Allow Contacts to have Deal Roles

[gotmike]

When we have multiple contacts on a specific deal in the CRM, it would be great to assign roles to each. This could be a standard "deal role" dropdown field/property. So I can pick "Champion" or "Decision Maker" or whatever.

Or if you are dealing with an Agency, who has contacts on both sides of a transaction, could be "Buyer" and "Seller" or "Seller's Agent" and "Buyer's Agent."

With only a few deals or a few contacts on a deal, this is not a problem, but in larger, more complicated transactions, there may be many different types of contacts. Attorneys, agents, lenders, investors, and more...

[gotmike]

Hi all! I'm excited to tell you about association labels. This functionality was released to public beta at INBOUND, and I believe it will do exactly what you need here.

With a custom association label, you can create a Contact:Deal association like "Champion" and when applied, it displays on that Contact's card on the Deal. This is an improvement on the ABM functionality for Buyer Roles, which applies to that Contact on all Deals. We're working on bringing this functionality together in the future.

You can also create association labels for Company:Deal, for tracking "service provider", "partner", "supplier", or whatever else you might need. Those association labels are now supported through filters, so think Workflow triggers, Lists, and soon Reporting as well.

This functionality is available at the Pro and Enterprise tier. To get into the public beta, follow these steps. Our current date for exiting beta is H1 2022.

[gotmike]

Hello HubSpot Community, 

Thank you as always for your continued feedback, it helps us build a great product. The ability to set roles between any two relationships is something we have been investigating on the HubSpot Product team. As a result, I'm going to move this idea into the "In Planning" stage.

In fact, we’re looking to interview customers to learn more about their process and get feedback on a few solutions we’re exploring. Please fill out this quick survey if you’re interested in participating. If you meet the criteria we’re looking for, a researcher from HubSpot will reach out to schedule a 60-minute call, and as a thank you we’ll send you a $50 gift card upon completion of the study.

[TreyF]

It would be great if Hubspot added a "role" between the "contact" to "deal" such as "sales manager" or "Project Lead" as many times different contacts will be associated to a deal and may not have a constant role to all deals.  If role was always constant then "Sales Manager" could reside in the "contact" field but not always the case.

Please vote "YES" we really need this functionality for our use!!!

thank you,

[TreyF]

any traction on this??

[jdelbene]

Another closely related idea would be on the company object which would be the ability to pin the most important 5 contacts for the company (contact roles).  

[TreyF]

I have let HS know that without this feature, we can not use this product.   This is super important to us.

HS--please implement this small change--please

[VagaeNatus]

We need this too and the number of actions that could be opened from that is immense. I think for this feature, the number of upvotes does not reflect the importance as few users understand what they need boils down to this.

In our use case, a contact has a different role depending on the deal. In the meantime, we have added a role property on the contact, that contains all the roles this contact may have. But with this, we don't know which role is having contact A on deal X, and which role is having contact A on deal Y. We just know contact A has two roles.

Today, the association between contacts and deals is "many-to-many", which in database design is not always best. Hubspot needs a junction table in between deals and contacts, and that table would contain the role. Admin should be able to decide if a deal can have one unique role A or many role A, depending on the pipeline. 

A few things that could be done once this is implemented:

1/ Run report based on associations, which is not possible today. Example: show me all deals that have contact A as decision maker.

2/ In deal workflow, after deal is moved to stage ABC, send an email to the decision maker (instead of "all contacts" as it is today).

[JimA]

+1 for Contact Roles within Deals

Like others have mentioned, our "deals" involve multiple contacts. Even our most basic jobs have the following:

• Sell To contact
• Designer (and this may be in-house or at the client, or a 3-rd party, or even a collaboration w multiple designers)
• Bill To contact (the "customer" as far as our accountant is concerned)
• Ship To contact
• End Client (Who the job is actually for. Often this is the client of our client.)

This list can go on and varies from job to job.

And in addition to these roles, there are often other contacts involved, such as the Construction Contractor, Architect, Engineer, A/V designer.

It would be tremendously helpful to have fields for each role that can be filled with a Contact from a drop-down menu.

[CTAKevin]

Though this is a very import feature but I don't think HubSpot can implement this in the near future unelss it changed it's system structure fundamentally.

The core reason is becasue you can not create customized object like you do in Salesforece. To specify a contact role to each contact on each opportunity will require a many-to-many relationship, that means you need to have a another tab besides the Contact, Company, Deal and Ticket tab. The new tab will be worked as a configuration table in which you can specify each contact a role for each opportunity. 

Right now HubSpot doesn't have the ability to do that. All properties have to leave in their only tab and cannot be referenced across objects, and you cannot create customized objects.

I'm not positive on this one.

[gil1001]

I'm looking for a way to have a form where you map different contacts to their roles in the buying process as described in Hubspot's article  here 

Hubspot let you attach contacts to a deal, I would like to be able to set their role in the buying decision. 

I know I can do it in each contact's record using custom property, but this will not be very friendly to use and it is really tied to the role a contact plays in a deal.

It is part of our basic qualification to be able to identify multiple people related to the deal and we can't seem to be able to do it in Hubspot

[EyalWorth]

This is definitely needed.

Contact Roles on Deals are necessary for B2B sales managers.

[GayanG]

This is super important.

Apart from the Champion, Decision Maker.... roles that others have already mentioned, we'd also like to see an Accounting/Billing role and a Technical role.

[alexinelittle]

This is something that would be useful for us as well, and as our business grows we may have to leave HubSpot if it doesn't become available. On every deal, we have a buyer and a seller. We cannot map this at the contact level because we run a marketplace and many contacts are both buyers and sellers. For now, we are managing this manually, but we need to be able to enroll contacts in workflows and build reports based off of their deal role. 

[scottfasser]

+1 on the roles functionality - both at the contact level and deal level. 

I'd like to be able to send different emails via workflow to different roles in the company.

Also, I'd like a way to have some sort of org chart or who reports to who functionality in Hubspot. This could be a custom field in contacts, but is there a better way to make associations that show level?

[EyalWorth]

Dear @hubspot PM Team, 

I have not seen any progress on this idea. I'm sorry to report that we will likely be moving away from HubSpot CRM. 

I've been a big fan of HubSpot and was the main person introducing HS to my organization, but this, as well as other feature enhancement requests have not been heard and I have a hard time justifying to sales management why they can't move to salesforce. 

I hope to return to HubSpot at some point. 

Regards, 

[twmartin2]

Are there any updates to this request?

[timjobpal]

Hi! Is there any update on this from HubSpot's side? Influencer Maps are a key feature for us and extremely important in the buying process. Ideally, the role assigned to each contact would be visible on the deal record as well, making it easier for every team member to understand the role a contact has in the process and the relationships between them.

[gil1001]

It seems that this has lately been added to the Hubspot beta, but instead of being something that is deal related, it is in the contacts, thus not useful for us.

[Brittany-RG]

We really need this. We have many deals within a large company and the contacts cross over so it is a major painpoint.

[bdesilva]

I don't see that Hubspot is paying any attention to this quite old thread, but I'm going to pile on anyway.

Relationships are vital to a CRM. With Hubspot there isn't a way to tie records together in a valuable and logical way.

1. As this thread talks about, we need to be able to identify the contacts tied to a deal. Their job title isn't useful. It's the role they play in the:
   1. Sales process
      1. Who is the vendor salesman we are partnering with?
      2. What roles are played by my team members involved with the sale?
      3. Who are all the various players at the prospect and how can they influence the sales process?
   2. Closed deal project
      1. Which contacts on the deal are my company team for the project and what role will they play. This can change of course from deal to deal (project to project)
2. Contacts relationship to Companies
   1. A contact can be part of the company with a title
   2. or an advisor to the company with a role

Lot's more on this topic if anyone wants!

[BastiSchuhl]

I absolutely agree with the comments above. Being able to “tag” a Contact’s Role in a Buying Process for a specific deal is crucial for efficient B2B Sales Management. It’s great to see HS adding a “Buying Role” as standard Contact Property as part of the newly released Account Based Marketing (ABM) features. Yet, the current set-up still falls short in two key areas in my opinion:

1. Displaying the “Buying Role” Contact Property of an associated contact within the Deals’ details view
2. Allowing for deal specific Buying Roles; a contact’s role can be changed depending on the associated deal (this might be a more complicated implementation as it would required more than one “buying role” contact property or rather a deal property with a dynamic link (association) to a HS contact.)

Especially the first element, the lack of high level visibility of an associated contact’s “buying role”, is urgently needed. Currently, only contact name, job title, email and phone number are displayed. This doesn’t help in understanding immediately which of say 10 associated contacts of a deal is the “Decision-Maker” and who should receive the invoice, for example.

So, it would be great to either see the “buying role” previewed right there with job title, email and phone properties for each associated contact. Alternatively - and this might be the most versatile solution - it would be amazing if HS users were able to choose which contact properties they want to display for associated contacts at deal (and company) level; similar to customising the default properties for a contact record’s left sidebar. 

@hubspot is there dedicated place to provide this and other feedback to the new ABM features?

[gil1001]

Just wanted to mention that there are several upvotes for this in here as well https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Tips-Tricks-Best-Practices/Mapping-deal-roles/m-p/242566#M649