What is the best way to track affiliate referrals in HubSpot CRM?

Smart CRM & Sales Hub CRM
1

I am looking for a CRM system that will allow me to run an affiliate scheme.

Basically we are a business consultancy and when we get a referral we pay a referral fee to the person who has referred them.

We need a way to track who has referred who.

There are sooo many options in Hubspot I am not sure which would be the correct option to use.

Wehave various members of staff who all use their own log ins to the system and track their own sales but I need an additional add on that will easily allow me to track the referals.

I am more than happy to upgrade to a paid service for this if someone could help me.

Thanks

Jenny
Moderator Note: this post was reviewed for relevancy and optimized for clarity on March 31, 2026. Thank you for your contributions to the HubSpot Community!

2

Hi @Jennyhardman, do you need this proceess to be automated? If so, I don’t think there’s much in the CRM but if you are willing to fill in this informaiont manually you could create a custom contact property for “Referral” and fill in that field. You could also have this field display in a form, so the referring party can fill in their name when making said referral.

3

It would be great if this could be an automated feature. We want to start doing a “refer a friend” program, but there seems to be no easy way (or any way) to do this with HubSpot atm.

4

I am struggling with the implmentation of this business request in HS for 7 years of this post. It seems the product team doesnot care. very sad

5

Automated would be great. Referred by and then when you type in the name, the contacts are queried. It would be simple to have this functionality. It would make reporting much easier. I would want to be able to see by contact who they had referred.

6

I created two custom contact fields:

1) referred by (i.e. if Joanie referred Chachi, I’d put Joanie’s name as the value in this field on Chachi contact record)

2) referred us to (i.e if Joanie referred Chachi, I’d put Chachi’s name as the value in this field)

Also, if you paste in the URL string for the HS contact record it will allow you to click on the link and go to the other contact record.

HS referral example.png
HS referral example.png806×106 16.3 KB

7

I may be wrong, but I don’t think this approach will allow you to store more than one referral for the referree. You may have an active connector who refers 10 leads your way. But this field only allows you to track one.

I’m frankly surprised this isn’t a feature of HS given how critical a role referrals plays in generating leads.

8

Have been wanting this functionality for years! Double upvote

9

I created this workaround (no automation, but trackability):

Adding fields:

  1. Create a Contact field labeled “Referred Contacts” as a multi-line text field (for multiple referrals, yay).
  2. Create a Deal field labeled “Referred by” as a single-line text field (if only one source can get credit, otherwise multi).
  3. Enable these fields in the Deal and Contact view.

For Tracking:

  1. Enter the name of the referred contact(s) into the contact information of the referrer (the person referring).
  2. On the referred Contact: Add the name of the referrer into the field “Referred by.”
  3. On the referred Contact, open the Deal (in my case, I give referrals not by contact but by the deal type / amount). Add the referrer as a contact to the deal. That way, you’ll always know when a deal closes with multiple contacts, to look at the “referred by” field in your deal information.
10

thank you for sharing @Ceeme

11

I posted this below but wasn’t’ sure if you’d get notified about it:

I created two custom contact fields:

1) referred by (i.e. if Joanie referred Chachi, I’d put Joanie’s name as the value in this field on Chachi contact record)

2) referred us to (i.e if Joanie referred Chachi, I’d put Chachi’s name as the value in this field on Joanie’s contact record)

Also, if you paste in the URL string for the HS contact record it will allow you to click on the link and go to the other contact record.

HS referral example.png
HS referral example.png806×106 16.3 KB

12

Hi there!

I have set this up for my company - we have a number of people who refer business and have developed a way to capture and track using forms, deals and workflows.

Essentially I did the following:

1. creating contact properties such as referred by (full name), referredby (email) and other fields that relate to the referral program such as commision fee, name of company they are referring, price they quoted etc.

2. creating coresponding deal properties (that will be used to copy the contact properties into a deal via a workflow). This will prevent the challenge that happens when 1 person fills out the form 10 times, there will be 10 unique deals to track the information.

3. creating a form using these fields. And adding this form to a landing page explaining how to use the form. For example: please fill out this referral form. You will get an email with a copy of the information. And anything else you want to add. For us, for example, we include links to different resources to support the referral partner.

4. creating a workflow such that when the form is filled out, a deal is created, and copies all info over from contact field into deal field.
There is also a workflow action to manage associations and association labels (e.g., label one contact as Referring partner and another as Referred contact on the same deal), which can make reporting cleaner than storing those roles only as plain-text properties

Optional extras we do - that may make sense!

* On the form, we have used the required field “Email” and have re-named it so that it appears as “Primary Contact of Referred Business” of the individual or company the referral person is referring. This way, when the deal is created, the company and the contact of the company that is being referred is auto-associated. We have a seperate property for “Referred by (email)”.

* Auto-associating contact and company: Since the “email” on the form is the primary contact of the referred business, this email of the contact and the associated company will be auto-associated to the deal. Depending on how you set this up, it may make more sense to have the referral individual as the associated contact.

* On the form, we have a field to allow for people to upload documents. This can be used to upload a contract for example.

* On the form, we have a required checkbox that has some simple language such as “by clicking this, you approve of submitting this referred business, and that our team can contact the individual above” or something similar.

13

+1 While the suggestions here are creative, hubspot really should have a native way to connect contact records to other contacts under an easy to sort and catgorize referral tracking feature.

14

Hi @wlott,

thank you for your comment. There are two product ideas in our Ideas Forum with a similar use case:

The HubSpot Ideas Forum is a place for HubSpot users to discuss feature requests with each other and the HubSpot Product Team. I would like to encourage you to participate in the idea thread by upvoting and commenting on the posts to bring it to our Product team’s attention and provide more context. Thank you!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team

15

The mind boggles that Hubspot does not have a proper way to track referrals.

16

Hey @ramasan,

To track referrals and references in HubSpot, you can follow these steps:

- Use the Traffic Analytics tool to track referrals. You can use the web traffic analysis tool (Sources report) to track referrals. In the Sources table, click the Sessions number next to Referrals to view the referrer domains that linked visitors to your site. Then click the Sessions number for a specific referrer domain to see the individual pages on that domain that link to your site. More information can be found here: “Understand HubSpot’s traffic sources in the web traffic analysis tool”.

- Utilize the Track and Log features of the HubSpot Sales Chrome extension to monitor and keep a record of your contacts’ engagement with your emails. With the track feature enabled, you can receive real-time notifications when a contact opens your email. You can also choose to log the email to the contact’s record in HubSpot to keep a record of all past communication for your team to reference. Find more information here: “Track and log emails with the HubSpot Sales Chrome extension”.

- Analyze social reports to track new contacts generated from web sessions driven by social media within the selected time period. This will help you understand the number of new contacts created in HubSpot as a result of web sessions driven by social media. More details can be found here: “Analyze social reports”.

I hope this information helps,

Pam

17

Thank you @PamCotton - appreciate the response. However what I’m looking for more specifically has to do with a particular contact referring a new contact. So email1 refers email2. Email2 refers email3. I’d like to be able to see the relationships between the referrals.

We don’t deal with a high number of customers or referrals, however it is important to keep track of who brought who in. I don’t understand why this kind of data isn’t built into the CRM.

18

Hey @ramasan, thank you for your follow-up.

One option is to utilize custom properties to manually input and track referral information. You can create custom properties for contacts to capture the referring contact’s email or other relevant details.
Additionally, you can leverage the “Associations” feature in HubSpot to link contacts together and establish a referral relationship.

Another approach is to use our reporting features to identify referral patterns and track the effectiveness of referral sources. You can report on referrals via custom reports and segments built off your referral properties/associations.

Kindly,

Pam

19

This approach might work well from a digitial marketing / web-analytics “referral source” perspective, but the challenge we (and likely others) face is much more strategic. We use the platform to capture and attribute the Companies and Associated Contacts that are candidates to be “Referral Partners”, and have a separate pipeline to track the progress of formalizing Referral Agreements with these partners. However, once a company becomes an official “Referral Partner” we’re not getting what we need from the platform to manage the rest of the collaborative sales lifecycle. We would love to understand how to better associate Prospects to a Referral Partner and if/how Hubspot could better support collaboratively working with one or more Referral Partners to bring deals to close. This is an essential aspect of Enterprise Level, B2B sales and should be seamless and fully integrated aspect of the solution for Sales Profressional subscribers.