Linked Referral Sources to Deals - Just like Contacts

[stevenplapp]

For any business generating sales from referrals, it is important to track who your referral sources are, by linking them to deals that they referred.

Currently, there is no way to effectively link "referral sources" to deals.

The current method is either:

1. Manually enter the referral sources name in a text field (does not link to their contact profile)

2. Enter the referall sources as a contact on the deal (onfusing because they are not working at the company, they just referred them to us)

It would be great to have a seperate section like "referrals" or "sources" uniquely different from "contacts" that would link referral source contacts to deals they referred

[stevenplapp]

Hi all! I'm Jeff, from the Framework Data Group.

This sounds like a great idea, thanks for proposing it. Our challenge will be figuring out how to scale the infrastructure that displays options inside - portals can have hundreds of thousands of contacts! For the time being, we won't be focused on this challenge, but I've taken note of it for the future.

Please keep the upvotes and comments coming, so we can track more use cases and relative importance.

Thanks!

jeff

[juliettecove]

I agree! — It would be nice if I could make a custom property called "Referred By" and be able to set the selection method to search contacts. The functionality already exists in hubspot for creating a deal, when asked to select "Contact." Right now, the only seletion of a person for a custom property is "Hubspot user." Why not offer "Contacts" within that option list?

It' super simple, and I would like to reward and thank my patrons every time someone they referred purchases from me, particularly when they lead me to repeat business. Also, in the case when a contact is based on a professional partnership (vs a buyer) all we may do is provide referrals to one another, and it is possible they become a buyer in the future (and get heavy gifting to help them do so).

I would also like to indicate when contacts are a couple, or a family. I can not do this by creating a company called "The Smiths" because both of those smiths may have jobs and could be connected to a partnering organization. — It seems compicated, but the imediate fix is fairly simplicated. Custom property!

[cstrange]

Did you guys get an answer to your request above?  How do you manage referrals from partners, etc?  I am new to Hubspot and trying to figure this out.  We have partners (Companies and Contacts).  These partners may refer a lead to us.  We have lead source as partner, then have a free-form text field where we have to manually type the name of the partner.  It would be great to be able to just select the partner from a drop down list (of Companys who have Type=Partner).  Thoughts?

[sgagliano]

YES!  i submitted the same request.  It's a gap for Hubspot to fill, rather than force users to create clunky workarounds.

[ChrisWheeler]

I too have been racking my brain on how to configure this and have concluded a searchable dropdown field that searches all contacts would be the most elegant way to address this need.  Otherwise the solution is very clunky.

[deandelisle]

Any further developments on this, praying yes, since this was 2018 orgionally! 🙂

Happy New Year!

[Sorazal]

I'm interested as well, though this would be an easy think to do but just found out that it's actually not possible.

Happy New Year! 🙂

[Tim8]

I  do not understand why this is not done for Deals, Contacts, and Companies?  In our line of work we do not get our leads from random website visits so the majority of that side of marketing is irrelevant.  Almost all of our sales come from warm leads from past clients and partners.  It would be really nice to have a way to track these referalls on each contact, company and deal that they provide.  We even have multiple referrers that would need to be associated for one client.  Why cant this happen as a new dyanamic property just like parent/child company?

[adamhoyt]

Nothing new to say here, other than YES PLEASE! Upvoted...

[ANiMaLnz]

Hi all. I am in the process of migrating across from Insightly which has this exact feature (see screen clipping below). I would of thought Hubspot would offer this as standard. I will now have to migrate my referral data with plain text entries rather than links to "referring contacts". A bit disappointing. Hoping Hubspot will come to the party with this soon.

[SkeeStylus]

I've seen a lot of ideas submitted and some are very specific to individual use cases.  Being able to track referrals speaks to Hubspots Lifecycle Stage "Evangelist" value.  I'm going to look into seeing if I can build this using one of the new "custom objects" but I agree this has been overlooked.  I'm glad to see the idea is under review however. 

[mb02]

Yes please, my business is built around looking after my clients and asking (bluntly) to refer their friends, family and colleagues to me.

I would LOVE to be able to record this information easily, so that I can:

- send an email to the referrer and referree thanking them both

- keep a tally of incoming referral leads, and who they came from

- keep a tally of referred leads that convert to sales

- understand the dollars involved so that I can reward my referrers down the track

PLEASE please please put this in place Hubspot.

[Paysteady]

This is a MUCCHHHHH needed piece of the software. It seems to be an incredibly easy fix here as well by simply updating the available property options within the current custom propery functionality. By including "Contact" here, we would at least get the most basic functionality. Futhermore, this would allow for great automation with "Thank you emails" going out to referral sources through a custom workflow once deals are closed, etc. 

[jeffvincent]

Hi all! I'm Jeff, from the Framework Data Group.

This sounds like a great idea, thanks for proposing it. Our challenge will be figuring out how to scale the infrastructure that displays options inside - portals can have hundreds of thousands of contacts! For the time being, we won't be focused on this challenge, but I've taken note of it for the future.

Please keep the upvotes and comments coming, so we can track more use cases and relative importance.

Thanks!

jeff

[APallarito]

I agree! Our last CRM, Pipedrive, had this feature, and it's fairly important to us.

[Paysteady]

Hi @jeffvincent - odd response. You do realize that many of your (much smaller) competitors have this feature figured out and presumably have customers with a large volume of contacts, right? Perhaps the request was misunderstood? 

[Tim8]

Agree.  This was my first step into a CRM.  Looked at a bunch and liked the layout of this product which is why I chose it but without this feature I will most likely be looking at an alternative this summer when tax season is over.

[Paysteady]

@Tim8 as a payroll company, we probably share similar wishlist items in this regard. Much of our business is referred to us by CPA firms, clients, consultants, etc and attribution of these deals is massively important. We also have a consulting company where we actually implement CRM's or other systems - basically outsourced COO type of work - but we've shifted to alternative providers for this as well due to responses like this from Hubspot. Unfortunately, or firm still runs on it haha!

[bvantil]

What's hilarious is they have an entire blog write-up on "how to build a customer referral program". 

Item #9: "Setup Tracking" From Hubspot themselves:

Regardless of the size of your company (though this is especially relevant if your company has a larger customer base) you need to have tracking set in place. 😂
This will ensure that you don't miss one detail — for referred accounts especially. You should be tracking:

• Who was referred and who referred them

Good advice Hubspot...can you recommend a CRM that tracks referrals? 🙄

[bautrey]

Yes, please add this.  Many, many Hubspot customers need to track which Contact and/or Company referred a Deal to them.  Either allow adding another association to a Deal beyond the existing Company, Contact, etc. or allow an option for a Deal property drop-down list to populate with a list of existing Contacts as one user already suggested.

[CSmith27]

In all of MarK Roberge's lectures he talks about yoru sales team knowing where your deals come from. Inbound/Organic/Referral. Yet, Hubspot doesn't have the ability to track this? How did Mark build hubspot into a $100MM company without knowing where the deals come from?  REference- https://youtu.be/aIAbNeqn9K8