Existential question about Analytics Source

[pbergeron]

Our company has reps that do offline sales efforts, combined with an inbound lead strategy.

We are trying to figure out the best way to represent lifetime sales to customers that originate from inbound marketing efforts.

Hubspot sets the Deal's Analytics Source like so: 

A) Deal with no contact, no company:  Analytics Source = Not Set.

or

B) Deal with no contact, company: Analytics Source = Company's

or

C) Deal with contact(s): Analytics Source = Oldest Contact's

That makes sense, to a point:

Bill from Acme gets in touch with us directly. Bill's contact is created (Source = Direct Traffic), and Acme is created (also Direct Traffic).

I create a deal with Bill, so the Deal's Analytics Source  is Direct Traffic. I win the deal, yay.

One month later, Bill introduces us to John, Jill and Jack. Bill is leaving the company, so I create John, Jill, and Jack through the UI.

Then I create more deals, and this time, Bill is not part of the deal's contacts, and instead I link deals to either John, Jack or Jill, so the Deal's Analytics Source is OFFLINE.

So now if I wish to query the lifetime total value of customers that originate from non-OFFLINE, I'm screwed because the Analytics Source for deals associated with ACME will fluctuate between OFFLINE and non-OFFLINE sources, depending on whether or not Bill is among the list for the Deal's contacts.

Thoughts on how we wrap our head around this ?  How do we get the lifetime value of customers that originate from a marketing (inbound) effort?

[Phil_Vallender · Accepted solution]

Hi @pbergeron

Good question. I'm still getting my head around HubSpot reporting tools but it looks like you can create a report to visualise total deal value by company original source. 

Does that help?

[pbergeron]

Thanks that helps. We do some offline reporting as well, and I have found a workaround using the API in the meantime...