HubSpot Ideas

Andreas007

Allow importing empty property values

Hi

 

I have created a new property (because we got smarter over time) and I wanted to transfer the values of an existing property to that new property. Populating the new property was easy. But emptying the values of the existing property turned out to be difficult.

HubSpot seems to prohibit this intentionally, when you consult the support page (https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/troubleshoot-import-errors). I couldn't figure out why, and felt a bit like a user, which needs to be protected from himself :-).

There are workarounds, but not very nice ones: "Bulk edit" or creating a workflow to empty the property values are two. But the stay workarounds.

 

I think, HubSpot should offer the possibility to empty property values via the import functionality.

 

Thanks for considering this request.

KR, Andreas

10 Replies
CPurcell
Member

I am having issues with this recently as well. I would expect that there should be a box to tick if you want to enable overwriting a populated field to blank via a list import. Like it doesn't need to be on by default, but should be a choice. 

CChristenson2
Member

I agree this feature would be very helpful in managing the ever changing propery values in our contact list. For us not being able to easily clear a property value for a contact leads to contacts staying on lists that they no longer qualify for and receiving marketing emails that are not relevent to them. Please update the Import API to add this feature.

dambra
Participant | Partner

I'd love to see this as well. Our sales team was using some of the standard properties incorrectly and entered data into the incorrect property. It's easy to move that data to another property via workflow or import, but I cannot easily clear the property after the data is moved.

RLightfoot
Participant

100% Agree! 🙂

When Importing a list, we should be able to select, "Allow NULL Values to overwrite existing HS values" - this would still protect those that need protecting 🙂

Provide this option for every mapped field/property (maybe in the same dropdown list where we can choose, "do not import") 

There are so many powerful features in HubSpot, this would definitely be another. 

BBellon
Member

This is necessary. Salesforce makes this easy with an option to toggle on to allow an overwrite of null values. 

PranasZiaukas
Member

Lack of this setting makes it unreasonably difficult to delete property values. No official response in 2+ years though, so I'm not holding my breath...

DHalliNet
Participant | Platinum Partner

This needs to be implemented.  For Customer who migrate from another CRM to Hubspot, they must be able to come though and reset and No or NA dropdown values to have (No value) in order to work the way Hubspot wants to work.  

dbarbuti
Member

I completely agree. An "empty string" should clear the value like using APIs.

fborgosano
Participant

I have the same problem since the beginning. In the first imports, when I migrated my database to Hubspot, I did a horrible mistake and now I have thousands of contacts with the company name (for example) in the First Name or Last Name fields. I'd like to just bulk erase the values in those fields of those contacts but no way...

fborgosano
Participant

I'm trying, with the help of ChatGPT, to build up a private app that could help us to resolve this issue with a Python script. Any help and ideas are very welcomed. At the moment, I'm trying to understand how the endpoint URL of the app should be.