Limit Contact Visibility by Team

[TMwd]

Hi, I've been reading KB articles and can't quite figure this out so I'm hoping someone can help me find clarity. 

We have two types of sales people in our organization. Lets call them Internal and External. External people have geographic territories, and Contacts are assigned to territories through Teams (IE, Northwest, Southeast, etc). 

Internal people should see all contacts - no issue there. I just added them to all teams. 

External users should only see the contacts for the team they are on. For example - All contacts within the geographic region are in Team EAST, and the external user is the primary of team EAST. I have the setting in Hubspot to limit visibility of Contacts to only their Team, but they still see everyone. 

Does it limit by the Hubspot Team the contact is defined as? OR (this is the big question) for this to work, does the Contact have to be OWNED by the team? Because right now, the Contact is owned by the Internal User. 

Thanks!

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @TMwd,

The fact that you're saying "the external user is the primary of team EAST" suggests that these users have an additional team – do they? If so, team-permissions apply to additional teams the same way they do for the primary team. This can effectively lead to these users seeing everything.

Generally, here's the expected behavior: If I am a user who has team-only view permissions, then I can see all the records I own or the records owned by users with whom I am in a primary or an additional team.

Records cannot be owned by teams, only by users.

Best regards

[TMwd]

I should qualify that. 

I mean that in the team, the external sales person is listed as the MAIN team member for that particular team. They do not belong to any other teams. Should this, by design, limit them from seeing people not in their Team. 

But I came across a bigger issue. It seems that when we imported our contacts from our old CRM, the import didn't match the Team properly. So now, most of our Hubspot Teams are wrong for our contacts (10,000 contacts.) I read something that the contact owner must be a member of the Team. Currently, the contact owner is an Internal Sales person - and they are members of MANY teams... so how would it choose which team to assign? it seems like it is randomly reassigning out contacts.  We used to manually assign the team in our old CRM - now it seems like I cannot assign the Hubspot Team? This is all very confusing. 

To fix this, do I have to assign the External sales person as the contact owner, instead of the internal? We do not want the external sales people editing contacts - the internal sale speople should be handling that. this is just very challenging to figure out. 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

@TMwd record ownership in HubSpot is entirely user based, see here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/records/how-to-set-a-record-owner -- assignment is not happening randomly, you have full control over it. If you're unsure how it's happening, check the property history if the owner field on a record.

Records cannot be assigned to teams directly (aside from manually sharing a record). The team if a record is just a reflection of the team the user is in.

Whether someone can access a record depends on whether it's assigned to them (owned only) or by someone in their team (team-only). Membership in multiple tams can easily mean that a user can effectively see all records, via shared team memberships.

(For exact instructions, I would have to better understand what internal and external sales people should be able to do and access, and examples that illustrate your team structure.)

[TMwd]

Thanks for your help. that worked!