Buying Roles as a Deal Property rather than a Contact Property

[doyleslayton]

We're excited about the new ABM fuctionality in HubSpot. In reviewing the current setup for Buying Roles, I've noticed this field is listed as a Contact Property. I'd like to suggest making it a cross-object property that you can assign to a Contact within a specific deal, without making that role the Contact's ongoing Buying Role on their Contact Record. I'll try to explain...

Let's say HubSpot was selling Marketing Hub to ABC Company. The HubSpot Sales Rep creates a Deal and starts working through Alice Wondermaker, VP of Marketing (Decision Maker, Budget Holder), and a couple of the marketing team members, Jane Doe, Social Media Manager (End-User) and John Doe, Content Marketing Manager (Influencer) participate in the evaluation process. Ultimately the deal moves to Closed Won!

6 months later the HubSpot team says, let's try to upsell ABC company on buying Sales Hub. The HubSpot Sales Rep reaches out to the VP of Marketing and says Alice... imagine what you could do if your Sales team was working alongside you in HubSpot! ...and Alice says that's a great idea. I'll introduce you to our VP of Sales, Mark Geditdone.

Following an intro call Mark is interested so the the HubSpot Sales Rep opens a new Deal and adds the associated contacts related to this deal. Mark Geditdone, VP of Sales is now the Decision Maker, Budget Holder... but when they add Alice Wondermaker, she's still listed as the Decision maker... in this case she's is our Champion. When the sales rep makes that change, since it's a Contact Property, it Changes Alice's Buying Role under the initial Marketing Hub Deal you closed 6 months ago. 

As you play this process out for later upselling ABC Company on ServiceHub, etc, you begin to see the issue compounds over time. For that reason, we're recommending the best practice of having Buyer Roles be assigned on a Deal by Deal basis. The "buying committe" of 6-7 people will likely change from deal to deal, but some of those people may have been involved in previous deals... playing a different "Buying Role".

This adjustment would then allow the HubSpot Account Manager for ABC Company to look at ABC Company Holistically and explore additional upsell opportunities, and understanding what who and what role each person played for each deal along the account growth management process.

I look foward to hearing your thoughts.

Best, 

Doyle Slayton
Director of Revenue Operations

Wiley Education Services 

[aclanahan]

Great idea. It would be helpful if we could qualify/unqualify leads/prospects within the deal. 

[doyleslayton]

As this thread relates to enhaning functionality for "Deal specific" insights, we're now recognizing the need for a "Deal Overview" within the Deal record, that works like the "Account Overview" under the Company record. This allows users to have both a comprehensive view at the Company level and a more specific view at the Deal level.

[KGervaise]

Yes! Yes! and Yes!! If I could upvote this idea a 1,000 times, I would.  

On another but similar topic, has anyone figured out or know a way to have multiple ABM campaigns going on at once? We have more than one product and want to be able to do ABM campaigns for each but haven't discovered a way to set target accounts by product. 

[guod123]

I 100% agree with this. We should see buying roles at the deal level, not contact level. Associate it per deal, and could copy a previous deals buying roles if we want, but for our enterprise deals this would be huge. 

[mpatino]

Also the ablity to store a contact on the deal itself is important. I know you can add it as a related object, but often the contact can move or change and that would misrepresent the contact to deal relationship. for example if I deal with John Doe at Acme on a deal. Then later John Moves to Spacley Sprockets. We being good data managers move the contact to company Spacley Sprockets. Now it will look like we had a contact from Spacley Sprockets work on a deal with Acme, one of there biggest compleditors! 

[Juraj]

I totally agree. Having the same problem rn. The situation of buying roles changes from product to product. I would highly appreciate the buying roles within deal overview.

[ringer135]

Upvoting as well

[STweedy]

Agreed, would like a Project/Deal role that can be change from deal to deal as well. 

[twinterkamp21]

In addition to have Buying Role either separate (or synced) on a "per Deal" level, it would be great to then have the Buying Role as a property to select for being mandatory at a certain deal stage. It would help to enhance and understand deal quality at that stage. 

[CMcDermott]

Great idea - we have been wanting to do this too. At the moment, we have the buyer roles for Deals, and use freetext to add the names of contacts but having them linked to actual contact profiles would be ideal. 

[TimoWollny]

Standard in every Salesforce installation and imho a mandatory B2B feature in every CRM.

Can't stress enough that we need that feature asap.

Workaround:

At least allow us to create custom properties in a deal linking a contact. It works for users but not for contacts.

Cheers

Timo

[mpatino]

We created a custom objects as a work around that we call 'Referer', 'Champion' Decison Maker'  to track the person that refered the the business, the client side champion for this deal, and the decison maker for the deal and we associate them. however, we have to clone the contacts in order to do this and then claw back the original contact do keep them in sync. NOT ideal. 

[KLaubmeier]

Yes, HubSpot, please allow us to designate contact roles per deal, not per company or contact. We often work on multiple projects (Deals) for customers and the site contact or the primary decision maker might be the same project-to-project or it may be different. The original poster here, doyleslayton, set up a great example. "Alice" in his example should be able to be listed as the Buyer/Decision Maker for Deal#1 and the Champion on Deal #2. 

As we try to get more people from our team up and running on HubSpot, we do not want to have to mine this kind of info out with a report or put additional text fields in, as that sets us up for failure in the future when data is entered poorly (or not at all). Some of our team members use HubSpot less than others and they aren't going to want to run a report (honestly, neither do I). A contact's role within each deal should be visible on a sidebar when anyone opens the Deal - we should be able to identify for that deal who is the Site Contact, the Decision Maker, the Billing contact, the IT person, (insert any custom designation that makes sense). We had this functionality with our last CRM and would love to see this back. 

Thanks for considering!

Krista

[SimonaR]

Yes, it will be very useful. 😉 

[jzeesman]

I think it would make a lot more sense to have "Buyer Role" as an association label for a Contact connected to a Deal.