Set all Contacts as Marketing Contacts when associated Deal Lifecycle Stage is set as "Customer"

[sarahbecherer]

Hi there!

Question about workflows from a newbie.

How would I go about setting up a workflow where I auto-enroll all contacts associated with a company in marketing emails when that company becomes a customer?

For example:

• Sarah is a Contact in my database
• Her email is sarah@funcompany.com
• Sarah's Contact > Company (Primary) is set to Fun Company
• Fun Company becomes a customer and the Deal Lifecycle Stage is changed to Customer
• Now Sarah and all of the other Contacts with Contact > Company (Primary) set to Fun Company with @funcompany.com email addresses should become Marketing Contacts and receive marketing emails

Trying to wrap my brain around this but haven't cracked it yet – anybody out there have an idea of how this could be done?

Thank you!

- Sarah

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @sarahbecherer,

In case you are now on a Professional subscription or higher or if anyone else stumbles upon this: Good news, the 'Set marketing contact status' action is now available across workflow types (public beta).

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Workflows

Set marketing contact status action available across workflow types

January 22, 2025

What is it?

The Set marketing contact status workflow action is now available in more types of workflows, instead of only in contact based workflows.

Why does it matter?

Until now, the Set marketing contact status action has only been available in contact workflows. This is because the action is only applicable to contacts, as they are the only record type with a marketing status. This also meant that the action could only be used with triggers available in contact workflows, which doesn't fit every use case. With the update we're making, you can now set other types of objects' associated contacts as marketing or not marketing, from other types of workflows.

For example, from a deal workflow, you could trigger automation when a deal is closed lost and use the Set marketing contact status action to make the "Decision maker" contact associated with that deal non marketing, to automatically reduce costs for contacts you're no longer engaging with.

How does it work?

Since these three actions can only run against contacts, when using them in other type workflows, you must define which contact the action should affect.

To set up the above example, follow these steps:

• In your HubSpot account, navigate to Automations > Workflows
• Click to create a new workflow from scratch
• Choose a Deal-based workflow and set up a trigger
• Click to add the Set marketing contact status action
• You'll now see a new field on the action labelled "Contact," where a specific type of contact must be selected
• To choose which contact to change the marketing status on, click the "Edit available data" link showing in the field drop down
• Follow the steps for adding a new data source for record type Contact; you can use association labels or other filters to choose which associated contact the action should update

When these actions are used in workflows other than contact type workflows, they can currently only run against one contact at a time.

Who gets it?

Professional Customer Platform, Enterprise Customer Platform, Marketing Pro, Marketing Enterprise

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You should see this product update and the ability to join the beta under Settings > Product updates > All product updates.

Best regards

[Ben_M]

Seeing as your post is marked starter, you will not have access to workflows until you upgrade to pro or enterprise hubs.

Personally speaking, when a Deal moves to Closed Won and they become a customer, I would typically set a company property to customer so that it lives on that object for reporting purposes, otherwise to tell if someone is a customer you are going to merge the Deal and Contact objects instead of the Company and Contact which is usually more natural in reporting or Deal and Company vs. Deal and Contact which may not be related.

Furthermore, I don't know whether I would recommend setting all contacts to marketing contacts when someone becomes a customer. While it sounds like a good idea that you would want to be able to send to everyone, with GDPR and other compliance, this doesn't solve for being able to email the contacts. Making them a marketing contact only makes them eligible if they are opted in and starts you getting billed for them in Hubspot. Let's say that potentially you are selling software to enterprises. To sell that solution you have some directors, a VP they report to, IT that needs to sign off for integrations, and a CFO who will sign the bill because it's above their limits. Why does the CFO need to be blasted with your marketing emails, or the IT person? While there is a need to maybe send IT transactional emails for downtime, or keep the CFO apprised of renewals, blasting the entire company often ends up with that company reaching out and telling you not to email them anymore with very strict compliance measures. It's a road I've seen people go down before so I would try to suggest being aware of the pitfalls here before you run this workflow.

[sarahbecherer]

Thanks, Ben!

I do want these contacts receiving product nurture emails from me about how to use the platform and highlighting features so it is appropriate that they are marketing contacts.

It would take me less time to unenroll people who I know don't want that type of content (C-Suite, etc.) than it would to enroll those who will (dozens of hands-on users). I appreciate the judiciousness but I'm good to go on that front. 

I don't understand all of what you're saying in paragraph #2 but it seems like I need to manually indicate, on a Company level, that the Company is a customer once the deal is won? And then all of the associated Contacts of that Company will be automatically marked as Customers, too? Or would I need to build a workflow for that? I'm just looking for ways to save myself some time but if it's best done manually, that's not a problem.

Thanks so much, I appreciate you!

- SB

[Ben_M · Accepted solution]

With regards to my second paragraph, that is in relation to your bullet #4 (Fun Company becomes a customer and the Deal Lifecycle Stage is changed to Customer). By setting a value of Customer on the Deal and not on the Company, you will potentially lead to a tough time pulling reports. For instance, if you want to pull a report of customers, you will be looking for a Deal with a Lifecycle Stage of Customer which is the Deal and Contacts objects. Let's say you have 5 contacts on the account. Contact {1&2} are associated to the Deal. Contact's 3-5 are created after and only associated to the company not the deal. If you only look at the Deal Lifecycle Stage to see who a Customer is, Contact's 3-5 would not be seen in your segment unless you pull 3 objects into the report (Contact/Deal/Company) instead of just 2 objects (Contact/Company) if you set the Company Lifecycle Stage to Customer when the Deal is Closed Won. Longer term, more objects leads to complexity in querying when you are trying to build reports. Looking beyond Hubspot starter, I would recommend in a case like yours to set a workflow to trigger this automatically, but with Starter, yes it would have to be done manually. It might be a bit of a pain, but for scaling your data longer term, you will be better off having data points like that on the company object as opposed to the deal.