Multiple Contacts, Deals, and Workflows

Data Hub 💬 RevOps Discussions
1

Hi,

Somewhat new-ish to HubSpot and trying to solve a slightly complex ops setup and workflow and not sure the best way to do it…

I have a client with multiple contacts that functions like a partner of sorts. Our “partner” contacts send clients to us (i.e. buying services on behalf of a child) that have a primary contact (the parent) plus additional contacts (one or more children). Tdchnically, the child is the “client”, but we obviously aren’t communicating with the child in any way and will not have an email address for them.

My inclination is to create two contacts:

  1. Parent
  2. Partner Contact

…and then a deal for child, including child-specific details as deal properties, and associate the Parent and Partner Contacts with each deal.

If I use the parent email for a child, I can’t use it again for another child, and I need a way to associate all of them with each other.

Does this sound like a good way to structure things? Any suggestions or pitfalls I should keep an eye out for?

Any insight appreciated! Thanks!

2

Hi @sschroeder13,
Thank you for reaching out to the Community!
It’s great to see that you are already using the parent/child option for your contacts :slightly_smiling_face:
For information, I don’t know if you use this already but you can create and use association labels. It might help organize the different type of contacts.
Also, you can create and edit custom objects if your business requires a relationship or process beyond the standard CRM objects. But for that, you need an Enterprise subscription.
I’d like to share these posts that might help you:
- The solution from @Bryantworks and from @karstenkoehler on this post “I have 2 very different customer types”
- The solution from @GuyTaylor on this post “How to create contacts with multiple ‘categories’”
I also wanted to invite a couple of subject matter experts to this conversation @mangelet, @StjepanGrcic and @Jnix284 do you have any tips or workaround to help @sschroeder13 in this use case please?
Thanks and have a lovely day!
BÊrangère

3

Happy to jump in and offer some insight @BÊrangèreL

A few questions first @sschroeder13:

what subscription tier are you using for each Hub?

are you migrating data from another source? or starting from scratch with HubSpot?

beyond the initial referral from the partner, is there any further association with the partner and the parent?

As an initial thought, Children won’t need to be added as contacts, especially since you won’t be adding them, but determining the best way to associate them to the Parent will depend on answers to these questions.

4

Hi Jnix284,

Thank you so much for responding. I’m on starter everything plus Marketing Pro.

I am starting from scratch with paying clients but do have a marketing list I’m migrating over. They are not related, however.

Beyond the initial test there could further association with the partner and parent. For example, if the partner refers another one of their children.

Thanks for jumping in here!

5

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply and invite others who might be able to help me understand things better.

In my situation, I was describing a family relationship of parent/child, not an object relationship. I didn’t realize that existed. I will look into that. It’s that an enterprise feature? I’m on starter everything and Marketing Pro.

6

Hello @sschroeder13,
You are very welcome! Thanks to @tverdokhlib1 and to @Jnix284 for your help :slightly_smiling_face:
So, if you are looking to add a parent/child relation, this will work with your current subscription.
If you are looking at creating custom objects, then you will need the Enterprise subscription for that.
Don’t hesitate if you have any other questions!
Have a great day!
Best,
BÊrangère

7

Hi @sschroeder13

A few questions:

1. Do these Parents and Childs are from the same company? Or this is B2C and companies don’t matter here?

2. So we have:

1) Partners - Contacts who send you the below clients

2.) Parents

3) Childs

In this case, to associate Partners with Parents and Childs, you may create a custom object (if you use Sales Enterprise) and create Partner as a custom object.

If you don’t have Sales Enterprise and can use Contacts only without companies, then I would recommend creating a custom property like “Contact type” with Partners, Parents, and Child dropdown.

Then if a Contact is a Partner, and you have, for example, 100 partners, you can use another text property ( or Dropdown if the number of Partners is not high). When you add a parent, you can go to this Partner property and find the associated Partner.

The same can do for Children - Parents where each child will have a property Parent with field Parent.

Let me know if that makes sense.

Thanks,

Anton

8

Thank you. That is an interesting approach. I will definitely give it a try.

Here are some answers to your questions:

  • The parent and child are from the same family and the referral would come from the same partner
  • Yes. The partner sends the client (child) who has a parent that we engage with on behalf of the child.

Thank you for taking the time to respond! Much appreciated!

9

Hi @sschroeder13 ,

I’ve been reviewing your question and I see you already have a response that’s somewhat helpful … but I’m not sure how much it has helped.

Understanding your question was little tricky for me. If I get this right, we’re discussing a referral program where customers refer others to you.

Firstly, your clients are children. But actually, you don’t directly deal with the kids; instead, you talk to their parents.

So it’s like having different types of customers: Purchasing customers and user customers, right?

If so, maybe, I would argue that your real customer is the child’s parent.

Now about reporting it - there are countless ways but don’t overcomplicate things. There’s an easier way to do this.

Initially when getting a referral create a deal and associate three things: The father as one contact; the kid (child) as another contact; and the person who referred them to you as another contact.

You can use labels in HubSpot to know who’s who. Apply tags such as “referral”, “parent” or “main contact”, and “child”. It’s that simple at this stage of your need!

Further down the rabbit hole, creating custom objects could be useful for defining family groups depending on more details about your business operation.

Consider using company object or creating custom ‘family’ object for tracking family groups – whichever works best for you!

With current information available and based on previous responses given by yourself - these recommendations seem most fitting now!

Try them out & let me know if you made it happen.

10

Thanks, Martin. Appreciate you taking the time to digest my situation and make a suggestion.

What you suggested is basically where I ended up. Happy to get some validation on that approach!

And while it’s easy enough to do manually, my end goal was to automate assigning contacts to deals through workflows, but it doesn’t look like HubSpot supports that at this time?

I’m going to try Anton’s suggestion and see if that can get me there from a workflow standpoint.

I’ll let you know where I end up!