I am looking to benchmark with the HubSpot community. We have our personas set up and automatically assigning to contacts. We currently have 32% of our contacts database that are not assigned to a persona. We are trying to determine if this amount of “unknown” personas is good or not.
Would you mind sharing what percentage of your contacts are not assigned to a persona?
Thanks in advance!
We regularly work in HubSpot portals with 10K-250K+ contacts and here’s what we’ve found over the past 5+ years.
The percentage of contacts with a missing persona (m%) is strongly influenced by …
-1- The number of and type of entry points into your HubSpot CRM.
IOW - How are contacts being added to HubSpot? -- e.g., HubSpot forms, non-HubSpot forms, manually, HubSpot integrations, custom API, etc.
-2- Persona NOT being a requirement during contact creation -- aka: the wild-wild-west! haha
This setup yields an uber-high m% -- i.e., 90%+ isn’t uncommon. This can even be worse in HubSpot CRMs that either started on the free HubSpot tier &/or have no ongoing data hygiene policies in place.
-3- Persona being a requirement during contact creation.
Many organizations want to (try to) enforce persona as a requirement for contact creation, but fail to make a corresponding contact property mandatory on
ALL
lead capture entry points. The typical argument in these cases is that too many mandatory fields discourage form submission.
We like to counter by asking, “Are you looking for high quality leads or high volume leads?”
This example LP, Perfect HubSpot One-to-One Email Templates, successfully uses Role as a mandatory field to feed the persona property. However, this lead capture form is only available as a 2nd-stage option after the visitor has seen the content. That way, the likelihood of accurate form completion and, thereby, the quality of the lead is dramatically increased.
The lowest m% we’ve seen is 0% (very rare in our experience) which makes your 32% better than average. Again, in our experience.
-4- The age of your HubSpot instance.
As sales and marketing personnel for the organization change and priorities shift over time the m% can suffer greatly. Typically, the older the portal, the greater the suffering. (sad, but true)
Bottom line?
Based on the factors above and others, m% results from a fairly unique combination of your specific organizational controls, your HubSpot portal controls, and your use cases.
Hope that helps.
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Best,
Frank
Author the Perfect HubSpot Series
MFrankJohnson.com | Connect on LinkedIn
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Thank you Frank for your thoughtful response. I certainly understand that there are a variety of factors that influence the m% and I appreciate the tips you offered to decrease the m% overall.
To answer a few of your questions, our HubSpot portal is one year old, we launched it in January 2018 and put the personas in place in June. We have 80K contacts currently and they come in from all of the entry points you mentioned in 1. We’re using the data that exists within the contact records to assign the persona profile via automated workflow. We realize that we have a large amount of junk data and missing data about our contacts so we don’t anticipate or even want to reach m% of zero because we want the persona assignments to be accurate, and we understand that not all contacts will fit within a persona. However, we’re wondering if we should continue to strive for a lower m% or not. It sounds like based on your experience that 32% missing personas is better than average. Do you have an average m% that you’ve seen from the Hubspot portals you’ve worked with?
With so many organization-specific and portal-specific contributing factors any m% we intuit based on working fewer than 0.4% of HubSpot’s 50K+ client portals wouldn’t be very insightful IMHO. Honestly, think this is a big data number that only HubSpot can answer with any degree of statistical significance. So, no.
Not sure if the ask is too esoteric, but pinging some HubSpotters nonetheless.
Again, hope that helps.
Good luck with your projects.
cc: @roisinkirby, @jennysowyrda, @Tom ? (sorry if you’re the wrong Tom)
