We have built out workarounds for this. Previously, our reps were the company owner of thousands of accounts (I had 1,500 companies under my name, another rep had 1,300, the rest had 700-900 each). This is entirely unmanageable and makes company ownership in HubSpot an absolutely irrelevant data point. We made two changes and now our reps are only the company owner of the 50-100 companies they are actively engaged with, defined by companies with closed won deals within the last year, companies with open deals, and companies with closed lost deals within the last 60 days.
First, we added a “Business Development Owner” field for our BDRs to track their top prospects, as they use tasks and not deals to follow up and company ownership is set by deal data. Sales reps have also begun tagging companies using this field to stay on top of their top prospects they are working but haven’t yet engaged.
A workflow was created to reset all company owners to unassigned, and then assign companies based on most recent deal activity. It’s a cumbersome workflow with a couple dozen if/then branches that checks if companies are on active lists that filter things such as “Has an associated deal in closed won stage within the last year” to determine who the company owner should be.
A new “key account” field was created on the company level to bypass the above workflow, so reps can set the handful of companies that are most important to them as key accounts and not have to worry about this workflow surprising them with sudden changes to their most valuable relationships.
The trigger for the workflow is essentially “not a key account” and “company has an associated deal that was updated in the last day” which in theory should update the companies when deals are created/modified/contacted/closed and update the owner of the company accordingly, but in practice I end up turning this workflow off and on at least once a week to catch up.
This is definitely not a perfect system, but it fixes the HubSpot default “email a person and you are set as the company owner forever” to enough of an extent that seeing a rep as the company owner in our database actually means something now.