If this were my project I’d use a simple form, like from Fillout.com.
The email would include a link to the form, prefilled and/or with hidden variables that identify the supplier, with a simple Yes or No response option.
Upon submission, kick off another automation that takes the next steps according to the response.
Your trigger for this is the Hubspot form submission.
The tricky part is triggering a reminder email 48 hours later if there was no response / form submission to the original email.
For that you might track in the spreadsheet when the email was sent then have a separate scenario: periodically scan the spreadsheet looking for those where an email was sent, no response was received, and the time since the email sent was more than 48 hours ago, then send a reminder email.
You’ll need another way to track to which suppliers you’ve sent a reminder email so you don’t send another reminder email, unless you want to continue sending every 48 hours until you get a response.
Finally, there is a way to send two “one-click” links using Webhooks, but I would avoid that since some email services or clients will click those links to scan them for spam or viruses which may inadvertently submit a yes or no on behalf of the supplier.
I just implemented something like this a few days ago.
The email recipients receive a unique link to the form but it’s prefilled specifically for that recipient and their response only affects their record.
There’s very little chance they can submit the form on behalf of another because Fillout.com uses the record ID to identify the recipient and that’s not easy at all to guess.
The difference here is I’m using SmartSuite as a database so I have the record ID available as a unique ID. Fillout has a way to set up forms to update SmartSuite records (also works with Airtable).
With Google Sheets, FIllout.com can only add records to the Google Sheet.
If you go this route, you’d need to have a scenario that is triggered by someone submitting the form.
Thank you for your reply and for providing all that valuable information!
If I understood correctly, my original vision for the process might not work as intended. But your input has inspired me to rethink and improve the approach, and I think I’ve come up with a more streamlined version.
Here’s what I’m planning now:
The supplier will receive an email with a single button that says, “Yes, I want this brief.” If they’re not interested, they can simply ignore it—this feels more intuitive and user-friendly.
When they click the button, they’ll be redirected to a page containing all the relevant information.
As soon as they confirm, the information will be automatically sent to the Google Sheet.
If there’s no update in the Sheet within 24 hours, they’ll receive a reminder. If there’s still no update, the deal will be closed, and the link will be invalidated.
How that sounds?
Thanks again for your guidance—it really helped me come up with a better solution!
It sounds like Scenario 1 is done, this sends an email to the Supplier. Just need to figure out what kind of link to include.
Now for scenario 2:
For this initial click on “Yes, I want this brief”, you want this click to redirect the user to a page containing more information. Do you already have a page to forward them to or do you need to create one on-the-fly using data from Google Sheets?
What does a confirm look like? Clicking another button within the information page?
