Tracking activity for contacts who attend multiple conferences/events

[AGodfryd]

I need to track activities related to conferences over time, including for contacts who may attend multiple conferences without losing or overwriting previous data.

Activities I need to track include pre-booked conference meetings, post-conference meetings, and outreach progress by each member of the sales team. The way we log needs to be easily analyzed/reported.

For example, let's say Jane Doe attends Conference 2024 and Conference 2025. For conference 2024, we booked both a pre-conference meeting and a post-conference meeting. For conference 2025, we only booked a post-conference meeting. 

I created two custom multi-pick fields for 1) conference name and 2) conference lead status, but I'm not sure how I can show on a report which lead status goes with which conference. 

Is there a better way to do this? or is there a way to nest a custom picklist under another to report on lead status for any given conference?

[FCorbaci]

@AGodfryd hi,

On some basic level tracking, you could go for custom property route but what you described, creating a custom object would be most robust solution.

Best,
Firat

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @AGodfryd,

If you want to work with HubSpot's native features, there are two routes you can take:

Custom properties

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/properties/create-and-edit-properties

(A lot of them, unfortunately.) To track if someone attended the pre-conference meeting, the post-conference meeting etc. you would set up a date property for each, and populate with the date of the meeting when it actually takes place. That would allow you to filter for contacts where this meeting took place, and also visualize over time when these meetings happened. It is however suboptimal because of the number of properties required over time, the manual work and the general inflexibility compared to the approach below.

With the two dropdown properties you already have, unfortunately, you won't be able to add the perspective of the meetings and report on that. (Unless meetings are logged to a record, as explained below, your reporting options would be very limited.)

Custom objects

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/object-settings/create-custom-objects

This is an Enterprise level feature and the approach would be to create a custom object for event interactions. Each registration/attendance would have its own record and would be associated to a contact. (It could additionally be associated to companies, deals etc which makes it great for reporting.) Since each event interaction has its own record, you can also log meetings to it – such as your pre- and post-conference meetings.

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/meetings-tool/how-do-i-create-and-use-call-and-meeting-types

If you use custom meeting types for those meetings, there's a lot of things you can do later in the custom report builder and visualize how many pre-conference meetings there were for an event in a given year.

The custom object route is not trivial, it requires good planning and configuration but it's very powerful.

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