How to change contact owner based on sender of an email?

Smart CRM & Sales Hub
1

Hi there, I’m trying to develop a workflow where if one of our sales sends an email to a potential client, if that contact is not owned by a sales, it will replace the current contact owner by whoever is sending that email – but only if the sender is a sakes and the contact is not owned by another sales!

Is this possible??

2

Hi @Henrika,

You could approach it with an email-based workflow (not a contact-based workflow), see here:

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Without custom code, there is however always a caveat:

  • If the email is logged to multiple contacts and there is at least one that’s not assigned to sales or is unassigned, all associated contacts will be updated with the sending sales rep as an owner.
  • If, vice versa, this would be created as a contact-based workflow, the workflow wouldn’t “know” which associated email to pull the owner value from. There are approximations but it wouldn’t be 100% reliable either.

So, this is an approximation.

Have a look, give it a try, test it and only set it live if tests look good to you. If your sales reps are typically logging emails to single contacts only, the above should not be an issue. If it’s typically emails with many copied contacts, then you might run into issues.

Best regards

3

Thanks for your reply! I don’t seem to see the option to choose “HubSpot team”, what object is it under for me to add this criteria?

4

Hi @Henrika
I think the biggest question is how you’re identifying the email sender in the workflow.

I suggest checking whether the email activity exposes the sending HubSpot user as a workflow property. If it does, you could use that value to update the Contact Owner, provided the current owner is empty or doesn’t belong to your sales team.

If the sender isn’t available as a workflow property, this may require Operations Hub custom code or another automation approach.

Could you also clarify whether you’re referring to one-to-one sales emails logged from HubSpot (or the Outlook/Gmail add-in), or marketing emails? The answer may be different depending on the email type.

5

Hey @Henrika,

Thanks for following up here! Re-tagging @karstenkoehler for visibility.

Shane, Senior Community Moderator

7

Hi @Emmytech
Thank you, that’s possibly my biggest challegne too. I’m not refering to a marketing email, as if I do that, I won’t have the option to identify and assign the contact owner to the right person.

I’m referring to the one to one sales email logged from HubSpot (via Outlook) – right now I have my wofkflow as:

Trigger: 1) Email direction is any of Outgoing, and 2) Email is associated to: Any contact, and associated contact of (my personal email as test subject), and 3) Email is associated to: Any contact, and contact owner is none of (names of the sales team)

Then the next step is Set Contact owner on associated contacts to “Activity assigned to”.

But this doesn’t seem to work, the contact I designated never changed contact owner when I emailed her over and over again.

8

@Henrika you should see “HubSpot team” both as an email property (in the email based workflow) and for the associated contact object.

If you’re not seeing it, can you please share a screenshot of what you’re seeing?

9

Hi Karsten,

I managed to find it. However, the workflow didn’t appear to be working when I try it on a personal test email, I can see my email to myself was logged in HubSpot, but the contact owner didn’t change to me.
Can you take a look at what I did wrong?

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10

Hi @Henrika
Thanks for the additional details. That helps clarify the scenario.

Since the workflow is enrolling correctly but the Contact Owner isn’t being updated, I wonder whether the “Activity assigned to” value is actually being populated for one-to-one sales emails sent through the Outlook integration.

I suggest checking a recent email activity record to see whether that property contains the expected HubSpot user. If it’s empty or isn’t supported for this activity type, that would explain why the Contact Owner isn’t changing.

If that’s the case, it would be helpful if a HubSpot employee could confirm whether “Activity assigned to” is supported for one-to-one sales emails or if there’s another property that’s intended for this use case.