Hey Community,
@karstenkoehler is a high-valued member and a thought-leader of our DACH and EN Communities. Karsten is currently at the top of our leaderboard in both communities and the quality of content that Karsten has consistently delivered is remarkable.
Karsten was able to reach 1000 solutions accepted in less than a year and a half.
From the 19th of July until the 23rd of July you will have the opportunity to ask Karsten anything you want about him, his experience, knowledge and HubSpot.
Here are some sample questions could be:
- What is your favorite HubSpot tool
- What is the toughest question you’ve answered on the Community
- What are your tips for customizing your CRM
Have fun! 
Thanks for doing this @karstenkoehler! I’m curious what your Community time looks like. Do you devote specific hours or days to it? You’re so active, how do you manage it along with your other work?
And a follow up… in addition to your obvious penchant for helping, why do you do it? Does it lead to leads/connections for your business?
Thanks!
Hey @danmoyle,
One of the reasons I am so active in the community is that it’s a great way to sharpen problem solving skills. I’ve definitely become a better HubSpot consultant during my time in the community, learning about new functionalities and figuring out what the best workarounds for very specific situations are. I can generate more value for my customers that way. I’m faster at figuring out solutions and I can with very high accuracy and confidence say what’s possible and how long it’s going to take me. There’s also almost instant feedback as to whether a solution works.
And yes, my activity in the community has helped me get more exposure especially in the German speaking markets. The leads that I generate from my meeting link in the signature are either people who mistake me for HubSpot support or very highly qualified leads.
As far as my time management goes, that’s also a mystery to me. I’ll hit 2,000 solutions soon. With 5-10 minutes per solution, that’s between 20-40 working days that I’ve spent on solutions alone. German time management skills and efficiency I guess?
Thanks for asking!
Hi Karsten
Chat pointed me here, I have incorrectly set up a field as a single line text instead of a number field, I have cloned it and changed to number and selected currency but the numbers are not showing in the new field. I need to be able to filter those paying less than £500 for example and those paying more? Very new to Hubspot!
Hi @RTapper,
Hahaha, I’ll happily help alhtough I have to say that it’s funny how an AMA with me is turning into first line of defense support. cc @sharonlicari @jennysowyrda
When you clone a property, you are simply cloning the container, not the content of the container. That’s why your cloned property is empty.
If you want to find all contacts with a value below £500, you would create an active contact list. You’d filter for Contact properties, search and find BID Levy and set the filter to “is less than £500”. After saving and a few moments, HubSpot will give you all contacts who match the filters.
Best regards!
Hi Dan.
I am wondering how you can split revenue into shipment months after the deal stage. It is not reocurring as the revenue per month will be different. Is this possible in hubpsot?
Hey @SMcCann25,
As far as I know there aren’t any out of the box features for this at the moment. Other users have discussed this before (see here and here) but the only options seem to be splitting one deal in multiple deals. For monthly recurring revenue, there is a specific report (available in Sales and Service Hub Enterprise).
I’d recommend posting this in the HubSpot Ideas section of the community.
Best regards!
Hi there. Has there been any changes to the chat notification options? I’m hoping an option has been created to change sound to avoiding missing incoming chats.
Hi @CJones6,
In your notification settings you can enable “Play a sound when you receive…” but the sound cannot be changed at this stage:
Hope this helps!
How do respond so fast? I’ve got the Knowledge Base bookmarked and everything still can’t get close. Is it dictation software or what?
Hi @ConnorSlivensky,
I have a developer portal set up with all kinds of dummy data for easy access, screenshots etc – and typing fast helps. Just did one of these tests for the first time in ages:
Also for 1 out of 20 answers, I’m able to site-search the community for an old answer of mine and re-use it.
Thanks for the question!
What’s your favorite suite of tools for Direct Mail + PURL campaigns?
Hi @TheMiz777,
Haven’t used one myself yet but Postalytics would be the first one I’d evaluate: Personalize HubSpot Landing Pages With pURLs
Thank you for the question!
@karstenkoehler I can’t believe there is a live AMA happening with you right now!
What advice would you give in regards to best organizing Sales assets for prospecting emails within Hubspot’s horizontal folder system?
Hi @AHudson,
Hahaha, I know, right?
This depends a bit on what exactly you’re trying to achieve. If you want to use HubSpot’s documents feature, this is a question about categorization and taxonomy, mostly. There are a few threads in the community about naming conventions, I would take these as starting points for how to name your files.
Regarding the folder structure, documents could be sorted into folders by topical area (e.g. industries), the sales process stage or deal stage they’re usually needed in (e.g. exploratory call documents) or – if highly personalized – by sales rep.
Generally, the file system structure in HubSpot is limited, yes. I’d love to see more functionalities in the future here, too (multiple level folder structures, tagging etc).
If you need a sales asset management solution in general, I’d recommend having a look at digitial asset management software in the HubSpot App Marketplace. So far I’ve only used solutions that do not integrate well with HubSpot, unfortunately, but Brandfolder has been mentioned here and there in the community.
Thanks for the question!
Thank you for doing this and all your help!
Hi Karsten, what do you think about handling “re-leading” i.e. contacts that re-enter the buyer journey - such as upselling or cross-selling to existing customers, or customers making unrelated product/service/solution purchases - specifically with respect to long B2B sales cycles?
We have this linear lifecycle approach with Hubspot - can we break it, should we break it?
Hi @auto-mate,
Agreed, while HubSpot has introduced the flywheel model, the tool itself is mostly following a linear logic. How exactly you’re “breaking” with this approach depends a lot on your requirements and sales process. Over the years I’ve set up different processes to handle upselling, cross-selling, resetting lifecycle stages after inactivity etc.
My recommendation would be to try to document your sales processes and requirements as accurately as possible. Not a fun task (unless you love process documentation, user stories and requirements), but invaluable if done correctly. If for example you need to see something specific in your reporting, you can then reverse engineer whether that affects HubSpot’s linear lifecycle stage logic or whether you’re fine using it as is and an assisting custom property will do for these reporting purposes.
I know this is a bit of a vague answer, but: it depends 
Great question!
I agree - I think the only answer is “it depends”!
…The flywheel thinking is great and there are good planning charts there …but… I fear if I explore that thinking with my organisation the lack of concrete Hubspot features to put it into practice will make thnigs cloudier
The other paradigm I’m grappling with is source, and handling offline (non-Hubspot-tracked-inbound) source attribution. I “grew up” on Original Source being locked - but now we can edit it! Like most enterprises we have all kinds of data sources, data entry in myriad other systems and uploads/imports in various systems.
I’m looking for best practice on the pros and cons of editing Original Source vs using custom offline source field values. Any thoughts?
