[Coming 11/13] A Better Way to Associate Activities to Deals

[ariplaut]

(11/13 update: these changes are now live)

On November 13, the way you associate your sales activities with your deals is getting a major upgrade. From that point forward, you'll have the ability to choose which notes, emails, calls, and meetings roll up to a deal timeline --- rather than having every activity automatically do so. In this article, we'll walk you through why we're making the change and how it works.

Why the change?

The power of the deal timeline in HubSpot is that it puts a 360-degree view of that deal in one place. To do so, it automatically pulls each and every activity from records associated with the deal. That’s incredibly powerful. But, as our users have brought up time and time again, it can also be incredibly overwhelming. Why? Because not all contact and company activity should be associated with a given deal.

Here are a few quick examples:

1. Activities are pulled into the deal from the associated company that do not relate to the contact associated with the deal. Example: A CSM logs a check-in call on the company record. Unrelated to the deal, but logged there anyway.

2. If a contact has multiple deals, activities are pulled into the deal from the associated contact that do not relate to that specific deal. Example: your sales team is working three separate deals within a company, and one stakeholder is peripherally involved in all three. Certain activities are involved in one deal versus another. But they’re logged on all three anyway. Unrelated to the deal, but logged there anyway.

3. Activities are pulled into a deal from the associated contact and company after the deal has closed (lost or won). If the user goes back to the deal a couple months later, it is impossible to figure out which activities helped close the deal or were related to the closing of the deal. Unrelated to the deal, but logged there anyway.

With this update, you can select which records an activity should be associated with when you log it. Your deal timeline, with only the information that relates to that deal.

How it works

When logging or executing an activity on a contact, company, or deal record --- leaving a note, writing an email, making a call, logging an activity, creating a task, or scheduling a meeting --- you’ll have a new association bar to work with:

The tags in this new association bar denote where the activity will appear. If you associate an with the contact “elise@hubspot.com” and the deal “HubSpot - New Deal,” this email will only appear in the timeline for those two records. Using the drop downs and X icons, you add and remove records that are associated with the record you are currently on. If you don't want a certain associated deal to include the email on its timeline, simply X it out.

A few nitty-gritty technical notes:

1. To keep this association experience quick and easy, when you create an activity, HubSpot will automatically associate the contact, company, and the five most recent open deals to that activity.
2. This functionality is not yet available in your email client. Only for activities that occur within HubSpot. Emails you log from your inbox will be associated with the contact, the associated company, and the five most recent open deals. This is also the case for Sequences and engagements logged from the mobile apps.
3. Any additional replies in an email thread will be associated with the same records as the first email in the thread.
4. All activities that are created before November 13, when the new system is rolled out, will keep their same associations, but will adopt the new system of associations. With that in mind, if a pre-11/13 activity doesn't belong on a certain deal record, you'll be able to edit that activity's associations.
5. When you create a new deal and associate contacts and companies with it, the previous engagements logged on those contact and company records will not automatically pull over to the deal record. You can choose the associations you'd like ported over to the deal from the individual records.

And as an added bonus...

With the change, the deal properties "Last Activity Date" and "Last Modified" will now update based on activities associated with the deal from contact and company records. Previously, these properties only updated when activities were logged from the deal itself.

 

This new way of associating activities will go live on November 13.