I use Hubspot as a guide for making sales telephone calls. Frequently, I will reach a person on the telephone, who tells that me someone else in his company is a better point of contact. Everything in the first person's contact is often unchanged for the second person, excepting name, title, email address and phone number. However, sometimes even the phone number is unchanged. I might stumble through a half dozen new contacts in one such company before finally finding the right person to visit with, but all along the way I may be accumulating information on all six contacts, which will contribute to moving me closer to closing a deal. Sometimes I get all the way down to contact number six, and I find that contact number two is the REAL DEAL CLOSER.
I would like to be able to make new contacts by cloning the old contacts. I know that Hubspot bases everything on email addresses, and will not permit duplicate email addresses, which I agree is a good idea. However, if you go through a cloning process there WILL be, at least temporarily, a cloning of emails, which is not currently allowed. Hubspot should be set up so that temporarily copying cloned data is allowed until you hit the final "Save" button.
The way things are set up now I have to export one single contact into a csv file and then go through the laborious clicking process of changing that one exported file to the name and email address of the new contact and then turn around and import the new contact back into Hubspot. That's a LOT of trigger work for just one contact. I could key the contact in from scratch faster except now I am talking about increased probability that I will make a typo on something and corrupt the new contact so that I can't find it in a new search or I can't use it even if I find it.
You guys and gals are REALLY smart, but I think this is a glitch in your code, and it really needs to be fixed. Thanks, and best regards, Charles.
How are HubSpot users being efficient without a Contact Clone button in HubSpot? How hard can it be to add this feature?
If the issue is HubSpot's need for a unique email address then let us users clone the Contact and require a new, unique email address be entered before we can save the new Contact. Salesforce can provide this; HS must!
We can't be the only HubSpot user that needs each Contact to have a full address that can be cloned from an existing Contact at the same location.
We moved from Salesforce to HubSpot - I wish I knew this basic tool was not available when we were making our decision
I love HubSpot CRM for Sales, but all other CRM allows you to clone a Contact record. We are constantly adding contacts from the same Org and need to clone. Waiting years is too long.
Clearly, HubSpot doesn't read this forum, or worse, they read it and choose not to respond. I've spoken to them on the phone when they have called me to up-sell me on advance features, but it's been 5 or 6 years and still no contact cloning. The only thing I can suggest if you are adding more than 1 person at a time is to export the contact you want to clone into an Excel spreadsheet, copy the record for each new person, make the necessary edits, delete the original record and the record-id column and then import the new records. It's a pain to do it that way, but for me, it's faster than typing a bunch of new records individually.
Yes, we need to be able to duplicate records. Every CRM that I've worked in has offered this ability. When I contacted HubSpot, I was told that records can't be duplicated because the main identifier is the email address so it can't duplicate an email address. I said, then write in the programming to not duplicate the email field when cloning/duplicating a record! That's how all the CRM's have done it - you select 'Duplicate Record' and then it duplicates all fields, except email address, name and title. This most basic feature needs to be added because productivty has been lowered since we switched to HubSpot because now we have to manualy enter all of the contact information for multiple contacts that have identical information (aside of name, email and title).
This is an essential feature. Any CRM system deals with organisations/companies and then contacts within those organisations. It is naive to have a system which does not recognise this and does not meet a simple requirement of allowing multiple contacts within a company, without the need for adding in the same data multiple times for each contact that is encountered in an organisation. What is the point of having a database if it will not fulfil the simple function of making the data easy to maintain correctly? The current system design means people are more likely to create inaccurate data as they have to maintain the same data manually several times over.
We had this ability in Salesforce and need to be able to clone new programs (a custom object) for companies who send us several customers whose programs are nearly the same. It is taking us a lot more time to schedule people because we cannot simply clone the object, change a field and save. Thank you!
Hi CBryson, I have given up hope that HubSpot will implement a cloning feature. I've been complaining about it for years and I've never heard anything from them. The only solution I can think of that might work for your situation is to create an import template in Excel for each project type and/or customer and put the new info in it rather than HubSpot (with all other fields being prepopulated with info that doesn't change) and then import the Excel file into HubSpot. So as an example, rather than typing in, say 20 data points into the HubSpot interface, you open the Excel file, type in 3 unique data points with the other 17 common datapoints already being filled in, and then importing the Excel file into HubSpot. Just a thought. Don
Hi dmsmith , thank you for the info. This solution would be more trouble than just re-entering the properties in our particular case; however, I appreciate your response and the idea. Hopefully we can keep the pressure on for this one. Other CRMs do this natively, yet in HS even the apps from the app store can't do it on custom objects because there is no ability to put a card on a custom object. We are talking with our onboarding specialist today and will bring up this time-saving and simple capability.
Have you heard of Clone Attack? It's a HubSpot app that let's you clone records (contact records included):
It carries over all properties to the duplicate record along with any associations you select. There's actually a blog post covering your use case here.
I'd love to talk about this further if anyone has questions.
No, I haven't heard of it, thanks! For a small operator like me, the free plan (10 dupes/month) might be useful.
Although, I'm not sure if this also copies over things like addresses?
However, this doesn't address the question of why such a basic CRM feature like this doesn't already exist in HubSpot! It shouldn't take an outside package to do this!
How did you ask? I don't think they look at this forum. They have never replied to any past requests. If you are communicating in another way, I will follow suit and maybe some others can as well.
Day 3 asking for the ability to clone contacts already. Simple solution, if weight is tied so heavily to email ID, simply clone the contact without the emial ID. Force user to enter new one before clone can save. SOOOOO SIMPLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Did you see my earlier post regarding Clone Attack by any chance? You can clone contacts (among other records) using it. You can also make it happen via workflow as well!
especially when adding another employee in the same company, why have to enter all that data again, come on hubspot, I came to you from salesforce becuase you were more progressive, this is dark ages stuff
Yes, I've thought of creating this ticket many times, until just now finding that this idea has already been suggested. Programmatically, it is not difficult at all to clone a record and mandate changes to specific fields before actually enabling the final "Create"' button. I'm not sure why Hubspot is treatring this a such a challenging problem that, as I've been told, can not be done at this time. There is absolutely no reason it can not be done, assuming major design flaws were not made in the backend data schemas.
