Report for Business Unit

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Dashboards & Reporting
1

Hey all,

I`m having a small problem and would like to see if anybody can help me with this.

We have a couple of BU(Business Unit) and I`m trying to create separate reporting on activities. Currently on the Deal side it works great but on the contact side it`s not working.

We have a field that it shows which BU they`re belonging and a lot of the contacts are shared between different BU. When I try to see reporting on emails or calls done for BU a or b I can`t get specific numbers. The only way this could work is if I duplicate the contact so each BU have their own contacts but this would increate our contacts massively. Does anybody have any recommendations on this?

Thank you in advance.

2

Hey @tiago_bezerra, thank you for posting in our Community!

To address this, consider using custom properties or activity tags to align activities with the relevant BU better. This can help improve reporting without duplicating contacts.

To our top experts @TomM2 and @danmoyle do you have any recommendations for @tiago_bezerra matter?

Thank you and happy new year!

Pam

3

Thank you for replying on this. How could I achieve using the tags for the activities automatically? I was wondering whow this would be done without the agent having to manually add the tag when he have a activitie with the customer related to a specific BU.

4

Hey there @tiago_bezerra.

It seems like you’re experiencing something others have seen as well: creating separate reporting for activities across different Business Units in HubSpot can be challenging, especially when contacts are shared between BUs and you want to dig into how they interact with your BUs. I did a little poking around and here’s what I found.

First, you mentioned that reporting on the deal side works well. This is likely because deals are typically associated with a specific Business Unit, making it easier to filter and report on them. That makes sense. Keep that in mind, and maybe you can add a filter to reports that looks at contacts asociated with Deals in a specific BU.

If I understand correctly, the main challenge you’re facing is with contact-level reporting, particularly for activities like emails and calls. As I understand HubSpot, this is because contacts can belong to multiple BUs and activities like emails and calls are associated with contacts, not directly with BUs.

As @PamCotton mentioned, you could use custom properties to help. If you create a custom multi-select property for contacts called “Business Unit Activities,” you can manually update it whenever an activity is performed for a specific BU. But this means your reps have to do it, which can add human error to the equation.

Instead, you could set up workflows to automatically update the “Business Unit Activities” property based on certain criteria, such as:

  • Email sent from a specific BU
  • Call logged by a user associated with a particular BU

Another cool update to HubSpot is “Sync Properties.” You could create sync properties on the contact object to pull information from associated deals. This can help you indirectly associate activities with BUs based on deal information.

I’m also wondering if creating dynamic lists for each BU based on the “Business Unit Activities” property could help. You would then ese these lists in your reports to filter contacts by BU involvement.

Speaking of reporting, here’s my initital finding on some custom reporting solutions that might help. Build a custom report with this set up:

  • Set deals as the primary data source
  • Add contacts as a secondary data source
  • Apply filters based on contact list membership or custom properties

This approach should allow you to report on deals and associated contacts while filtering by BU.

Hopefuly this helps inspire a solution to help you create more accurate reports on activities across different Business Units without duplicating contacts.

5

Thank you @danmoyle for this. It helps a lot, but I got a few questions.

In my team, the sales reps are the same for all BU. So if Rep talk to customer offering product A, but he`s a fit for product B then we`ll pivot and work on the deal.
Lot of times the rep will call,email to customer on the contact page or be prospecting before creating a deal for those the sync property I don`t think would work. Besides the manually update of a property, what would be a different approach in this case?
I know that the perfect scenario would be having 1 contact per BU, but that`s not something we can afford now.
Thank you,

6

@tiago_bezerra I’m glad it helped some. I think with your team structure, you might have a couple other potential solutions.

You could create custom properties for each activity type (calls, emails, meetings) that allow reps to associate the activity with a specific BU. This can be done by:

  1. Adding a custom “Business Unit” dropdown field to activity logging forms
  2. Creating workflows that prompt reps to select the relevant BU after completing an activity

You could also potentially put a tagging system for activities into practice:

  • Create a standardized set of tags for each BU (e.g., #BU-A, #BU-B)
  • Train reps to add these tags to activity notes or descriptions
  • Use the HubSpot reporting tools to filter and group activities based on these tags

If you have BUs, I think you’re on an enterprise hub, so maybe creating a custom object for BU-specific interactions would help.

  • Create a “BU Interaction” object linked to contacts
  • Include fields for BU, interaction type, and other relevant details
  • Set up workflows to create these objects automatically based on activity criteria

I think when you stretch HubSpot as you are, you’re not going to find a necessarily “easy” answer, but hopefully I’ve given you some options to think about.

It may also come down to hiring someone to consult with you and your team on data structure, reporting, and the like. A freelancer or a HubSpot solutions partner with a strategist could help more 1:1.