topic Re: Automating Deal Stages with One to Many Relationships in Sales Hub Tools

Automating Deal Stages with One to Many Relationships

JKirmess — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 21:29:46 GMT

We are trying to automate the movement between our deal stages.

We sell through brokers (middle men) to their customers. Because of this, one broker could be associated with multiple deals in the system.

As an example, John Smith is a broker for the following customers:

Acme Corp

Johnson & Co

Detman Construction

We start by engaging John. Then, he plugs us in to his customers.

We create a deal for each customer that the broker thinks we are a fit for. When we create a new deal, we associate John's contact with an association label of "broker."

We are trying to automate the two initial stages of our deal process using meeting types and outcomes.

Discovery --> Broker Evaluating = Meeting type of Claims Review, Outcome = Complete

Broker Evaluating --> Customer Evaluating = Meeting Type of Customer Proposal, Outcome = Complete

Because we log the meeting on John's record, every deal associated with John is moving to the next stage instead of the specific deal we are meeting about.

We don't want ALL deals to move stages, only the specific deal related to the meeting.

How can we automate our deal stages on specific deals using meeting activities when the contact associated with those activities is associated with multiple deals?

Re: Automating Deal Stages with One to Many Relationships

karstenkoehler — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 03:47:04 GMT

Hi @JKirmess,

They key here is logging the meeting to only the correct deal – and then using a deal-based workflow to move just this one deal, not a contact-based one.

When logging the meeting, make sure to use the associations dropdown in the lower right corner to select / unselect the right records: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/associate-activities-with-records#associate-an-existing-activity-with-another-record

That way, you can specify which deal(s) the meeting applies to. This will in most scenarios have to be a manual step; HubSpot simply cannot know which deal the meeting relates to.

In a deal-based workflow, you could then enroll deals that are associated to a meeting with the applicable type and outcome and use the 'Set property value' action to update the stage of this deal only.

Without cleaning up the associations, I don't see a way to automate this that doesn't require the help of a developer and custom code actions in Operations Hub Professional or Enterprise. And even then the approach would likely be to clean up the associations first.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

Re: Automating Deal Stages with One to Many Relationships

Lucila-Andimol — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 14:29:25 GMT

Hi @JKirmess

multiple association objects are difficult to update through automations

because you will need to use the Record/Deal ID to able to target that deal in particular,

and you will have to create a lot of WF for this to work.

In general we solved this for our customers creating a custom automation (with operations hub) or outside HubSpot with 3rd party apps/tools like Zapier that also lets you define more advanced automations.

You can try it out.

Hope this helps

Re: Automating Deal Stages with One to Many Relationships

JKirmess — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 15:43:18 GMT

Thank you Maria! So operations hub gives you the ability to use the deal ID in workflows? Or what functionality does it open that would solve for this? I'd like to get an idea of the complexity of the solution. Because I have a very small team (three people including myself) and I'm weighing if the juice is worth the squeeze.

Re: Automating Deal Stages with One to Many Relationships

JKirmess — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 16:15:20 GMT

Going to try this to see what the user experience is like. I think it may be hard for our users to remember to do this step but let's give it a try!

Re: Automating Deal Stages with One to Many Relationships

Lucila-Andimol — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 15:37:33 GMT

Operations Hub Pro let's you create programmable automations

and this way you get to code/program the workflow action

with all the information available from the API, including Record ID

so you get to write exactly the action that you want to do.

If you want to know about this check this developers resource

Hope this helps