Ability to export property history - specifically for 'HubSpot Owner'

[jordan_yocum]

Goal: The ability to report on 'HubSpot Owner' value history. 

Suggestion: An export of contact property history or a dashboard that tracks recrod ownership 

[jordan_yocum]

Hi all, I'm pleased to share that the ability to export the property history for a contact, company, or deal property in HubSpot is now live for all CRM users. 

Navigate to Settings > Properties, and click the property whose history you’d like to export.

Click the brand new “Export Property History” button in the upper-right.

Choose your desired file format, and the email address you’d like the export to be sent to. Within moments, you’ll have a spreadsheet in your inbox.

If you have any questions about this feature, please post them here. 

[jordan_yocum]

Hey @jordan_yocum thank you for following up to clarify. So that our product management team can better understand your goal / request, but also so that others can find the idea and vote for it, I'm going to update the title/description of this idea. Feel free to edit yourself if you feel I have not communicated your feature request in full. Thank you!

[jordan_yocum]

Hey @jordan_yocum @GuestGuy @jschmidt it is possible to access the historical values for a contact property such as 'HubSpot Owner' as well as data on specifically how the change was made.  

To view a contact's property history:

• Navigate to your contacts:
  • In your HubSpot Marketing Basic, Professional, or Enterprise account, navigate to Contacts > Contacts.
  • In your HubSpot Sales or Marketing Free or Starter account, navigate to Contacts. 
• Click the name of the contact.

• To see the history of all properties for a contact, click View property history in the About section.

• This will display the property history of all properties for which your contact has had a value. Click the column headers to sort by property, the date of the change, or the change source. You can also use the search bar at the top to search for a particular property, value, or change source.

• To return to the contact record, click Back to contact record at the top of the screen. 

You can also see the isolated history of an individual property on the About card or from the All Properties screen. 

• Hover over any of the properties in the About section and click See history to see the history for that particular property. 

• To see the history for a specific property that doesn't appear in the About section, click View all properties.
• Hover over a particular property and click See history.

To segment a group of contacts that had a previous value for a property, you can create a list that segments contacts based on historical values.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns further to the above. 

[jschmidt]

This is a fabulous concept and idea! Let's move this forward immediately -j.

[GuestGuy]

Yes Please!

[roisinkirby]

Hey @jordan_yocum @GuestGuy @jschmidt it is possible to access the historical values for a contact property such as 'HubSpot Owner' as well as data on specifically how the change was made.  

To view a contact's property history:

• Navigate to your contacts:
  • In your HubSpot Marketing Basic, Professional, or Enterprise account, navigate to Contacts > Contacts.
  • In your HubSpot Sales or Marketing Free or Starter account, navigate to Contacts. 
• Click the name of the contact.

• To see the history of all properties for a contact, click View property history in the About section.

• This will display the property history of all properties for which your contact has had a value. Click the column headers to sort by property, the date of the change, or the change source. You can also use the search bar at the top to search for a particular property, value, or change source.

• To return to the contact record, click Back to contact record at the top of the screen. 

You can also see the isolated history of an individual property on the About card or from the All Properties screen. 

• Hover over any of the properties in the About section and click See history to see the history for that particular property. 

• To see the history for a specific property that doesn't appear in the About section, click View all properties.
• Hover over a particular property and click See history.

To segment a group of contacts that had a previous value for a property, you can create a list that segments contacts based on historical values.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns further to the above. 

[jordan_yocum]

@roisinkirby I am aware that you can view this. What I need is to export this information in bulk. Thank you. 

[roisinkirby]

Hey @jordan_yocum thank you for following up to clarify. So that our product management team can better understand your goal / request, but also so that others can find the idea and vote for it, I'm going to update the title/description of this idea. Feel free to edit yourself if you feel I have not communicated your feature request in full. Thank you!

[AnnaC]

 Hi @roisinkirby

I was wondering if there has been any further developments on this? I am trying to export contacts history in bulk also (which shows the history of changes made to contacts). But I can only export current propertities details not the changes that I have made. 

Thanks,

Anna 

[RiccardoPisani]

Yes I am also super interested - Would be great also to fix problmes due to wrong uploads ..etc

[javirevi]

Just came up with the same issue. really important.

It would be great to be able to export it/access via API.

[roisinkirby]

Hi all, I'm pleased to share that the ability to export the property history for a contact, company, or deal property in HubSpot is now live for all CRM users. 

Navigate to Settings > Properties, and click the property whose history you’d like to export.

Click the brand new “Export Property History” button in the upper-right.

Choose your desired file format, and the email address you’d like the export to be sent to. Within moments, you’ll have a spreadsheet in your inbox.

If you have any questions about this feature, please post them here. 

[javirevi]

Hi @roisinkirby, that is good news.

However, I am afraid this solution is not really what we are looking for, right?

I think it hsould be accessible directly via API and per contact. This way we can only go and download the whole historic of , for example, "first name".

Thanks in advance,

Javier

PS: sorry I didn't ask my questions with a post where you said, but I figured this would make sense in the same string.

[philipB]

We run into this regularly. What we'd love specifically is to export the contact property history for a specific field for a specific set of contacts. In our case, we sometimes would like to provide an "aging" report of leads that shows us how long contacts were in a specific state in a custom property. For example, let's pretend this is a hiring workflow and we have a "Hiring Status" custom contact property. In this case, we might like to be able to see how many leads have been in the "interviewed" status for more than 2 weeks, or what the average time spent moving from "Reference Check" status to "Offer Letter" status. is 

We can see this right out of the box on an individual basis in the contact property history within HubSpot, but we can't run these kinds of reports against segments of our contact databse within HubSpot, nor can we export the data in bulk to query against it for collective data insight outside HubSpot. The data is all right there; we just can't get to it in a useful manner.

Thanks!

[RiccardoPisani]

with a couple of date stamps set by a Wf when the spacific stage occurs you should be good to go right? Just saying because I run into these kind of issues every day and would like to get other perspectives - Still, there are cases in which you cannot set date stamps with WFs and here we need the possibility to export the history so badly 🙂 

[philipB]

Thanks for the suggestion! Yes, you could do that for sure. The problems are that 1) this is replicating data and functionality that's already in HubSpot; 2) it creates an additional layer of tracking and clean-up as lead statuses are added or removed; and 3) it doesn't provide for a many-to-many relationship between lead statuses and status changes. 

Let's say we want to track--for each custom lead status--the date the status was entered and the date it was exited, which would make sense if the status flow is not perfectly linear. That means we'd have to create two custom contact properties for each lead status, right? That could add up quickly, but is unecessary from a data perspective at least because we already have comprehensive property tracking in HubSpot. It's just not exportable at the moment. If we go the route of creating those additional contact properties anyway, then what happens over time as we change the way our status flow works? Do we eliminate those old timestamp properties and lose the data? Or do we keep old unused statuses around so we don't lose context? Or is there another approach that would make sense? I'm not sure. 

But let's say we figure all that out and we're okay with creating the properties and have a strategy for long-term maintenance. What happens when a lead reverts to a previous status? Do we overwrite the old timestamp and lose data, or do we have to anticipate this and create a potentially enormous number of additional timestamps for each status?

So on the surface, we can create a workaround of sorts, but what we really need is less of a discrete property-focused  approach and more of a transaction-focused one. And what do we have in HubSpot by virtue of the contact property history? A transactional log of all changes to all properties for all contacts over time with no required customization and no additional data management overhead. We just don't have access to that data so we can put it to use. 

I'm certainly no expert, but in my view, creating additional contact properties is a workaround that will satisfy some use cases, so it's a good idea given where things stand. But unless I'm missing something, it seems like a kludge at best while we wait for the current functionality to be exposed to users. That's why I hope this request can get a little traction to help speed that day along. 

[RiccardoPisani]

Yes, agree with all the points you highlighted.  As you mentioned, that is just a workaround, the only one I can think of as per today.

Cheers 

[JoseHan]

I would like to add-on to this great idea and ask if you can also include the Source ID (i.e. the user, tool or integration that made the update) in the export.

My use case for this is putting together a report where I can see in a timeframe how many times a particular user changed the field. For example, "Feb 2018: Field changed to "Yes" by Jose 5 times"

It would only be possible by knowing the Source ID. If we could implement this as an option for HubSpot reports and/or available in the API, even better! Thanks so much! 

[jdugue]

@roisinkirby it's great to have the ability to export the property history, however in my opinion the current formating of the CSV makes it difficult to exploit, as I can't query it or use pivot tables, in order to have analytics / reports.

It would be a lot easier to have 1 new row per property value change, instead of having a new column each time (like a database for example)

Would this be possible ? 

[RodrigoAddor]

Agree with @jdugue, it'd be much better in that way! If they change, how are you thinking to automatically collect this data?

[jdugue]

@RodrigoAddor with Zapier, using the "New dealstage" trigger. You can then push the data in a Google sheet, adding a new row each time the zap is triggered. You get kind of an action log from which you can perform analysis 🙂

Hope this helps 🙂 

[RodrigoAddor]

Nice, helped a lot! @jdugue

Have you already created a script to turn the original spreadsheet into a data log?