HubSpot Ideas

ccds11

Contact or Company Tags?

Is there a process for associating tags to contacts or companies? If not, is there another way in which to associate certain qualities to contacts and/or companies that are not already listed?

HubSpot Updates
May 21, 2020 02:21 PM

@lizzie_p  @dtwuensch  Thank you for the quick replies here. We do think that, at this stage, "multiple checkbox" custom properties provide much of the same value. Certainly, there are places where they don't entirely fit the bill. And, it's not totally out of the question that we build tags some day. However, as of now, there are more pressing customer issues that our team needs to focus on to deliver the highest quality overall product. 

Not Currently Planned
May 21, 2020 11:41 AM

Idea Submitted
May 21, 2020 11:40 AM

Hello HubSpot Community, 

Thank you as always for your continued feedback, it helps us build a great product.

We are constantly evaluating and re-evaluating our priorities and roadmap to deliver as much value to our customers as possible. At this time, adding tags is not something our team is currently planning to build natively into HubSpot. This is certainly subject to change in the future and we will update this idea if that becomes the case.

242 Replies
BrettLanguirand
HubSpot Employee

Hey @ccds11,


Would you be able to provide some more context around the types of tags that you are referring to?  There isn't really a "tag" feature in Hubspot, but using custom contact and company properties, you might be able to accomplish what you're looking for.  

 

For example, you could create a custom multi-checkbox property called something like "Tags" and have the potential values be "Tag 1", "Tag 2", "Tag 3", etc. Both contacts and companies would need to have a respective property set up, and the two properties wouldn't be able to communicate with one another.  If you think this would work for you, here are instructions on how to create a custom contact property.  

 

Thanks,

Brett

monicaway
Contributor

Hey @BrettLanguirand,

 

I believe that @ccds11 is describing a "tag" feature that is different than the solution you proposed of selecting pre-defined values from a multi-checkbox property to assign a "Tag 1" or "Tag 2", etc to a company or contact. 

 

The other "tagging" feature is a fast and efficient way to label and group contacts, companies, deals, etc. With this kind of "tag" feature, tags are user-defined. Anyone can create custom tags that are applicable to them and their business. Tags would be shared between all the users of the team in a multi-user account. There could be hundreds of Tags that are associated with all kinds of things. For example, cities could be tags, or employees within your firm could be tags, or project names, or plant species used on garden projects (I'm a landscape architect). Using tags this way is a user-friendly, quick, flexible, and familiar way to organize and access important data in your CRM.

 

Hubspot currently allows you to add "Filters" to properties as a way to work with contacts and companies in the CRM. However, I believe Filters are less flexible, less user-friendly, and slower than Tags. 

 

Here is a short list of other CRMs I believe are using "Tags" in this way:

 

OnepageCRM

Nimble

Capsule

ZOHO

Insightly

Nutshell

Highrise

Base

 

Personally, I would really appreciate if Hubspot added the Tag idea to its feature development list! I think Tags would be greatly received by your existing and future clients. 

 

Monica

rosskelly
Participant

I agree, tags should definitly be implemented. 

 

Using multi-checkbox is NOT the solution. When you go and edit multiple contacts with various different 'tags/check boxes', you override their existing categories when you want to add a new one.

 

Tags are faster and more flexible without a doubt.

 

Ross Kelly

ccds11
Member

@BrettLanguirand

 

Thank you for your advice. You are correct in that if you were to create a work around, your solution would be optimal. At the same time @monicaway is describing what I was looking for. 

 

Either way, Hubspot has been great for my business as it is!

 

Thank you for all of the insight. 

 

Best,

Matthew

risoy
Participant

Tags should definitely be implemented. This is exactly what we currently look for.

 

We would like to tag contacts and customers with what type of products of ours they are interested in. Say, I can tag a company with "VSD" and I can list all companies that are interested in our VSDs. I can send a mail to all VSD customers. Etc.

 

Also, I would like to tag the existing systems they have received from us. This way sales persons can see who has what systems and better analyse what to reccommend, how to respond to queries, selling upgrades and so on.

 

Tags can be used for filtering, newsletters, automation and many other features.

rosskelly
Participant

It is VERY dissapointing that they don't use tags. Probably the ONLY CRM I have seen that doesn't have such a basic, useful and essential feature.

 

Product development need to sort it out!

stan255
Participant

Tags is a simple yet powerful feature that would eliminate the need for a lot of the feature requests here.

 

If tags were implemented:

  1. We can filter contacts or companies by tags.
  2. We can send emails to contacts with tags
Bene
Member

yes, different users in my organization will look at contacts from different perspectives and need to be able to mark contacts in ways that make sense to them. 

bart
Member

Please Hubspot, add tags or inform us of a more effective and efficient way to segement. It would be aweosme as there are many great features in this software but this is something I would need to go to another company for. I just can't get what I need out of filters and segmenting in this simple manner is such a time saving function that makes it worth shifting to a platform that has it.  

bart
Member

Yes to this!

MartinG
Member

Another vote for tagging from me. I've been investigating and testing various CRMs recently, an exhausting, boring and time sucking process. On trying to import contacts from another CRM, I now realise I'll lose a lot of valuable context in the shape of a variety of tags added to contacts. We use this to search, filter and group together by tags to send targetted emails.

Context: We're a micro-startup, a few hundred contacts only at present, and never likely to be huge. We're a small consultancy selling services rather than physical goods. Many of the features of most CRMs are unecessary and even a hindrance for us, and they often feel overwhelmingly complex for our needs. Still there's a lot to like about Hubspot, sufficient to be willing to put some effort in.

We would often add tags like 'Training course Apr 17', 'facilitator', 'area of expertise / interest X/Y/Z', 'region', 'XXX conference Jul 16', 'friendly to our biz'.... and so on and on and on.

Extremely useful, and I'm also very surprised such a basic and common feature isn't included. I'd love to see it added!

monicaway
Contributor

Hey @BrettLanguirand,

 

Just checking in. There's been a lot of traction about the Contact or Company tags idea since your response to @ccds11 in March. Can you let us all know if Hubspot has plans to address this request?

 

Many thanks!

Monica

susanna
Member

This sounds much like campaigns in Salesforce, where you can create campaigns for anything under the sun (e.g. Saturday picnic, board members, advisory committee, bocce players) and add contacts to one or many. Then you report on, mass email, or whatever to your groups of campaign members.

eloyd
Participant

We would like to be able to tag a company, contact, or deal (mainly deals).  We'd then like to be able to search for entries that do or do not have one or more tags.  We can accomplish something similar with different sales pipelines, but here's the use case:

 

Customer is in the pipeline.  Contact says "we'll buy, but not until fourth quarter."  31 days pass.  There's no way to push that deal to the side but keep it part of the pipeline for our CR staff to follow up on, since they're supposed to follow-up with any customer that hasn't been contact in 30 days.  Sure, they could read the notes and figure it out, but that's time wasted.  If we could tag that deal as "Postponed" or something, then they wouldn't even see it in their search results (search for all deals > 30 days contact & not tagged "Postponed").

 

Tagging would help coordinate things at a user-customizable level without involving HubSpot for assistance.  For instance, you could tag contacts, deals, and companies as "Startups" or "Established" or "West Coast" or "East Coast" or "Blue" and "Red" or whatever you want.  Having the tags means you can search for things however you want.

 

Mostly though, we want to be able to tag deals as being "HOT" or "Delayed"  🙂

edjusten
HubSpot Employee

Hi @eloyd  Great suggestion Smiley LOL, but at this time the HubSpot CRM does not incoproate tags of any kind. You might be able to get similar results by creating a custom property and filtering your views based on that property. 

 

Can you head over to the ideas forum and add this suggestion as a post?

 

Ed 

 

 

nicolebrenner
HubSpot Employee

Hi All, 

 

Thanks for your continued discussion on this thread. I think this would be a great post to share with our ideas forum, but I'm still unclear on how the tags are entirely different from contact/company properties. For example, you could use a single-line text field in a form and a contact could fill in whatever industry they like, then you'd still be able to use that value to filter in lists and views. You can send emails, enroll workflows and do some reporting using these features. I'd love some more insight into how the tags would differ. 

Bene
Member

I'd like everyone to have the freedom to put a mark on arbitrary contacts, regardless

 

1) if they have permissions/roles to do anything serious or potentially destructive with the HubSpot data (in other words it's safe for anyone to use)

2) which lists the contact appears in or who the hubspot owner is

3) if other colleagues in the company use the same tag names or not

 

It's our ability to empower everyone in our organization to track arbitrary contacts for specialized follow up, without empowering them to accidentally destroy data, or pollute the listings with irrelevant entries for others.

risoy
Participant

One significant difference is typically that the tag taxonomy is not centrally defined, but tags are agile and up to the end user. There is no configuration of properties, but simply when an account manager sees the need for tagging a record with e.g. "ERP" and "Priority" he simply writes "erp, priority" in a tag field.

The account manager can then use the tags for filtering or whatever need they have. It is fast, flexible and does not need preconfiguration. If the needs change the user can adopt it instantly. There could be thousands of tags.

ddchbhs
Contributor

Agreed, tags are what I'm looking for. In my case, I would like to tag some prospective companies as "strategic partners". The easiest way I can think of is to slap a tag on them... except I can't.

Bonnie
Member

Hi Nicole,
This is a key feature we use in our current CRM's and is definitely a deal-breaker for us.
I love the features and opportunities that Hubspot provides, but without tags we will not be able to use our database effectively and efficiently.

Here's an example of how it works in Capsule CRM
https://capsulecrm.com/support/customizing-capsule/

Essentially a tag should be
- easy to enter
- not something that you will duplicated through human error easily eg. if you are entering a tag name (even a new tag) it should autmotically search and suggest existing tags - so that you created relevant required tags but NOT duplicates (super important when you have a team of people working on something)
- searchable

Your solution of "For example, you could use a single-line text field in a form and a contact could fill in whatever industry they like, then you'd still be able to use that value to filter in lists and views." isn't useful because
- it doesn't search entries that might have already been created (eg. if you have 'Circus Performer' as a tag, but someone has already created 'Acrobat Artist' there's no way to see that this might have already been entered) so you end up with lots of similar but not unified tags
- there are unlimited options rather than funneling the tags into preferred lists (eg. human error)
- it's time consuming to add separate property boxes for people to tick as a work-around for this, and completely counterintuitive when you just want to 'tag' a contact as you're dealing with it.

I'm more than happy to talk about this further