Exclude Companies With Open Deals from Email Nurtures List

[toricook]

Hi community,

Looking for a solution for a B2B company.

This question is regarding building a recipient list for an email campaign.

In some email campaigns, I want to exclude companies that already have an open deal with us. Recipient lists in HubSpot are contact-based, so I haven't found the perfect way to do that. Basically, I want to ensure that any contact associated to a company that already has an open deal with us is excluded from an email send.

I currently have a list of all contacts with an open deal. I use the filter "At least one associated deal has deal stage of" and then list out all of our open deal stages. I then exclude this list via a filter on other email recipient lists that I create — "contact is not a member of that list." 

A few things to note:

• Not every contact at every company is assigned to our open deals. So let's say the company has 10 employees, only 2 may be assigned to the open deal. So, this means that 8 employees will still appear in my email list. But I still want to exclude them from my email list.
• I have considered excluding companies with associated deals. But that doesn't work because I only want to exclude those with open deals. I have wondered if perhaps there's a way I could create and calculate a custom property that could show the number of open deals on a contact or company record, but I haven't put much thought into the logic behind that and whether I could make it work. But, in theory, I think I could probably use HubSpot's "increase/decrease value" actions in workflow to create this if we think it is the best way to exclude companies.

Curious how other B2B companies are making this work. Have you been able to exclude contacts that already have open deals from your email campaigns? And if so, how are you making that work?

[AM8 · Accepted solution]

Hi @toricook 

I'll try to asnwer your questions in order: 

Q1. What do you do with people who have an open deal that becomes close-lost. Do you move their lifecycle stage back from opportunity to MQL/SQL? Or do you keep their lifecycle stage listed as opportunity?
Ans. We don't move the LCS back but I have seen many companies do it. Choose what works best for you. 

Q2. I want to be able to appropriately email people who have had open deals in the past but don’t have one now. 
Ans. I have a workflow that mapes Opportunity stage to lifecycle stage.  Then with the help of a list : Lifecycle stage = opp ; AND Lead status = Closed Lost , I am able to reach this type of audience. 

[AM8]

Hi @toricook , 

We have turned on company to deal lifecycle stage mapping sync.

So I am able to exclude companies that are in stage = customer ( and the contatcs in those companys are all excluded) 
I generally send out  emails to companies that are in opportunity stage ( open deals) becasue we run a lot of "upsell" campaigns. 

[toricook]

Thanks for the idea! 

A few follow-up questions:

What do you do with people who have an open deal that becomes close-lost. Do you move their lifecycle stage back from opportunity to MQL/SQL? Or do you keep their lifecycle stage listed as opportunity? I want to be able to appropriately email people who have had open deals in the past but don’t have one now. 

We are, of course, one of the weird exceptions to the rule for the contact/company lifecycle sync. We haven't turned on lifecycle sync between companies and contacts. The main reason is because we have many contacts that are affiliated with multiple companies. Only one company can be assigned to a contact, so we use lifecycle stages to differentiate between multiple accounts. Example: A contact could be listed as lead status = customer and lifecycle stage = opportunity. Which means they are both a customer and have an existing opportunity. Is there a cleaner way we can do this without muddying up the lifecycle stages?

I think what would really help me is if HubSpot had an "open deals" field on the contact record instead of only "associated deals." That way, I can email contacts based on their open deals only and not an ongoing list of associated deals that may be very old.

[AM8 · Accepted solution]

Hi @toricook 

I'll try to asnwer your questions in order: 

Q1. What do you do with people who have an open deal that becomes close-lost. Do you move their lifecycle stage back from opportunity to MQL/SQL? Or do you keep their lifecycle stage listed as opportunity?
Ans. We don't move the LCS back but I have seen many companies do it. Choose what works best for you. 

Q2. I want to be able to appropriately email people who have had open deals in the past but don’t have one now. 
Ans. I have a workflow that mapes Opportunity stage to lifecycle stage.  Then with the help of a list : Lifecycle stage = opp ; AND Lead status = Closed Lost , I am able to reach this type of audience. 

[AM8]

@toricook Did it work? 

[toricook · Accepted solution]

TBH none of these worked perfectly. However, HubSpot's new ABM features with "open deals" on company record will do the trick. Thanks for all the help coming up with some work-arounds!