Contacts partitioning system needed for large HubSpot portals

[RiccardoPisani]

Hi all, 

We operate in more than 10 countries and we all use the same HubSpot instance.

Every country has dedicated teams: sales, customer, marketing - In total, we have ~1k HubSpot users.

We have several marketing teams and around 1k active workflows that send emails every day, set properties and automate sales, marketing, and cs processes. 

Contacts are segmented using several properties as you can imagine and the property `country` is the most important when it comes to geo-segmentation.    

It happened twice that by mistake a marketing team sent an email to the wrong country. This has serious consequences and I cannot exclude it'll happen again, human mistakes are always around the corner. 

I see that HubSpot is putting a lot of effort into content partitioning lately and that's great news! What I feel is missing for huge HubSpot portals operating into multiple countries is a contact partitioning system!

In my use case, a country should only be able to send emails and enroll in workflows contacts that belong to it or, at least, have the possibility to do so. Team and content partitioning help to some extent but e.g: they don't prevent to set a workflow with wrong conditions and send emails to the whole contact base.

In our case, even if we are all part of the same group and we all have the same mission, every country has its own identity, language, rules, and every country operates with hight degrees of autonomy!

Many times we discussed switching to a multiple Hubspot instances scenario - In my opinion, this is not the way to go because, as you can imagine, it would increase entropy,  costs, and workload.

I am curious to hear, from the community, if you have ever faced this situation and how you managed it, and from Hubspot would be great understanding if contacts partitioning is something that has been evaluated as part of the partitioning framework recently under development.

Thank you!

Kind regards,

Riccardo

[SPhillips]

@RiccardoPisani, we have a similar issue, but across brands instead of countries. Content property partitioning is a great feature we're making use of, however, as you have stated, this doesn't stop a contact from falling into a workflow or list by mistake! The idea of excluding lists from workflows may help with this - we use a lot of exclusions to minimise errors in workflow enrolment and email sends.

We have a bit of a more complex layer too, in that sometimes we want the contacts to receive completely separate messaging from the brands, but some of our contacts overlap across brands (use more than one of them), so this proves difficult to manage and a straight contact division wouldn't suit.

Would be great to have a greater degree of flexibility when deciding whether a contact, or their properties/activities, are visible to one or more teams, or can be enrolled in workflows/lists that are assigned/linked to each team.

[RiccardoPisani]

Hi there @SPhillips I totally see the point - I was thinkign that the best way would be partition contacts based on 2 or 3 properties and assign then teams based on that - e.g:

https://monosnap.com/file/a5CPmdu6EZZtEztSxmEJLzpfvsILfY

What do you think?

Riccardo

[SPhillips]

Yep - so you could definitely do that!

Or enrol into lists based on properties and make those lists only available to certain teams.

[mgeorgieva]

Richard, thank you so much for this post! We hear you loud and clear. In fact, we are in the process of talking to customers with similar setup like you and understanding better your team structure and where partitioning may fall short today. Would you be interested in spending 30-45min chatting with us?

Regarding the contact partitioning, the way we've approached this so far is to have a team and partition the list by team. So if you are on team A and build a list, in it you will only see contacts that have been assigned to any of the sales reps in team A. That means team B won't be able to use that same list for an email.  This is one way to help with the separation issue, but I'd love to have a more extensive discussion with you, if you are open to it.

Best,
Maggie

Product Managers

Users & Teams

[RiccardoPisani]

Hi Maggie, this is great news, I'd love to jump on a call and discuss contact partitioning!

I look forward to it!

Thanks, 
Riccardo 

[khorne]

As an option for the short term, you could always create a supression list for each team... So if the France team sends an email, and then use their supression list for that email or workflow that includes all contacts not in France... that is a way to ensure those contacts that arent getting included no matter what.  Obviously its work for that team to remember to always use that, but for a complicated workflow or big send, it can always be used as an option.

[RiccardoPisani]

Hi there @khorne and thanks for your suggestion - This is a great point and for sure would decrease the probabilities of mistakes! However, I would still be worried about possible mistakes as you are mentioning!

Tnx a lot for your answer,
Riccardo