HubSpot is a great place to manage your work ... but it can be confusing to know where your tasks are! Here is an overview of HubSpot task management.
You are probably accustomed to organizing your task list by categories, customers, teams, departments, or projects. If you are looking for your "list of stuff to do," you have to think about creating, managing, and viewing those tasks a bit differently in HubSpot.
In HubSpot, the first order of organization is by purpose. You begin by asking:
- Is this task a SALES task?
- Is this task a CUSTOMER SERVICE/SUPPORT task?
- Is this a task related to a specific MARKETING ACTIVITY, like creating an email, landing page, website page, or blog post?
- Is this task part of a PROJECT, with many related tasks and subtasks?
Once you use purpose as the starting point, you begin to understand where to create, look for and manage tasks in HubSpot.
Where to Organize Tasks
Existing Customer Tasks
The tasks you create for customers will be one of two types: Tickets and Tasks
- Post Sale Tasks: An existing customer need related to a service or product you have already sold them.
- This type of task should be turned into a TICKET (which is why you need HubSpot's Service Hub).
- There are several different ways to create TICKETs in HubSpot.
- With the contact record open, click "Add Ticket" from the right-side menu.
- When the customer sends an email to your group inbox (assuming the channel is set to auto-generate a ticket, which we recommend).
- You can use forms to generate tickets.
- Integrations from other systems can automatically generate tickets.
- You will then find and manage these tasks from the SERVICE/TICKETS workspace in HubSpot.
- Pre Sale Tasks: An existing customer presents an opportunity to sell them something new. This type of task should be turned into a TASK.
- You can create a task from the open contact record. Tasks appear as one of the navigation options in the center of the contact screen.
- You can add a task from your Email/HubSpot integration.
- You can generate tasks from automations in forms or automatically from integrations to other business systems.
Prospect Tasks
For the most part, tasks for non-customers will be related to sales activities. So, tasks for prospects should be created in the sales pipeline or at the contact level as TASKS.
Internal Tasks
Project Tasks & Management
For creating and managing individual tasks and larger projects HubSpot has a section called Projects. Projects is not part of the client dashboard. Instead, it is found in the drop-down navigation you see when you click your user profile picture in the top right.
In Projects, you can assign owners, set due dates, communicate about, and attach files to tasks. You can also turn repeat project work (like building websites, preparing for trade shows, or launching any complex campaign) into templates, making it faster and easier to launch new projects in the future.
Marketing Campaigns
You can also create tasks related to creating campaigns and campaign elements like:
- landing pages
- website pages
- blogs
When you are creating these assets, the right-hand menu will expand to reveal an area to enter comments, tasks, and a scheduling calendar.
You can access campaign tasks by going to the Marketing>Campaigns dashboard. On that dashboard you will see sub-navigation tabs with options for Manage | Calendar| Tasks. The Tasks tab will show a list for all tasks related to creating campaigns and campaign management.
Using Tickets for Internal Task Management
In addition to simply assigning tasks or using Projects, another option for managing internal tasks that are not project-driven is to create a Service/Ticket pipeline just for internal use. You can even create a separate shared in-box just to send emails to for that internal pipeline. Even if some of your team members do not have a paid Service Hub seat (say, they are just in the Sales Hub or the CRM Hub), you can still assign tickets to them.
Keeping it All Straight - Where to Find & Manage Tasks
These different task paths do mean that you have to manage your tasks in more than one place.
- All tasks assigned through the sales pipeline, tickets, or the tasks dashboard are aggregated in Sales>Tasks. This is the best view for managing day-to-day tasks. This view will not contain tasks set up through Projects.
- You can also find tasks by looking at the individual tickets or deals in the service or sales pipelines. This is the best view for overall management of client and prospect deliverables.
- in Service>Tickets: You can go to the task tab in the ticket to see the tasks associated with the ticket.
- in Sales>Deals: You can go to the task tab in the deal and see the tasks associated with the deal.
- Your tasks related to managing campaigns will be found in Marketing>Campaigns.
- Your project tasks can be managed in Profile Dropdown>Projects.
You can also search for tasks and tickets (but not project elements) by name by creating a filter in the search box for... you got it, tasks and tickets.
For most people, using the Sales > Tasks dashboard will be the most efficient place to manage tasks.
You can also create integrations with various task systems (like Slack), though we encourage you to try to maximize your use of HubSpot tasks to reduce the number of tools you and your team need to use, and only add on other task managers if you need additional functionality or if an external tool offers benefits beyond task management and communication.
This article only touches the surface of task management in HubSpot. Hopefully, if you are trying to figure out how to get started with HubSpot tasks, this information will set you on the right path!