How HubSpot counts Contacts + more

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Dashboards & Reporting
1

Hey Forum,

This is a technical questions whilst perhaps being be a general question:

How does HubSpot count contacts?

Duplicates and “(no value)” are affect us trying to have HubSpot generate our Lead/Closed Won report numbers without us having to mannually subtract those that dont truly contribute to them.

Context:

We’ve had a customer decide to do mail correspondence from two seperate emails throughout the conversation; theyre personal email and work email.

None of the conversation involves their work/company, or them being a reprsentative of it, they just use their work email for their own convience

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Their partner is also looped in as an accioated contact but this question doesnt involve them much, it’s just for addtional context.

Is there anyway to immedatiely have that addtional email automically populate in the Contacts “email” property feild as an “addtional email” rather than HubSpot auto-assume it’s an entirely new person and create a duplicate of the 1 contact?

Can understand the current set up works postively in the case of their partner being looped into the conversation and HubSpot creating a contact for them. However it works negatively when a single contact decides to email back and forth with multiple emails creating more than 1 contact and affecting reports down the line.

We’re aware of the “merge contact(s)” feature but the use of that is after the fact a contact, and it’s duplicates, have entered our CRM already. Merging them also takes lower priority over progressing the contact through their Deal, and by time of merging reporting period (weekly) may have passed already.

Asking all this due to the way we do reporting is by “#count of contact” to determine our Leads. We haven’t implemented Lifecycle Stages 1 and 2 mainly due to little-none difference between Lead and Oppurtunity within our industry/process. Even called industry friends at other companies who do the same as above, simply having work arounds and mannual intervention

Our entire aim with HubSpot was/is to remove issues like these and report more accurately whilst being able to have automations set up in the background stress free

2

Hi @LSugrue,

The short answer is: Unless you’re telling HubSpot, in some way or another, that two different email addresses belong to the same person, HubSpot doesn’t know and will count these two email addresses as distinct contacts. To HubSpot, they look as if they’re two different people.

If you want your reports more accurate in the sense that such a case should count as 1 and not 2, you’ll have to merge or deduplicate the contacts, either manually or using third-party deduplication like Insycle.

Best regards!