How do you define ownership between HubSpot admins and business teams?

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Account & Settings
1

Hi all.

I want to ask you all if you can share your advice/ any similar experiences same like me before?

I’m currently working as a CRM Coordinator/Admin, and I’m trying to clarify our ownership and decision-making structure.

One of the biggest questions we’re facing is who should be responsible for making decisions about the data model and data governance.

For example, different teams are responsible for entering and maintaining different types of data. In our organization, BDMs are the main users entering information for leads/prospects, while the Sales team responsible for maintaining information related to existing clients.

I’ve raised this internally with management, but we haven’t yet been able to define a clear owner or decision-making structure. I’m therefore interested in learning how other organizations approach this.

Here are some of my questions:

  1. Who should ultimately own and make decisions about the data model and governance?
  2. Who decides when a property/field should be updated/created new and defines its purpose, usage, and ownership?
  3. When a team requests a new field, how do you determine whether the data is actually necessary and how do you ensure it will be consistently populated and maintained?
  4. Should this sit with one CRM/Data Owner, a cross-functional team, or different data owners/stewards for different data domains?
  5. What criteria should determine who has this decision-making authority - business ownership, process ownership, data maintenance, technical expertise, or a combination?

I’d appreciate hearing from your expereicne that manage HubSpot across Sales, Marketing, and other departments.

How is your CRM team structured, and where does the final decision-making authority sit?

Thank you so much in advance!

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Hi Honganh,

Great question, and a very common one we see in most of the HubSpot onboarding’s we run. Governance is either sorted early or it causes pain for years, so it’s well worth pushing on :slight_smile:

What we’ve seen work best is splitting it three ways:

  • A senior sponsor (Head of RevOps, Commercial Director or similar) has the final say and breaks ties
  • CRM admin owns the data model itself: how things are built, named and structured, and whether a new field gets created at all
  • Each team has a data steward who’s responsible for the quality of what their people enter. For you, that would probably be the BDM lead for prospects and the Sales lead for existing clients

For new field requests, we always ask one question first: what report, workflow or decision will this drive? If nobody can answer that, it’s worth questioning whether it needs building at all. After that, it’s about who fills it in, at what stage, and whether an existing property already does the job.

Making key fields required at deal stage changes and auditing fill rates every few months also keeps things from drifting.

Two quick wins: lock down who can create properties, and keep a simple data dictionary (property, description and where it’s used).

Hope that helps! Happy to chat more if useful.

Mambi

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Thank you, Mambi!

This makes the overall structure much clearer, especially the distinction between the CRM Admin owning the data model and the data stewards being accountable for data quality.