Lists or reports, Tags or Custom properties - what's the difference, how to use effectively

[LCK]

I am new to using this CRM, exploring the free version at first to see how it works for my business. I have used another CRM in the past. I've been reading posts and can't quite figure out how to do something fairly simple.

I want to run a report each day that will list certain Contacts.

I want to list out who is in my "Group of 90", 90 Contacts that I need to keep in touch at least once a month. I also want to list out who is in my "Group of 20", 20 Contacts that I am trying to build relatinships with so that eventually I can move them into the Group of 90

Colleagues who use a competing CRM tell me that they use Contact Tags and then run Reports each morning. They tell me they reserve Custom Properties for more permanent features.

HS CRM doesn't seem to allow Tags for Contacts. They require I create Custom Properties. Is this correct?

Also, I can't figure out how to run the daily report. Or is it a list?

Thanks

[LCK]

Ah, that makes a lot of sense now. Thanks very much. I feel I have the info I need to work on this now.

[LCK]

Hi Karsten,

Thanks for  the detailed reply. I am a bit confused, but not entirely!

I understand that I want to use Lists (not Reports) for generating the daily groups of Contacts.

For my Group of 20 I believe that I want to use a Static List. The reason for this is that the Group of 20 are a group of people who I have not yet established a relationship with that I want to. They are sufficiently important people (Thought Leaders, or people with a strong potential to become a Lead eventually) that I am going to contact them individually, with truly personalized direct outreach messaging. Once I  have that relationship established, I will move the persion over into my Group of 90, who are people that I will contact every 30 days on an ongoing basis.

As I encounter new people I want to put into my Group of 90, I will first put them into my Group of 20.

My Group of 90 will be an Active List if I understand your explanation correctly. These people (who may be more than 90) are the people who I want to have pop up in a daily list telling me that it is time to do some form of updated contact to them, because it has been 30 days since I last did so.

No one will ever be in the Group of 20 and the Group of 90 at the same time. First they are in 20 (hopefully not for very long), then they move into 90 (where they will stay long term). I view the Group of 20 "tag" to be temporary, and the Group of 90 to be long term.

The part I am still a bit confused about is how to best indicate is someone is in the Group of 20 or if they are in the Group of 90 so that I can easily pull them up each day.

[All of this is intended for Contacts who are not yet Leads; the goal of course is to generate Leads from the Group of 90 as a result of keeping up with them on a 30 day basis.]

How well did I understand your explanation and what have I missed?

thanks again for your time explaining.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @LCK,

Correct, a static list for the Group of 20 would make sense if they don't have defined criteria but you know who they are. The Group of 90 list criteria could be:

Last contacted is more than 30 days ago

List membership is none of Group of 20

Lifecycle phase is none of Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist

Once you've created these lists, you could open them in two tabs and pin them to your browser. You can also filter your Contacts dashboard (Menu > Contacts > Contacts) by those lists, which is virtually the same but the user interface has a few more options. In the Contacts dashboard, click More filters, select List membership and pick your Group of 20 or Group of 90 list. You can then save these views.

Generally, in HubSpot, you're not running reports to start your sales day. HubSpot always presents all contacts to you – which you can then filter to your liking. By static lists, by active lists, by any contact property. You just need to know what you're looking for.

Hope this makes sense!

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @LCK,

How are you determining who those 20 or 90 contacts are? Are there any identifiers or characteristics?

For your purposes I would recommend building lists. Let's look at active lists first. For example, if your Group 20 is characterized by the fact that they were Last contacted a month ago, their email address contains one of five key account Email domains and their Lifecycle stage is sales qualified lead – then you could build a list using these exact filters in italics. This list would of course change dynamically and wouldn't always come out at exactly 20 contacts.

A manual solution would be building a static list. Other than an active list which constantly checks all contacts in your CRM and whether they match your filters, you would manually add and remove contacts as you go.

Using a custom property to 'tag' the 20 or 90 contacts could become time-consuming quickly, since you would have to change the property values for your contacts manually. (For example, if you had a 'Group 20' property with the values true/false, you'd have to change two contacts every time you want to update the list. Change an old contact from true to false, change a new contact from false to true.) And eventually you would use this property to build a list filter for 'Group 20' anyway.

(Reports have an entirely different behavior in HubSpot. They will generally visualize trends and are not a contact management tool.)

I don't want to confuse you even more but there is also a third-party solution called HubTags for tagging contacts. For now, I'd recommend to stick to active or static lists.

Hope this helps!