Multiple sales personnel working a single Contact - how to view 'Working Withs'?

[DJclassic]

We have regional sales teams in real estate, but we have Contacts that may want to purchase in multiple regions. Our business structure is that they work with the regional sales consultant for the region they want to buy in - meaning multiple sales people could be working with a single Contact at one time before moving to the first Deal stage.

I'm trying to find a simple solution to enable each Sales Person to have these 'leads' on a 'Currently working with' view or list; Contact Owner is restricted to a single owner so that is not really effective for us in this structure. Originally we set up a Contact View for any Sales Qualified Leads where 'you' are the Contact Owner, we have a large volume of web enquiry so it worked well to channel this through to specific regions, but does not solve for our multi-sales person challenge. We have used 'follow' as well but cannot find a property that recognises this to add to the Sales persons 'working with' View. We can't be the first organisation with this challenge...any ideas? Trying to find something that is dynamic and not an admin burden for sales team (i.e. trying to avoiding managing static lists). Help!!

[DJclassic]

Thanks for outlining that approach and pointing out the Lead Mgmt/Lifecycle considerations. The solution is more admin-heavy than I had hoped but I had been thinking along the same lines. I had hoped there might be an approach which is more event-driven by the Sales rep if/when a concurrent sales opportunity arises, rather than creating a whole lot of data placeholders that might never get used and adds clutter to the contact view necessarily - we have 11 regions and new ones coming; so to display all 11 owner options plus lifecycle stage etc for all Contacts when only 25% might have >1 sales consultant is not ideal. I guess I could create that data set as a separate display section down the left side that can be minimised... will think through the approach - Many Thanks!!!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @DJclassic,

I would recommend making use of custom owner properties in this case. This is a little known property type in HubSpot that lets you create more field like Contact owner, for example "Region 1 Owner", "Region 2 Owner", "Region 3 Owner" and so on. (You can find this custom property type in the same list as "Single-line text" and "Radio select".)

With these custom user properties created, you would know two things: If the field is empty, a certain region is currently not working that contact. Also, you can use these fields to filter and find all contacts assigned to a given sales representative.

Additionally, you might want to also create Lead status and Lifecycle stage fields for each region: "Lead status (Region 1)", "Lifecycle stage (Region 1)" etc. – to allow sales representatives to keep track of their own sales process. Additional Lifecycle stage properties won't be integrated in HubSpot like the default one is, but it would still be helpful to see, for example, if a contact is already a customer in a region.

At first this might sound like an awful lot of properties to create but it's really not that bad and provides a lot more transparency. Once created, I'd group these new properties by region into sections of the contact record sidebar: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/customize-record-sidebars

Hope this helps!

[nlafakis]

Hey @karstenkoehler!,

I had a sort of follow up to this question. I'm actually in nearly the exact same type of job type, regional sales related to real estate. The biggest problem that we have is that we're (unfortuantely and hopefully not for long) an outside CRM system for leads along-side Hubspot. Though we have them integrated, we're having a big problem where a lead (similar to the aformentioned problem) can fill out a form for multiple locations.

The problem is that hubspot creates contacts based on unique email address, so if the same email address fills out on multiple forms, it merges the contact. Is there a way, possibly through workflows, to create a contact for any submission regardless of whether or not the addresses are the same?

The 3rd party system creates a ContactID number for each entry, so I'm wondering if there's a way for Hubspot to store contacts based on ContactID rather than by email address. I know how ridiculous that last part sounds, but I had to ask just in case it's not as complicated a solution as it sounds.

Thank you for your time in advance!,

Nick