[Now Open] AMA with Karsten Köhler

[sharonlicari]

Hey Community,

@karstenkoehler is a high-valued member and a thought-leader of our DACH and EN Communities. Karsten is currently at the top of our leaderboard in both communities and the quality of content that Karsten has consistently delivered is remarkable. 

Karsten was able to reach 1000 solutions accepted in less than a year and a half.

From the 19th of July until the 23rd of July you will have the opportunity to ask Karsten anything you want about him, his experience, knowledge and HubSpot.

Here are some sample questions could be:

• What is your favorite HubSpot tool
• What is the toughest question you've answered on the Community
• What are your tips for customizing your CRM

Have fun! 🙂

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @TBowie,

This has been brought up by other users before. Like HubSpot Insights, you can't change how the duplicate identification works exactly, unfortunately. It follows the rules described here: "comparing two records' names, email addresses, IP countries, phone numbers, zip codes, and company names."

I'd recommend posting to the HubSpot Ideas section of the community or reaching out to your customer success manager to flag this.

Best regards!

[UWilliams]

Hi @karstenkoehler ,

I've recently joined a new company and I'm looking into sorting out the duplicates. Is there a way to run a report to see how they have been caused? Imports or other apps that automatically create new contacts and companies? They have somebody that cleans the data in SF but not in Hubspot. 

Thanks!

Ulrike

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @UWilliams,

Not out-of-the-box unfortunately. With HubSpot's duplicates tool (Professional and Enterprise), you can choose to show the source for the contacts that you're comparing and include the original source:

But this information cannot be displayed in reports because it's a comparative information and HubSpot isn't looking at two contacts at the same time in reports. You'd have to label these contacts with a custom property (e.g. Duplicate contact with values "Original" and "Duplicate") to be able to create reports on this.

Hope this helps!

[TimSeabrook]

Hi Karsten, what API is available to screenpop the HubSpot client screen based on the Calling Line ID (CLID) or ANI of an incoming phone call? I see that you have a Calling Extensions SDK but this is only applicable to outbound calls.

thanks, Tim

[dennisedson]

@TimSeabrook ,

Presently, only outbound calls are supported; however, this is a very sought after feature and is being worked on for a future iteration of the SDK.  I do not have a firm timeline on it, but I know that it is actively being pursued. 

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @TimSeabrook,

Thanks for the question! Just for clarification, I'm not HubSpot support 😉

Unfortunately the API is not my strong suit – @dennisedson could you assist?

Best regards!

[dennisedson]

@karstenkoehler , you are my support system 😉

via GIPHY

[SSears13]

Appreciate all the help you provide here.   Question for you,   Is it possible to have people show on the forecast if they do not have an open deal against a pipeline? They have goals setup for that pipeline and as soon as they have an open deal they show on the forecast but I would like them to show from when they are first setup.

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @SSears13,

As far as I know HubSpot doesn't show null/empty data in reports. With the goals set up, this is a valid request however and I'd recommend you post this in the HubSpot Ideas section of the community.

Best regards!

[TRichards]

Question about deleting bounced or unsubscribed contacts. We have too many contacts in our database. There is a lot of advice about deleting hard bounced or unsubscribed people.

We are integrated with a different CRM than Hubspot. My fear is that these contacts will come back to Hubspot via the integration and be re-created. And since we won't have their bounce information any more, they will be sent messages that will bounce or that they don't want, then they'll mark us as spam.

Is this a common thing? 

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @TRichards,

One option here would be the GDPR delete in HubSpot: "GDPR deletion includes a blocklist functionality, which means that once a contact is GDPR-deleted, you will not be able to add them back to your account in the future." It would prevent these contacts from being added again by an integration.

In general, there are different approaches to tackling bounced or unsubscribed contacts and I wouldn't delete these per se. (This does however, as always, not constitute legal advice and your legal team is the best resource to give you advice.)

For example, you might have contacts that are either customers. You wouldn't want to delete these contacts even if they have bounced or unsubscribed. Same goes for bounced contacts talking to sales, your marketing emails might not go through, but calls and emails right from the rep inbox might.

I'd recommend thinking about the different types of contacts that you have in the system and how you would treat a bounce and unsubscribe for each of them. Some you'll want to GDPR delete, others you might want to research or follow-up on.

Hope this helps!

[auto-mate]

...The flywheel thinking is great and there are good planning charts there ...but... I fear if I explore that thinking with my organisation the lack of concrete Hubspot features to put it into practice will make thnigs cloudier 😉

The other paradigm I'm grappling with is source, and handling offline (non-Hubspot-tracked-inbound) source attribution. I "grew up" on Original Source being locked - but now we can edit it! Like most enterprises we have all kinds of data sources, data entry in myriad other systems and uploads/imports in various systems. 

I'm looking for best practice on the pros and cons of editing Original Source vs using custom offline source field values. Any thoughts?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi again @auto-mate,

I can't think of many cons here, the only one being human error, potentially.

If you import a list of contacts, check if these contacts have potentially been around in the CRM for a while. With a list, you can remove all contacts from that were created before the day of the import, to not overwrite more accurate previous data. If the Original source of the remaining contacts is offline, I don't see why you shouldn't change it to whatever information you have about the actual source of these contacts.

Best regards!

[auto-mate]

Hi Karsten, what do you think about handling "re-leading" i.e. contacts that re-enter the buyer journey - such as upselling or cross-selling to existing customers, or customers making unrelated product/service/solution purchases - specifically with respect to long B2B sales cycles?

We have this linear lifecycle approach with Hubspot - can we break it, should we break it?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @auto-mate,

Agreed, while HubSpot has introduced the flywheel model, the tool itself is mostly following a linear logic. How exactly you're "breaking" with this approach depends a lot on your requirements and sales process. Over the years I've set up different processes to handle upselling, cross-selling, resetting lifecycle stages after inactivity etc.

My recommendation would be to try to document your sales processes and requirements as accurately as possible. Not a fun task (unless you love process documentation, user stories and requirements), but invaluable if done correctly. If for example you need to see something specific in your reporting, you can then reverse engineer whether that affects HubSpot's linear lifecycle stage logic or whether you're fine using it as is and an assisting custom property will do for these reporting purposes.

I know this is a bit of a vague answer, but: it depends 😉

Great question!

[auto-mate]

I agree - I think the only answer is "it depends"!

[AHudson]

@karstenkoehler I can't believe there is a live AMA happening with you right now!

What advice would you give in regards to best organizing Sales assets for prospecting emails within Hubspot's horizontal folder system?  

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @AHudson,

Hahaha, I know, right?

This depends a bit on what exactly you're trying to achieve. If you want to use HubSpot's documents feature, this is a question about categorization and taxonomy, mostly. There are a few threads in the community about naming conventions, I would take these as starting points for how to name your files.

Regarding the folder structure, documents could be sorted into folders by topical area (e.g. industries), the sales process stage or deal stage they're usually needed in (e.g. exploratory call documents) or – if highly personalized – by sales rep.

Generally, the file system structure in HubSpot is limited, yes. I'd love to see more functionalities in the future here, too (multiple level folder structures, tagging etc).

If you need a sales asset management solution in general, I'd recommend having a look at digitial asset management software in the HubSpot App Marketplace. So far I've only used solutions that do not integrate well with HubSpot, unfortunately, but Brandfolder has been mentioned here and there in the community.

Thanks for the question!

[AHudson]

Thank you for doing this and all your help!

[TheMiz777]

What's your favorite suite of tools for Direct Mail + PURL campaigns? 

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @TheMiz777,

Haven't used one myself yet but Postalytics would be the first one I'd evaluate: Personalize HubSpot Landing Pages With pURLs

Thank you for the question!