So I’ve recently started a position at my company where I have been put in charge of CRM Automation through HubSpot.
I’ve run into a tricky situation where the country field was a free form entry box where the user could type whatever they wanted. I wanted to change this to a drop-down where all the countries are already listed (to avoid typos).
But of course, properties cannot be edited if they are present in a record (at least not in the way I need to edit them). How many records are there with this incorrect property configuration? 11,000+…
I can try deleting the property from those records, fix it, and add it back, but:
1. That would be an insane amount of time and work with 11k entries
2. I’m afraid of making mistakes, like adding the wrong country by accident or forgetting which country the contact had before.
Does anyone know of a way where I can manage this?
For some reason that eludes me, HubSpot still makes the country field a single-line text by default.
Here’s how you would change it:
Create a custom single-line text property called “Country/Region (temporary)”.
Use a contact-based workflow to enroll records where “Country/Region” is known, then use the “Copy property value” action to copy the value from “Country/Region” to “Country/Region (temporary)”.
Make sure that that “Country/Region” is not referenced anywhere (forms, workflows, lists) - you can do this under Settings > Properties *
Bulk edit all contacts where “Country/Region” is known and empty the “Country/Region” field: Bulk edit records
Change the property type of “Country/Region” to dropdown, use the “Load options” feature to pre-populate the dropdown with countries automatically.
Identify the most optimal way to get the information from “Country/Region (temporary)” back into the new dropdown field. This could be export/import, workflow, bulk editing. Let me know if you need more details here. Copying it back directly is not possible as single-line text cannot be copied into dropdown properties.
Re-establish all references, if needed (forms, lists, workflows).
Archive “Country/Region (temporary)” once you’re done.
* If there are too many assets that are already referencing the single-line text field, you might have to create a new country dropdown field and slowly migrate off the old one, replacing the old property with the new one, one-by-one. You’ll end up with two country properties, as the default one cannot be archived.
Hello @karstenkoehler , I only ran into one problem: our Outlook Contacts Integration is connected to the property 8 times. I managed to get one of the sales people to remove it on their end, but no luck with the rest. Can I as a HubSpot admin somehow remove it myself? When I go to “Integrations” within settings, there is no Outlook Contacts Integration on my end (probably because I as a user have not installed it myself).
It seems a bit crazy that an admin wouldn’t be able to remove an integration connecting to their account, even if they aren’t the user who installed it…
Hi there, I’m Sabrina and I work on the HubSpot product team.
What you’re describing is something we’re actively prioritizing on our roadmap. If you’re open to it, I’d love to connect and learn more about your use cases, and walk through a few design concepts to make sure we’re building the right solution for customers. Thank you!
This is super helpful… I will give this a try!
You saved me tons of time between labor and chasing down my sales people haha!