Assigning PARTNER (SELLER) contacts to deals

[Rob-Clued]

I need advice / help please.

• We have a huge global partner, with thousands of Sellers.
• These SELLERS are in HubSpot and are often involved with DEALS for multiple COMPANIES.

Therefore, we want to track (at CONTACT level – but relating to DEALS)

• The number of deals they are involved in
• The associated revenue

I thought I would achieve this by the following approach

APPROACH ONE: CUSTOM PROPERTY

• Create a custom deal property with a controlled drop down of these SELLERS (they are uniquely marked in our HubSpot)
• Use the property to add the various SELLER contacts to.
• Then use WORKFLOWS and customer CONTACT properties to do Counts and Calculation.

This failed because you cannot create a Custom Property which allows CONTACT selection, outside of HubSpot users.

Therefore I tried a second approach.

APPROACH TWO: ASSOCIATIONS (CONTACTS TO DEAL)

• Use ASSOCIATIONS and a unique ASSOCIATION LABEL to associate these SELLERS with the DEALS.

The problem with this, is that the SELLERS activity (email, comms etc…) is synced up to the DEAL – but as each SELLER has multiple deals – unrelated comms from other DEALS gets synced from their record.

The Questions….

• APPROACH ONE: Is there anyway to create a controlled list drop down/check box of CONTACTS? I assume no.
  
  
• APPROACH TWO: Is there a way to stop ASSOCIATED CONTACTS with a certain LABEL from having all comms synced? – I assume no.

Therefore, if my assumptions are correct…. Is there any ideas, advice or functionality I am missing that could achieve this?

I am hoping there is a solution, as there must be many companies which have partners with huge amounts of sellers, and who need to be able to track seller success.

[adodge_603 · Accepted solution]

They can associate their conversations (logged emails, etc.) to the correct deal if they understand how the Sales Add-in tool functions. 

See the KB: Track and log emails with the HubSpot Sales Chrome extension

To explicitly select which records the email will log to:

• Click the dropdown menu next to the Log checkbox.
• Select and clear the checkboxes next to the records you want to log the email to.

[Rob-Clued]

Thanks for this response. If this is the only option - then it will be something we might have to accept. My only issue is that this is quite a cumbersome approach - our sales team have a lot of deals running due to the length of our sales cycles (up to 24 months in some cases) and their drop down will be bloated. Also, educating a vast sales team to follow this process is tough, but governing it even tougher with a high chance of the process not always being followed.

I wonder if there are other solutions or workarounds. Ideally I would make a custom property as a mandatory field when creating DEALS, so that this is just controlled - but obviously there is no option to add CONTACT drop downs as custom properties.

I appreciate your approach might be the only solutions - but I will leave it open (for now) in case there are any other suggestions.