Presenting to you: Datasets!

[smcmillian]

Hi everyone,

I’m Stephen McMillian and I’m the Product Manager of Datasets by HubSpot. I’m very excited to finally release Datasets to all of you here!! I wanted to make this post to introduce myself and share what we’ve been working on the past few months.

About myself

At HubSpot I’m a product manager, but before joining HubSpot I worked as a business analyst for the eCommerce team at Walmart. I learned that the ease of retrieving insights was imperative for business stakeholders, and while not everyone felt comfortable diving into an open ended business intelligence tool, everyone required clean data.

The biggest annoyance working with data in my role as a business analyst was not that I couldn’t retrieve any data, it was when I couldn’t be confident the data I’d pulled was completely accurate or matched how my finance counterparts viewed our growth projections. Misaligned, bad data would lead to bad decision making.

On the Datasets team, we’re working to give analyst more control over data quality, transformation and curation.

About Datasets by HubSpot

With Datasets, ops teams and other data leaders can pre-select the most important properties for every internal audience to ground their reports, so every team is working with the most relevant data. Every business user can create compelling reports for themselves, which means better business insights and time saved for ops.

Your customer data speaks for itself. But sometimes, a bit of mathematical prowess can surface even richer insights.

Calculations in Datasets enable you to unlock deeper perspectives. Derive date differences like time to first conversion, sales cycle speed, sales commissions, profit margins, and more, directly within your reports — no need to bog down your database with extra properties.

With curated data and crafted calculations in tow, every business user is empowered to create their own reports and dashboards. Using your dataset as a starting point, build compelling reports quickly and easily in the custom report builder, available in Professional and Enterprise editions across all hubs.

[DEidelshtein9]

Awesome! I was just in the process of chatting with a very helpful HubSpot Rep, her name is Maria to figure out conversion ratios. This is extremely helpful. Glad I did a bit of googling to find this.

[JJones618]

We want to be able to count the number of MQLS by create date and the nuber of Opps by create date, and calculate from these two figures a conversion ratio by create date → within Hubspot. Will this feature enable this type of calc ?

[smcmillian]

You won’t be able to calculate the conversion ratio currrently. The tool can only support row-level calculations while the example you gave would require aggregate math. Aggregate math requires performing a calculation on an aggregated data point. In your example, count of MQLs would be an aggregate sum and count of Opportunities would also be an aggregate sum. Hope this clarifies your question!

[JJones618]

It does → huge thanks.
Are there any plans to include more sophisticated aggregate capabilities in the future? This is a killer for me and means Hubspot reporting is always a ‘second best’ data reporting and viz tool. The data within Hubspot though is really awesome → which makes it even more frustrating

[DParker7]

I would love to see this feature too. We are trying to build out a CMS tracking dashboard and some of our key metrics are tied to aggregate functions.

[VSalvo]

I just need some simple calculations on my reporting, but I can’t spend an extra 2K a month for this. While I’m glad it’s now live, I wish it was something I could use with my current build.

[CBludau]

Stephen, I’ve activated the 14 day trial to experiment with dataset functionality. I’m specifically wanting to combine two (or more) datasets into one, similar to the UNION operator in MS SQL. First, I can’t select datasets when creating a new dataset. And in Reports, I can only select one dataset as a source. Any plans for more sophisticated operations around datasets?

[smcmillian]

Today users are unable to join datasets together. I sent you an email to learn more about your use case -- this was a tough decision we made in the early development process to omit for the initial release, but that decision is not a fnal one. Would love to hear which questions you’re trying to solve that requires a union!

[Sem]

Hey Stephen,

Just discovering your tool. This looks great robust built. Thank you!

The only thing is aggregations. If there are any chance I can calculate Average metrics? Like
Sum (Properties) / Sum (Objects) ?
If I can’t manage this in Datasets, where do I can?
thanks again!

[HFisher7]

Hey @smcmillian,
I’ve been using datasets and loving the new conditional fields BETA.
Is there a function that will round a calculated number to a set number of decimal places - ideally 2 decimals, not integer like the CEIL function?!

[DRebellon]

@smcmillian ,
Looking through the functions, I couldn’t find one that rounds to a specified decimal place.
Is there anything like this in the works?

And is there any way to add symbols or formatting?
I was hoping to use the round function for percentages and currency amounts.

[BCovell]

Hello, I have a use case- on Contacts I added a field “Contact Type” which can be either Student, Teacher, Parent1, or Parent2. In a report I was hoping to “self join as I would in SQL where I would join 3 contact rows from the Contact table each selecting the corresponding ContactType”- this way I could grab or dot-walk fields from a student, teacher, AND a students Parents…Most CRMs enable this- also a trivial self-join in SQL (aliasing Contact table to 3 contact types and joining on common key). In Hubspot I would love to see this capability- I was hoping that I could create 3 datasets, one for each Contact Type, and be able to join through another Custom object (that I call Enrollment). In a nutshell, I am trying to help a non-profit to help them manage simple student enrollments to get them out of spreadsheets! What do you think? Now, my latest thinking is to create 3x2 custom fields to bring over the Teacher, Parent1, and Parent2 Name & Phone…