After countless hours (ok months) the teams have been working to improve the integrity of our HubSpot CRM, by removing the duplicate company records as best as possible. While there are a few remaining, the time has come to enter into the final stage. With the brunt of the work to be handled for the sales and account teams, each team will need to have an understanding of the processes for handling HubSpot records. This will be a key factor in keeping our database accurate and clean moving forward.
The process
We want the CRM to be a tool where anyone within the organization can see a company's progress at any point in time, therefore we're keeping this simple.
Only one company record will exist.
This record can, and will, have multiple company domains (.com, .co.uk, .jp, etc.) to ensure all contacts will sync correctly. If new contacts are added with a different email domain not yet on the company record, we will manually need to add the contacts to the appropriate company record. This will prevent any automatic duplicates.
This is why it is incredibly important to first check HubSpot prior to creating any new records: Contact or Company.
There will be a single company owner - the primary owner.
As many of you know, the owner property only allow for a single company owner. While this is may seem limiting, the company owner doesn't impact your communication with owned contacts. So this field is being repurposed into a primary owner who will support the sales, account and operations teams working on the record across all verticals and regions.
To help us identify who will be the primary owner, we have a few strategies:
- Based on where the company is headquartered, the lead from that vertical & territory will be the company owner; if not applicable, then
- If multiple verticals own within the same region, the person who owns the most associated contacts at the time will be the company owner; if not applicable, then
- Based on who owns the most associated contacts to the company at the time will be the single company owner
IMPORTANT: Teams can override the strategies above in favor of choosing their own primary owner, if necessary. The above will be the strategies used in the initial merging process.
Account Owner property is expanding (automatically!)
Currently, the Account Owner property only features members of the account team, however, we'll be expanding this to include all owners for better visibility into who is interacting with the company. Using HubSpot automation, this will feature the names of all of contact owners associated with that company record.
The property will have the updated name of Additional Owner(s) and more than one person can be selected. No action will be required from the team to have this show in their HubSpot instance, it will update automatically.
All activity happens outside of the company record. Through deals, tickets - and most importantly - the contacts. All of this activity will be synced to the associated company record in order for the entire company to see the activity being generated against our targets.
Rest assured, that while multiple teams, regions and owners will be involved in the same company record, you can only communicate with the contacts you own. HubSpot permissions only allow sequencing, emailing through HubSpot, etc. to be given to the contact owner. If you see a contact that you feel as though you should own, please work with the existing owner to transfer the contact to you.
Deals will be strictly enforced.
Now, more than ever, it is vitally important that all opportunities with a company are logged as a deal in HubSpot, associating the company the deal is for as well as the associated contacts your working with on the deal.
Deals are how we identify the progression of a company with Liquidity Services. One team may have the company as a customer, but another vertical is prospecting them for more of their business. We want - and need - to see the opportunity each company record is generating for Liquidity Services, by team and region, and we can get this by using the deal records.
Properties are going to get cleaned up!
Over the years we've developed multiple properties for the same information. Rather than having 6 different (yet same purpose) properties for the industry, we're merging down to one. Don't worry - all existing data will be saved, we'll just be working off one in the near future. Your left sidebar in your records will automatically be updated for you - no action will be required.
With this improved consolidation, it will allow us to also associate a record with multiple industries.
How does this benefit you?
Having a single company record will afford you with the ability to see how that company is working in other regions - or verticals. The insight you gain from your peers will show you opportunities not yet explored, or partnerships that can be rendered to secure a new relationship.
With HubSpot capabilities, you'll be able to filter out any noise you do not wish to see and only focus on your own activities. Or maybe just your team's activity - HubSpot caters to your needs.
The benefits go on and on:
- See which contacts are engaged, and who's not for additional outreach
- See the deals being generated (won and lost)
- See the tickets in queue for recent closures and layoffs
- Gain transparency into how Liquidity Services is working with the company
What about reporting?
Once we have all the records merged, and everything is ready to go, we'll shift our focus to any existing reporting dashboards first. Please be patient with us as we want to first get the platform stable for use. The data isn't going anywhere and we all will work on getting it finalized together - with new reports added!
Keep in mind, this may also impact any custom filtered views in your records section. This too will be addressed after the clean-up work, as this will be a simple update. Again, no data will be lost - you will actually gain data!