedule in calls into that cadence.

To some extent it can be set it and forget it. If you’re simply trying to get an existing customer to book time with you, setting up a sequence of 5 emails to go out over three weeks, before escalating to a phone call, can often get you the response or meeting you’re looking for.

3. Team Updates and Communication

Full disclosure, this one is pretty niche and not for everybody – but it can be useful! In some cases it makes sense to have your sales staff or, staff in general, in your CRM as a contacts. If that’s the case, it can be helpful to enroll them in sequences to give updates or send specific emails that may not necessarily require responses.

Uses cases here could be sending out reminders to staff about a competition the department or company may be holding or sending documents and templates to new hires.

4. Onboarding for Clients

This is probably one of my favorite and more out of-the-box use cases for sequences. When onboarding clients. There are typically certain check point emails that occur at a certain number of days into the onboarding process. Different resources need to be provided but its typically all pretty standard.

Sequences becomes very helpful in this case because you can use things like personalization tokens to get the same documents and information to people at the appropriate times, without having to retype the same email with names swapped out.

Say you have check lists that need to go out to clients that are onboarding every 10 days over the period of two months. With sequences, you can write the email, put in the check list (or a link to the check list) and then set the delays between emails for every 10 days. This saves your staff time and hassle and is an easy way to make sure those emails go out.

5. Internal reminders

While this use case may not necessarily be an epiphany moment, I do like to include it because it’s a way the tool was designed to work that not many people think about utilizing it for.

There are some cases where the sales process is highly contextual or done almost solely over phone. In this case, you may not be sending the same email with the same information over and over, instead it might make sense to have a template and customize it – or that doesn’t work and you need to constantly call (this brings me back to my time in real estate. HOURS on the phone).

You can use sequences and the functionality in the tool to schedule reminder, to-dos, and calls for specific contacts and never send them an email. Inside the reminders or to-dos you could include instructions about what specific email needs to go out and include templates for the contact owner to use. They will get notified and, if the delays between these events is set up appropriately, should have everything they need to properly and quickly execute a custom and highly tailored outreach or phone call. It’s small, but if find its can be a shift in thinking about how the tool is used and in some cases is a more appropriate and effective utilization.

Let’s Wrap It Up

Like any tool or piece of software, there’s often a lot of nuances and many different ways it can be used. These are just a few of the ways that I’ve found they can have more uses, and ways that clients have gotten use out of them.

I’m curious though, have you found other creative ways to use the tool? If so, let me know or leave a comment!