Hello! Our key contacts are providers (doctors) that have unique credentials, affiliations, etc. I am looking for someone who may have experience with managing providers in their CRM. Specifically looking for input on using existing objects vs creating custome objects (for example: credentials (MD, PA, CNM, MPH, etc, etc). I can’t seem to find any resources currently, any input or resources welcome!
Hey @KGraben76 this situation is something I come across a lot with clients actually!
It really depends on how you’re planning on using HubSpot.
Realistically if you’re planning on marketing, selling to or supporting these providers, a Contact record is the best object to use. But again that does depend on your business, if you also have general leads, or visitors for your business who would potentially be customers for those providers you really don’t want them mixed up together.
I find the best strategy here is to take a step back and define how your business sells and markets. Often it’s very easy to get lost in the differences between someone like a provider and a general user, but realistically there’s a lot of overlap. It’s just important to be able to easily define them. I’d recomend creating a user journey for each of these, where you see a new user gaining awareness of your business, becoming sales won and right down to renewal/evangelist depending on your business. If you look at it objectively like that you can then apply your personas/business types to how you structure your CRM.
If you plan on marketing/selling to these providers, contacts does make the most sense, but I would advise creating a custom property to define who these contacts are.
If you have CRM starter+ you can even set these properties as always required for a contact to exist in your portal.
You might create a property like “Contact type” which could be something like “Doctor, Patient, test Wholesale” or whatever you want.
You could then create lists, assignment rules, contact filters or more to seperate these contacts.
So for example you may have an account manager who helps Providers contact their clients. You could create a filter for them to only view contacts who have the value “Doctor” and is assigned to them to contact. You can also get as granular as you like with creating customer properties. You might even have something like:
“contact type = Doctor”
“affiliate status = True”
“Requiring leads = False”
“Crendentials = PHD, MD…”
…And as far as you like.
You could then filter contacts based on these or create lists, or if you have marketing Pro+ you could automatically assign these out or trigger email notifications.
Generally speaking it’s good to think of “contacts” as humans. Custom objects are generally for business specific needs related to another object, “shipments” is a great example. Realistically, even with ABM style marketing things boil down to a specific POC, so you need a contact.
It sounds like you may just need defined, structured custom properties on the contact records to define who your contacts are!
Hope this helps a bit! Let me know if you want to chat about it more!