User should only see certain contacts

[EPunt8]

I have a specific use case for our crm.

We are working with partners in specific countries that need to see contacts, companies and deals specific for their country.

I created a view only user account for them.

Internally our sales person is the owner of the contacts, companies and deals but thats not limited to a specific country.

As an example:

Is there a way that our sales person is the owner for contacts from Spain and Poland.

But the external user can only see the contacts from Spain.

and a second external user can only see the contacts from Poland.

Thanks

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @EPunt8,

HubSpot lets you create additional owner properties - so besides the contact and company owner, you could have a "External contact owner" and "External company owner". Simply create new properties and choose the property type "HubSpot user".

If you make sure that these external users have "View owned only" permissions, you could simply make them the "External contact owner" of certain contacts and "External company owner" of certain companies. They will then only see these records.

Record permissions apply to all user fields, last I checked. You should of course test this thoroughly internally before trusting it.

Best regards

[RubenBurdin · Accepted solution]

Hi @EPunt8 , glad to see this landed exactly where you needed it. Karsten’s approach is the cleanest pattern for this use case, and it’s still how HubSpot works today.

One small thing worth reinforcing is why this works so well: record-level permissions in HubSpot don’t care which owner property you use. Any property of type “HubSpot user” can act as the visibility gate when users are set to “View owned only.” That makes the “External contact owner / company owner” pattern very flexible without breaking your internal ownership logic. It also scales nicely if later you add more partner countries.

A couple of practical nuances to keep in mind. Associations follow visibility, so if an external user can see a contact, they’ll also see associated deals and companies only if those records are also “owned” by them via the external owner fields. Also, reports and lists respect these same permissions, so partners won’t accidentally see cross-country data in dashboards.

If at some point this grows more complex, for example partners needing different pipelines, stages, or stricter separation, teams combined with owner-based permissions can add another layer. But for country-based access with shared internal sales ownership, this pattern is about as simple and robust as it gets.

Nice setup, and great to see it validated so quickly. Hope this helps others finding the thread later.

[EPunt8]

Thanks Karsten for this fast response.

You just made my day with this solution. This worked exactly how I wanted it to work.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @EPunt8,

HubSpot lets you create additional owner properties - so besides the contact and company owner, you could have a "External contact owner" and "External company owner". Simply create new properties and choose the property type "HubSpot user".

If you make sure that these external users have "View owned only" permissions, you could simply make them the "External contact owner" of certain contacts and "External company owner" of certain companies. They will then only see these records.

Record permissions apply to all user fields, last I checked. You should of course test this thoroughly internally before trusting it.

Best regards