Mapping List Name to Property

[JEpner]

I have spoken to multiple reps who tell me there is no better way to do this... I am stuck creating many workflows to do ONE simple thing I shouldn't even have to use a workflow for.  I just want the name of a list to map to a contact property - that's it.... list name -> property value.  But I am stuck spending 10 HOURS setting up 20 different if/then workflows each with 20 different branches to accomplish this because HS can't be bothered to allow for something so simple.   This is such a waste of people's time and money to be forced to do this.  

If anyone can think of another way, please let me know.  And HubSpot, you REALLY need to allow for better data management processes, this is ridiculous.  Almost my entire week this week has been spent doing repetitive tasks HS doesn't allow to be automated when I have strategy and campaign management to be concerned with... such a waste of people's resources.

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @JEpner,

The information you received is correct, it's not possible to have a property automatically update its values based on list names.

Could you explain what you're trying to achieve by doing this? A lot of the times, there is another way to approach this.

You're saying you created many workflows and branches to send contacts into lists. This sounds like you want to automatically put contacts in lists based on certain criteria. For the sake of having an example, let's assume that's the case.

You want a contact to automatically be added to a list with the name 'Customers' if a dropdown property on the contact record has the value 'Customers'. You want the same to happen for a 'Vendors' list and the value 'Vendors' dynamically, without mapping every single value. Instead this should happen dynamically.

To achieve this, the list filters could updated to reference each value directly. Your list would filter for contacts with the value 'Customers', no need for a workflow. Yes, you would still have to create the filter criteria for each list but a workflow wouldn't be needed here.

For 20 lists, I would consider this doable, for 400 lists not so much. However, if we're talking about 400 lists (and if my previous assumptions were correct) I'd love to understand what the context of those 400 lists is – as again there might be another way of approaching what you're trying to accomplish instead of using lists.

Best regards!

[JEpner]

I imported 400 csvs that need to have a new property applied to all imported contacts. The list name / import file name needs to be what populates this field. It SHOULD be simple, not a 10-hour manual task.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @JEpner,

I have a workaround for you that'll take someone new to HubSpot ~ 30 minutes.

For contacts who were imported into HubSpot and which did not exist in HubSpot before the import, the import list name is stored in the property Original source drill-down 2. That's what we're going to leverage here.

1. Navigate to Menu > Contacts > Contacts and use All filters to filter the page by Original source drill-down 1 = IMPORT.
2. Add the column Original source drill-down 2 to view (Actions > Edit columns) and export the view (Actions > Export view).
3. First, we need to get a list of all list names. Duplicate the Excel sheet and use the new sheet to create deduplicated list of all list names. To do so, in your cloned sheet remove all columns but Original source drill-down 2. Then remove all duplicates from this remaining column.
4. Navigate to Settings > Properties and find the dropdown property you either have created or which you need to create. Use the Load options > Paste in your own options feature, see below. This is where you paste your list of list names.
   
5. Remove the sheet from your Excel file so that only one sheet remains. (HubSpot doesn't accept multiple sheets in imports, see next step.) Also, feel free to remove all columns but the Email column and Original source drill-down 2.
6. Re-import the list into HubSpot. Map Email to Email and Original source drill-down 2 to your newly created or updated property from Step 4. Do not import any other columsn. During the mapping process, you should see a green checkmark for this mapping, if all of the previous steps were completed correctly.

If you have contacts which existed in HubSpot before, this gets a bit more complicated. Let me know if that's the case.

Hope this helps!

[JEpner]

Holy **bleep**, this is amazing. Thank you.

I have yet to try this.. most of these contacts existed in HubSpot before.... many don't have emails.... I've already created a de-dupe mess of things (when the tool runs again on Sunday, I will likely have thousands). SO... what additional considerations or suggestions would you have in this case?

Thank you so much for your help!

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @JEpner,

If these contacts existed before, there's also the Latest source group of properties which follow the same logic as the Original source properties. If the import was the latest source, then you could use this instead. If contacts have likely had many other interactions in between, this would also not be 100% clean unfortunately: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/understand-source-properties

You could export both contacts by Original source drill-down 1 orLatest source drill-down 2 'Import', hoping that this should cover most if not all of them. You could then merge both export files, again removing duplicates (contacts where original and latest source are the same).

Regarding contacts without email addresses, it's also possible to use the record ID as an identifier when you re-import contacts. Just re-import the source and record ID column. During the import process, you can tell HubSpot that the record ID should be used as an identifier.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions, happy to help!

Best regards

[deepikaverma]

Thank you @karstenkoehler  for such a good explation.