Hi! Thanks to those that are taking the time to read.
We run a family-owned bookstore that recieves a large number of book requests each day: in person at the store, over the phone, through emails, and through messages. (I understand these are called “leads.”) We currently use an excel sheet that basically has the customers phone number, their name, the book they want, and the distributor of the book. Whenever we want to call the distributor to order books, we do an excel filter and read off all the books under that distributor. This form has color coding etc based on if a book has been picked up by the customer or not, and notes for if the customer has been called, or if its arrived in the shop etc.
I am looking to both consolidate this process and to automate it. The HubSpot rep over the phone suggested i use “deals” for this but it doesn’t seem that that will work. I’ve seen people on the forum advice against it. The lead management on Hubspot all seems super clunky for this specific thing, and I can’t find a page just called “Leads”, which would probably work perfect. What I really need is an Order Form of some kind, where people can fill out a form and the other end I have a spreadsheet with orders, whether they’ve been ordered to the shop, or picked up, or whether the customer was called, etc, and the ability to filter this by supplier, and also the ability to link this to contacts and therefore build up a visual purchase history.
Finally, I’d really love it if the front end of this on my phone would be very simple: I take down someones name, phone number, the book title, and the supplier, hit submit, and afterwards I can go on the computer and manage all the data. (Maybe there is some kind of google form integration?? Idk)
What do I do? I’m at a complete loss. This is the central aspect of our business model and I can’t figure out how to configure it for HubSpot. Any help will be super-appreciated. Thank you
PS I am super-open to upgrading to “Starter” if that’s what needed. Right now I just can’t figure out how to do it either way
Hey @PBookseller for capturing contact or other object data in HubSpot I’d definitely recomend using HubSpot forms, it’s super simple to setup, you can even get a url to visit it on or add it into any page you wish.
So HubSpot has a lot of different records, we would call them “objects” so a “contact” record is one object, a “company” is another, a “deal” another etc. For simplicity the easiest way of thinking of these is different “profiles”.
For things like Phone number, name, address, I’d always recomend using the contact record. So you could set your form to log all of these to a contact record. For example if I fill out a form saying:
Name: Tom
Phone: 555-555
Address: 123 fake street
This will then either create a new contact record for “Tom” which will be in your HubSpot CRM, you can then access this at any time through the “contacts” tab, you can also use it in your lists, automation, email marketing etc at any point. You can also filter by any of the properties (HubSpot’s term for fields) in the contacts view:
One thing to bear in mind about this is when a form is submit, it will override any property values on that record. So if I submit the form again with a new phone number it will update.
For this reason the contact record might not be best to store the order specifics. I’d recomend “deals” for this, which is a seperate object, but can be associated with that contact record, but unfortunately deals can’t be used in HubSpot forms right now. What we could use instead of “tickets”. You could create custom ticket properties for your needs. For example “supplier” “Book order” “fulfilment” etc. these could all be on the same form as the contact information, so once submit it will create a contact record and a ticket record, both would be associated to each other and could easily be accessed through their respective records.
You could then use the ticket to manage the order itself, so you can log the fulfilment, any updates, any notes information required etc. Both contacts and tickets have a table view on their homepages which can be filtered by any property too, so for example if you have a custom ticket property for “Supplier” you could filter by something like “supplier = Penguin” which will show all tickets who have that supplier.
There’s some great Knowledgebase articles which might be helpful here too!
I’d definitely advise using the contact record to store any consistent contact information (such as email, name, phone etc) and then using a different object for orders, if you were to use contact properties for the orders, they would be overwritten every time someone makes an order. With something like tickets it will create a new ticket for each order.
Also, one thing to bear in mind, if you plan on filling out the form yourself you *definitely* want to ensure the form feature for “always create contact for unique email” is enabled, otherwise your browser’s cookie will cause every submission to go to the same contact record.
Hope this helps! Please do let me know if you have any questions!
Thank you for the suggestion. I am trying to make it work with forms—i
don’t think it will do the trick. For one thing, some contacts will have
multiple orders and i can’t have them getting overwritten.
For another thing, when i make a smart list based on form inputs, editing
that data after the fact is super clunky. there aren’t simple or quick ways
of me changing order status, for example.
Hey @PBookseller using another object instead of contacts in forms will avoid an overwrite, for example you could store the consistent contact info in a contact record (phone, email etc) then use ticket fields for all of the order info, this will create a new ticket for each of the order info and associate them with the contact record.
If you have multiple tickets you can then just filter them in the tickets view and bulk update them from there if you need to! For example if I had 6 orders you could filter tickets by something like “associated contact has email …” which will show my 6 tickets, you can then just bulk update them from that view if you need to.
Interesting. So right now, my tickets are being used for specific customer service issues.
But perhaps if i upgrade to Starter, I can create a new ticket pipeline called “Orders”? And then would i be able to customize it to the point that is 100% usable as an order form?
And then my question is, would it be possible to submit new “Order Pipeline” entries into a form?