How to handle staff of elected officials?

[AJZ927]

Hello!

I've been using Sales Hub Professional for about 6 months.  The endless customization is amazing, but can be overwhelming at times.  I'm pretty sure that I've been doing everything wrong, however just need to do the best I can right now as I don't have the time to dedicate at the moment to earning my "masters degree" through HubSpot Academy.  I need to make sales!

One target market for my company is elected officials.  Specifically, staffers in the communications departments of US Congress, State Legislatures, US Governors, etc.  My main issue is the extremely high turnover and how to keep everything straight in the long-run.  I have been importing contacts every few months from an Excel doc, but am now running into issues where I have duplicate contacts and can see this being a major issue going forward.  I have not been creating "Companies" that these contacts are attached to, but I'm thinking that might be the way to go.

Here's a completely hypothetical example.  House Rep A from California has CD 1 as comms director on my initial contact import.  Two months later an import to update contacts now has CD 2 as comms director for House Rep A from California, but CD 1 moved over to comms director for House Rep B from New York.  The problem is that CD 1's email address remains the same.  Then throw in the issue where House Rep A loses to House Rep C in an election and a completely new administration is in place and everything becomes really messed up.

My options would be to overwrite the old contacts with the new ones on import.  Or completely change my strategy by creating a "Company" for each seat filled by an elected official and just have the contacts change upon each upload or when an a new administration takes over.  

Hopefully that wasn't too confusing.  I'm wanting to set up some email marketing sequences to these staffers of elected officials.  Even if I have to take a wrecking ball to what I'm currently doing so I'm not pulling my hair out in 6 months it'll be worth it.

Thanks!

[JFrerking]

From time to time, I have searched for a similar situation that I find to be a challenge in HubSpot and this conversation is very similar in nature, so I will post this here.  It would be helpful to have a feature that provides an “Elected Officials” association option for public-sector agencies.  Here is a summary of the challenge:

Elected officials (executive & legislative branch bodies, city council members, boards & commissions, county commissioners, etc.) are CONTACTS that have a unique ROLES within a COMPANY that have their own temporary position & title that are connected to the COMPANY, even though the same CONTACT may have a separate formal place of employment, title, etc.

This temporary ROLE is continuously churning, that makes tracking them in HUB challenging when done as a traditional CONTACT/COMPANY association. It would be usefule to develop a way to capture this unique data that is permanently connected to the COMPANY (e.g., Xxxxxxx County Presiding Commissioner; City of Yyyyyyyy Council Member; etc.), that allows a CONTACT to be associated with the ROLE, instead of directly with the COMPANY. It would also be nice to use this to capture relevant data to the ROLE, such as election date, term end date, next election date, etc. One could also auto-assign a task to update office-holder information after the next election date.

[AJZ927]

Thanks for the feedback @JFrerking!  Your suggested solution sounds like it would be extremely helpful for someone like me who's HubSpot is a complete disaster this time of year with a huge number of contact info being incorrect with staffers moving from one office to another in the US House and Senate.  At least there are others out there that can feel my pain in dealing with staffers for elected officials and government administration.

[JFrerking]

Thanks for your feedback and I only have to deal with the elected officials (mainly state/local), and can only imagine how much more difficult this would be if I were tracking staff, aides, etc.!! I put this same request into HubSpot as a ticket, so will see if they can create a feature that allows associating persons (Contacts) directly with the reoccurring "roles" for public-sector clients, instead of having to associate them directly with the clients (Companies) themselves. Fingers crossed!

[Emma_M]

Hi @AJZ927 , 

Thank you for reaching out to the Community!  As outlined in our knowledge base here, the unique identifier for contact records in HubSpot is the 'email address' property.  To avoid duplicate contacts moving forward, you will want to ensure that property is populated on contact records.  In your example it sounds as though contact information continues to change,  you can update records in bulk through several different methods which are outlined in our documnetation here! 

I would also love to hear from @JonasDeMets and @Gilempert - any recommendations or ideas on how to organize contacts that have a high turnover rate and change frequently? 

Best, 

Emma 

[AJZ927]

Thanks for the info @Emma_M !  I appreciate your reply and advice.

[Gilempert · Accepted solution]

Hi @AJZ927! I feel your pain 😂 Data management is always challenging, but it becomes even more challenging under such conditions.

Besides what @Emma_M shared, I can say that based on your example, if the Job Title for example, remains the same, you can try creating sequences that focus on the challenges a Comms Director faces. If I were you I would try to identify the key components that remain more stable and work on that to personalize the communication.

Wish you the best!

[AJZ927]

Thanks for your input @Gilempert!  I really appreciate it!