Is there a way to sort by last contact owner?

[MPhillips6]

In our center, when an agent makes a sale, we trasnfer ownership of the contact to our management. However, I want to create reports of all our agents, but any agent that has had their ownership of a contact transferred to management, I can't see that contact in the data. Is there a way to sort by the previous owner? Or maybe sort by the last person who called them?

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @MPhillips6,

I would approach this differently. For reporting purposes (and because of the problems you mentioned), I'd recommend not changing the contact owner.

If you need a way to assign contacts to management, you can always create an additional owner property. A property can have the type "Single-line text", "Dropdown" but also "HubSpot user". In other words, you can create a "Management owner" property which behaves exactly like the contact owner.

This would allow you to keep the (sales) contact owner information but still give management a way to filter for their contacts.

Filtering for previous values in HubSpot doesn't scale well so I'd almost always recommend the above.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

[MPhillips6]

The reason we do this is so that the closed contacts no longer appear on an agents contact list so that they can focus on all their new leads. 

You say filtering by previous values doesn't scale well, but is it possible anyway?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @MPhillips6,

If you want sales users to be have a better overview of relevant contacts, this would be a matter of creating better filtered views for them. Unassigning contacts removes a very important data point from records, meaning that a lot of reports either become meaningless or don't generate any insight. I really would advise against it and would recommend to create filtered views for sales users that exclude contacts from their views based on other criteria such as lead status, lifecycle stage etc.

This is one of the scenarios where a small change in HubSpot usage would solve all problems. Trying to accommodate a neglible user preference however creates problems in reporting and increases complexity.

The only way to access previous owner values is via the "has ever been any of" property filter in lists. This means that you need to create one list per sales user.

Another option would be to copy the contact owner value in a custom sales owner property before you clear it / assign it to management, via workflow. I'd still advise against it but theoretically it's an option.