Hi Joe
So what about… the user creates a new deal and has to search and link the company and a contact (or more?) - and these fields are required / mandatory, before a new deal can be created .
If a new deal is created off a workflow or from a form, if company and contact are not associated, a report is sent to a super admin to check & a new deal can then be created?)
Sorry if this is a bit simplistic but we all need a solution, so please re-investigate and provide a workaround?!
Thanks!
It just seems strange to me how a deal can be created without having at least an email address for a contact. How do those working on the deals communicate with the customer otherwise. I have several custom fields on deals that all need to be copied over to the company or contact profile. I cannot expect our sales teams to input this data into the system twice for every single deal, it would take far too much time. Also this is about the option to make assigning a contact/comapny to a deal mandatory. This would be controlled by the account admin, so each business can decide if this is something that will work for them.
I am having to have our admin support spend time trying to make sure company/contact profile information is up to date which is time consuming and open to human error. Even something as simple as tagging a contact from a closed deal as a client for our business isn’t possilbe without having the contact associated with the deal.
I understand the whole catch-22 of creation, but as it turns out these relationships are critical to a ton of workflows, data tags and reporting.
Sounds like this might need to be something of a pop-up / wizard flow? Start to create deal and a shell of a deal record is created, search for and associate a company and/or contact, hit finish and the deal record is off to a good start.
Could also just have a designated stage upon creation where it’s okay to not have anything associated, but then absolutely lock it down from leaving this initial stage until users associate it to a contact and/or company. - I’m trying to do this via workflow, but there are too many gaps to really enforce it right now.
What workflows are you using for this? All i’ve been able to do is make workflows to email the deal creator is they are not associating a contact with a deal then another reminder after 3 days. Still genearly those go ignored by sales staff though.
Hi David739,
I’ve done the notification/email/task route with limited success.
What I’m moving into now is pushing deals back into earlier stages of the pipeline if they don’t have a Contact and Company associated (based off of a formula field on the deal for number of associated Contact, and number of associated companies). Given that a rep doesn’t get credit until it’s in closed won (and stays there), it has been more effective.
Moving stages for reps is not something I like to do as it creates a weird and frustrating experience where they move the deal to a stage, hit save, and then it changes back over the course of the next few minutes. So I couple the task/notification with the stage change - you can use delays with unenroll so they at least know why something changed stages and they have a chance to correct the issue.
Unacceptable response. Figure it out. Hate to be insensitive, but its a base level requirement.
Upvoting and commenting on behalf of a customer, I’ve had quite a few requests for this. I think it would be a great idea to offer our customers the option to make this required or not so this isn’t a step their own sales team skip.
I’d love the ability to make a company association mandatory in specific pipeline stages. We often forget this step, but it’s cruicial for our quoting add-on (zoho configurator).
We need this feature as well. Please, hubspot product team, work your magic! Thank you!
Definitly need this feature ! So important to maintain relevant database !!!
My mind just got blown. How can this not be a feature?
The HS response that this is not being considered because a deal looking for an associated contact or company that doesn’t exist is developer and product management tone-deafness.
All that is needed is for a new contact or company object to be created when a similar domain isn’t found. Or, the system could flag the deal creation when no associated contact or company is found and force the creation of one.
In the meantime, I’ve created a “bad deal behavior” report (part of a “bad behavior dashboard” that has all deals without associated companies or contacts (I recently renamed them to “process error” reports and dashboard - to improve the maturity appearance) . This report is published so that all salespeople can see it. I’ve sorted it so that the worst offenders are at the top of the report. Our compensation plan indicates that anyone on this report is subject to disciplinary action up to and including job loss and the loss of compensation related to these records. Of course, this drastic step is rarely taken, but it gets everyone’s attention - nobody wants to be on this dashboard.
For us it is a must-have option, too. Sales folks easily forgets about associating companies/contacts with deals.
This is something very basic. Why do we have to be left at the mercy of an upvoted idea to have this feature?
2020 inbound did not have any update regarding this. HubSpot wants the platform to be more acceptable in large enterprises and yet it has no intention to deliver this ABSOLUTELY BASIC check in place! I love the user-friendliness of this platform but feel totally disappointed when I see that a request for such a simple and fundamental functionality has to be channelized through an idea forum and has status as NOT PLANNED even after 3 years. If moderators are reading this, please get this fact right - the mandatory association of a deal with a company is A FUNDAMENTAL practice in sales. Without an associated company and contacts, you can not fulfill an order and do billing/invoicing.
@GLR Were you ever able to make this work at all? I am facing a similar issue. We are using HubSpot marketing automation and outreach automation and evaluating/planning to open it up for a sales team of about 250 members. The absence of this feature can certainly create a nightmare for the sales ops admin.
I have a dashboard called “Process Errors.” In it, I have reports by rep on what they are not doing, like missing fields. This makes sense for this problem and others where a field might be required later but you do not have the data to fill in early in a cycle.
@JonDFreeman How do you set this up? Can you give me an example?
The solution is simple. Example, if you need to have a company associated to every deal.
You’ll want to have a report and graphic that shows all deals, by salesperson, which do NOT have a company associated.
Create a dashboard called SALES OPERATIONS PROCESS ERRORS (trust me, you’ll have many reports that fit in to this model and this dashboard will become an easy tool to point all salespeople toward when they are offenders.
In this case, create a two object report of deals and companies (you will add to this dashboard) of all deals with a filter that looks for all deals without an associate company. Be sure to create a bar chart visual that shows the number of deals by salespeople. If you have teams and lots of salespeople, then do this by the team leader or sales manager.
The trick is to send out a couple of messages to the salespeople that show on this report - one before the report to tell everyone what you will be doing and how each deal needs a company. Then, another when you create the dashboard/report you can send to everyone along with the expectation that they associate a company to every deal, but after that stick to only sending to the offending reps and their managers. Be kind in your messages, the shame of being on the report is enough and will keep you from getting crosswise with the sales manager or exec management owners of these people.
If you do it right, lots of people will comply before you build the report. Most people want to do the right thing and want to avoid being seen as a problem. Trust in this process, it works very well.
You will always have a few offenders left. If they are top performers, work with their manager to help them fit the data. If they are poor performers, this is good evidence of more bad performance if you’re organization has been working to remove them (which any good organization should do with poor performers that also break good process and well-communicated policy).
I hope that this helps.
Jon
Adding my name to this - it seems like a very basic feature that should be added, and shouldn’t be a massive engineering effort on the Hubspot side.