How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

mgeorgieva
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hello all,

 

My name is Maggie Georgieva and I'm a Product Manager working to improve our customers' experience with users and asset management. We've recently launched partitions - the ability to assign assets such as landing pages, forms, calls-to-action, emails, lists, dashboards, email subscriptions to teams, and would love to hear how you are using it.

 

What are the primary ways in which you've separated your assets across teams? Was there anything that you wish worked differently? 

 

Share your feedback in this channel so we can learn from your experience, improve the features and expand on them in the way that makes the most sense to you. Thank you so much for your time and willingness to help.

 

Best,

Maggie

60 Replies 60
LRocha05
Participant

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

I am working with a client with more than 1000 agents who need privacy on marketing emails at the user level. Instead of managing individual emails, it would be great to be able to put emails into folders and then be able to manage the access to the folder itself. 

P.s I know you can assign marketing emails to folders AND that you can manage access to individual marketing emails, but you cannot manage the access to a folder currently 🙂

0 Upvotes
SLoo
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi team,

It'll be great if we could further partition Knowledge Base assets within the portal. Thank you!

jasonmudd9
Participant | Partner
Participant | Partner

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

My team is saying that they can't access the Conversation Template folders when I share its links with them.
Instead, I have to share each template's unique link within the folder. That seems counterproductive. How might we fix that so they can view and access the folder view?
0 Upvotes
mgeorgieva
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

@psimeoni That's something that's not possible yet but we're currently discussing. 

0 Upvotes
psimeoni
Participant

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hello @mgeorgieva ! We have multiple business units in a single Hubspot instance, not sure if we are partitioning, but can you also have more than one GoToWebinar integration, meaning one per "partition?" If we can only integrate with one GoToWebinar, that won't work for us because of possible webinar overlap, so we use Zapier as a workaround. Thanks!

0 Upvotes
mgeorgieva
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi Joe,

 

When you say "unique" contacts I imagine they are completely different people. Are you saying it's the same person that exists twice? Maybe we can talk through this over zoom. I will DM you to find a good time!

 

Best,

Maggie

0 Upvotes
mgeorgieva
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Thanks so much for the feedback, Joe. These are great questions and scenarios.

Today you can partition the email preference groups, but we still need to add the re-subscribe piece. The team will be taking a look at this in the coming months, so stay tuned.

 

For the database partitionined, right now you can accomplish complete separtion through the Everything/Team/Owned only persmissions you can grant to a user. That being said, if you create multiple user properties (in addition to the default HubSpot one), you can have a contact be owned by two sales reps from different teams, for example. When that happens, both reps will see the contact. Does that make sense?

 

Happy to chat over zoom about both of these if you are interested.


Best,

Maggie

0 Upvotes
JoeDavies
Top Contributor | Elite Partner
Top Contributor | Elite Partner

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi @mgeorgieva - thanks for this!

Sounds good, I think a lot of people will be keen to see that feature!

On the multiple contact owners, would that be using this feature

That sounds like it would solve that scenario, but it does raise another question - what would happen if there were two separate and unique contacts in Salesforce, ie one unique record for each region?

Given contact owner is a mandatory two-way sync, and you cannot have two contacts with the same email address in HubSpot (both rightly, IMO), how would this work - would there be clashes with the main contact owner field potentially being updated incorrectly from Salesforce?

Also, how would we manage that double owner assignment in an automated way?

Thanks for all your support as I get my head around this!

0 Upvotes
TylerScionti
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi  Joe!

 

Maggie mentioned you  had some questions regarding resubscription in  the subscriptions partitioning beta, I am the PM on our  Subscriptions team and am happy to assist.

 

Right now our resubscription via form feature (which allows any form to send a resubscription email to  a contact  if they are unsubscribed) does not work with  the subscriptions partitioning beta, however  we are actively  researching solutions and prioritizing the work needed to fill this gap. For now the best way  for contacts to resubscribe is  via an email they've been sent so they can get to the preferences page and opt  back into email.

 

If  you have any  questions or want to  chat about  our roadmap on this let me know!

JoeDavies
Top Contributor | Elite Partner
Top Contributor | Elite Partner

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi @mgeorgieva,

Thanks for creating this thread for discussion on what is a much-needed tool - it's great to see it live!

We have a use case issue that is likely quite common, where Salesforce is the primary/lead platform.

In this case, where not all sales users are assigned a HubSpot login, and not all contacts have an owner in Salesforce, it's making partitioning lists a problem, as contacts 'disappear' from send lists.

I feel the solution would be far better if the lists were visible/not visible based on the partitioning you set, but that the contacts present within it would remain / be viewable based on the HubSpot users permissions - ie the list permission operating independently of the contact permission.

I chatted with support about it, and they were unsure if a contact could be enrolled in a workflow / sent a list email even if not visible to the sender, which is a little concerning too!

We've also had some bugs with the hierarchy, where child teams are being forced to have access to the parent team's preference group,

I would have expected that the parent has visibility of the child team's Preferecne Centre, given the hierarchy, but not vice versa. 

Overall a great feature though, and I'm sure all the bugs will be ironed out!

Thanks,
Joe

0 Upvotes
mgeorgieva
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Great feedback, Joe. We're actually in the middle of scoping out that exact change - for list partitioning to operate independently of the contact permissions a user has. Stay tuned! In the meantime, you can create a "test" marketing user that owns these unassigned contacts.

 

If you are using the partitioning today, an email won't go out to contacts who don't meet the critera because they aren't owned by anyone on the team.

 

On your last point - "We've also had some bugs with the hierarchy, where child teams are being forced to have access to the parent team's preference group" where did you see that? You're right that the correct order is that the parent has visibility of the child team's assets.

 

best,

Maggie

0 Upvotes
JoeDavies
Top Contributor | Elite Partner
Top Contributor | Elite Partner

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi @mgeorgieva, thanks for getting back to me!

How far along is the list/contact owner partitioning separation? And on the hierarchy point, I was playing around with it, and they bug seemed to have resolved itself - must have been a temporary issue that was caught and fixed.

I have some additional feedback and questions on further inspection of the tool:

1) Re-subscription emails via forms & partitioned preference groups:
This is an essential feature of what is already a very clunky re-subscribe process, so not having this feature on partitioned preference centre groups would cause a lot of issues where contacts wanted to re-subscribe, and cannot do so via a form, leaving just these two options:

- Re-subscribe via footer of an old email sent via HubSpot - not always possible for sales generated contacts that have not been sent emails, or opt-outs from data migrated from another marketing platform

- Take the details of the contact's request to be re-subscribed to support, and have them force-send a HubSpot branded re-subscription email on the back end - this is clunky, manual and time-consuming!

This is also particularly difficult if the account is integrated with Salesforce, where a salesperson's marked unsubscribes/re-subscribes on the CRM side would not be a two-way street in HubSpot (which is confusing for the salesperson!).

Is there a timeline for this addition?

It's really key to be able to point customers/prospects to forms to re-subscribe, and confusing for them (and internal teams) when they submit a form and tick the subscribe option, but are not opted back in.

2) Managing a strictly partitioned database, that also includes exceptions:
What is the process for this scenario - and is it manageable?

Let's say a database needs to be very strictly partitioned between teams, meaning zero visibility of contacts owned by other regions.

As you say, a dummy contact owner on the team could be set via workflow for all unassigned contacts a team needs visibility of, such as new form submissions in that region, but what happens if there are exceptions to the rule, such as a handful of contacts that operate globally, and multiple teams need to interact with those contacts.

How would we build that into the process?

I was wondering if you could create "visibility bridging contact owners", that could just own these contacts, and the user could sit across multiple teams. This would be problematic where contacts have a specific sales owner already - and this could even be two people if we're talking about Salesforce records, where there could be two owners of two equal records in the CRM.

Perhaps you could create a list of these contacts via a "Multi-region contact" tickbox property, and create a list of these contacts which is owned by a secondary team, of which all users are assigned to.

Keen to know if there's a defined process for situations like this as I'd imagine it crops up for a lot of teams with strict partitioning requirements. Am I close to the mark with any of these ideas?

Thanks,
Joe

0 Upvotes
JenP
Contributor

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi Maggie,

We recently upgraded our account to Enterprise.  The reason for upgrading was to add a second company (as opposed to brand).   We have 2 separate companies that are very different. One is a distributor of products, the other is a start up manufacturer.  We were advised the best option was to Enterprise and the way to separate the businesses was partitioning.

I envisaged partitioning two companies would entail a drop down box and you select one or the other company.  However now I realise I have to put a field in to select between the businesses, for contacts, deals, companies - then assign teams to emails, landing pages, socials etc.    This causes so many problems for me, because I can only customise to a point and I'm also reliant on individuals to click the right box.  There are instances like ie: a sales person sends and email, links to Hubspot, but no contact is in Hubspot.  So a new contact is created, but it overrides a default field to check the business.   I'm supposed to be a marketer, but now become and IT and CRM management person.

 

I think partitioning is great for different brands under one company, but it's not ideal for 2 separate companies.

 

Thanks

Jenny

mgeorgieva
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi Jenny,

 

Thanks for the feedback. Do the two companies have anything in common? Would you ever cross-sell or upsell, or share assets across them?

 

I think there are definitely changes we can introduce to make it easier to set up and manage multiple brands in HubSpot, but there is definitely still a use case for having multiple accounts if the companies are completely separate, no need for upsell and cross-sell, or shared reporting. 

 

Best,
Maggie

JenP
Contributor

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi Maggie, 

 

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.  I've been madly setting up the other business.

 

We are two separate companies, one is a Inline - distributor of medical & dental products and the other company is Visionflex which is a start-up/manufacturer of a medical device. We don't really cross-sell or upsell. Although we do have Visionflex products on the Inline website, but we funnel them back to Visionflex to follow up sales enquiries. It's a bit weird.  And we don't have shared reporting either.

 

Our contacts are separate, so we aren't crossing over.  However, when it comes to companies there is a crossover.   Our contacts are different, but they might work for the same company ie: state health organisation.   That's about it.  At the moment I haven't assigned companies to either business because we are looking to implement another software system to integrate with Hubspot, but will be used in only 1 of the businesses, Inline.  So here comes my next challenge.

 

Partitioning social sites is extremely difficult, because of the permissions.  I don't want either company to have access to the others site (in case they forget to check the Posting from dropdown).  However, permissions doesn't really allow this because the option of 'their account's only' means that no one else can post, unless you check 'share'.  So essentially then you are back to everyone seeing both companies because there is more than 1 person who will post to the social sites.  It took me awhile to figure out that i'd have to get others in the team to link Hubspot to their accounts.  At the moment, both companies are linked via my social accounts.

 

I'm trying to foolproof as much as I can, but if one of the reps sends an email from Outlook and links it to Hubspot and there isn't a contact set up, then a new contact is created, but not assigned to either company because there's no other information other than the email address.  So I can't do a workflow in this instance.

 

I'm not working on creating alot more workflows to try and capture every different possible scenario, but I'm not going to be able to do them all.  

 

Thanks & regards

Jenny

 

I was really hoping for it to be a clear separation of the two companies to avoid entries being done incorrectly.  

0 Upvotes
Ellesyanna
Contributor | Diamond Partner
Contributor | Diamond Partner

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi!

What we're currently missing is social partitioning.

Ideally - we would want people to only be able to post to the social channels of their team + view reports of social performance only from their team channels.

So i'd like to submit this as an idea.

- Elles


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michael9
Participant | Platinum Partner
Participant | Platinum Partner

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

The additional partitioning tools are great. We are however running into problems with a client who is running 3 different brands on Enterprise:

1. All Users has access to Settings. There are clients who need to hide ALL Settings from certain Users.

2. Although there have been significant partitioning improvements, there are clients in an Enterprise environment who need the option to comprehensively limit certain Users ie limit the view of Campaigns, Reporting, Conversartions, Social etc

0 Upvotes
mgeorgieva
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Thank you so much for this feedback!

 

- If a new user has limited permissions they shouldn't  be able to edit any Settings. However, in this case you don't want these users to see any of the Settings at all? Out of curiosity, what roles are those users - sales reps or freelancers?

 

- Can you elaborate on the type of limiting you want in those other areas? Completely limit if users can see those tools, or sepratate parts of these tools? 

 

We can chat more in person if you want! Here is my meetings link if you are interested in grabbing 30min: https://app.hubspot.com/meetings/mgeorgieva2

 

Best,

Maggie

 

0 Upvotes
osmith
Participant

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Hi there!

 

I've read a few other comments about this same issue below, but my most important request is that partitioning in all the tools should work like how it does in Email. 

 

Currently, I can assign Emails to multiple teams (using checkboxes). Whereas, in Lists for example, I can only assign a List to one team from a drop-down menu. This is very problematic for our team, and we won't use partitioning if this isn't changed.

 

Our business has three "geos" -- US, UK, and Australia -- and we mostly want to use the partitioning tool to filter our portal by geo, as Folders is not a good solution for this. We also would like to use it to separate out data in dashboards by geo. But it's also important that we can assign every email, list, etc. to "All Geos" which we have another team for. As we aren't really using partitioning to stop specific teams from looking at other teams' content.

 

Hope this makes sense. Seems like a relatively doable fix since this functionality already works in the Email tool. Please let me know if you need more context! 🙂

0 Upvotes
mgeorgieva
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

How are you using partitioning? What's working well and what can be improved?

Thank you so much for your feedback. We are currently working in reconciling the differences you've pointed out. Your use case makes perfect sense. Stay tuned for updates to the UX here.


Best,

Maggie

0 Upvotes