Limitations of the new Prospecting tool and a suggestion

[JMayhew6]

I'm posting this here both as feedback for the HubSpot product team, as well as to see if anyone else has encountered this problem and has figured out a solution/workaround: 

I think that it is major limitation of the Leads tool that 'Lead Owner' is automatically assigned to the 'Contact Owner,' and this is a non-editable feature. Our company, and I'm sure many companies, have multiple 'owners' and have set up multiple HubSpot User properties to note different owners. 

Our lowest level sales team members are called 'SDRs'. These reps are who deal with brand new leads and are in charge of vetting them, making the initial phone calls, booking meetings, etc. As such, they are the team that can stand to benefit the most from the prospects tool. However, they are never tagged as the 'Company Owner.' The Company Owner is assigned to a higher level sales account executive only after the SDRs have successfully vetted a lead and created an account. We have another proper called "SDR Owner" that is a HubSpot user property that we use to denote which SDR owns a contact. 

Because leads are only ever assigned to the Contact Owner, This means that, while the SDRs are the team that is getting assigned the initial tasks and working the contacts, the contacts do not show up for them in on their prospecting page. 

I think that you will find a lot of mid-sized to large comapnies will encounter this issue. Many people have multiple sales teams dealing with different stages in the lead management process, and its no doubt often the case that 'contact owner' is not assigned until a lead has been vetted and a deal has been created. 

So, I highly suggest making this feature not completely beholden to the 'company owner property.' 

If anyone has had to deal with this limitation and has figured out a way around it, I would welcome any suggestions. 

I will note: we did consider the idea of initially assigning the SDRs to the Contact Owner Property for new contacts, and then only overwriting 'Contact Owner' if and when a lead makes it all the way to the 'deal created' field. We could create automation that copies the sdr owner out of 'contact owner, pastes the value into 'sdr owner,' and then assigns a higher level sales rep as the new contact owner. However, I'm not sure what this solution would do to our reporting; I don't think we would be able to keep track of an SDR owner's success rate and productivity and report on their activities if we are replacing them as the contact owners. 

Again, any advice would be greatly appreciated! 

[ScottMoyse]

This is an extremely common way of working. It's a rough process currently. 

[M_Kelly]

So I see it looks like this has now been solved with the toggle option in Leads Settings "Sync lead owner with contact or company owner". I'm new to HubSpot and was just wondering how we find out when updates like this happen, I can't see any comment on this post so wasn't aware it had been solved? Is there an email or anything I should be signed up to receive? This is an awesome update BTW! Thanks 🙂

[Jnix284 · Accepted solution]

Hi @M_Kelly to keep up with the latest updates, here are a few resources:

1 - What's New official updates from HubSpot

2 - Product Spotlight monthly updates on HubSpot's YouTube

3 - HubSpot Tips and Tricks on LinkedIn

4 - Product Updates in your account (also access to Betas):

[JHumphreyNAC]

Hi,

Our current thought process (which I came across somewhere in the Hubspot Community) is to create a catch-all user that represents the Team as a whole. All contacts and companies are assigned to this catch-all user. Then, anyone on the Team has visibility to contacts and companies their team owns, and permissions are set to allow viewing of leads their team owns. SDR then toggles to the Catch-All user on the Prospecting > Leads page, and begins to take action.

We are brand-new to HubSpot, and I'd love for someone with experience to comment on this approach. 

Has some obvious some pros/cons -

Pros being that it allows SDRs to view leads owned by their team;

Cons being it requires an extra seat; sub-optimal reporting on user activity at the lead stage?

Thank you for comments 

[JMayhew6]

If I'm following you correctly, I think that the major drawback to your solution is that if and  when you would like to report on sales activities, every activity is just going to be attributed to that one 'catch-all' user account; you won't be able to see which SDRs are making more calls, booking more meetings, etc. 

But if I'm missing something let me know. If it seems to be working for you, that's great! 

[hellokyliep]

Agree completely with this post. Prospecting is often owned by SDRs or front of pipeline teams. The only way to track attribution for revenue is to hack your way through it by creating custom properties. It seems like a Prospecting tool should include this. 

[Pooja5]

It would be so good if this limitation is resolved soon

[KMassey8]

+1. I'm so excited about this new tool but I cannot find a way to make it work with our current process which also is split up across SDRs/AEs. Fingers crossed a solution is found, it would solve alot of our challenges!

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @JMayhew6,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community and for sharing this feedback regarding the prospecting workspace. It's much appreciated by our product team as they are looking for customer feedback to improve this new feature. 

I wanted to let you know that your feedback has been shared with the corresponding internal team. They are aware of this limitation and are actively discussing the lead owner/assignee process. 

I also wanted to invite our subject matter experts to see if they have advice on how to work around this product limitation at the moment.

Hi @Jnix284, @danmoyle, @franksteiner79 - Do you have any insight for @JMayhew6?

Thank you! 

Best,

Kristen

[Jnix284]

@JMayhew6 appreciate the detailed insights, we've run into this issue as well - because we have workflows that assign new contacts from specific sources to specific owners, we're seeing that leads are assigned to them even if someone else follows up or creates a lead. This is a tricky one, especially with the different ways leads can be assigned owners.

No workarounds, hoping for an update from the product team on this one!

[JMayhew6]

Thank Jennifer. For what its worth what we have decided on for now is that our SDR team (early stage sales reps) will be added as the contact owner when a new contact is created, then when the contact reaches the final lead stage (deal creater) the contact owner field get re-assigned to a higher level sales rep and the SDR gets copied over to the 'SDR Owner' property -a HubSpot User property. 

I've put together some reports based on lead stages and SDR performance and it seems like they have come out OK and I'm still able to create reports and attribute the activities and lead stages to the SDRs, even after they are no longer listed as the 'contact owners'. 

I still think it would be a great amendment to the product to tie the leads to more than just contact owners, but if anyone else is struggling with this, this technique is working for the time being for us. 

[Jnix284]

Thanks for sharing @JMayhew6, I'm glad you were able to create a process to work around this. I have heard that they are working on resolving this - realizing how big of a roadblock it is for a lot of use cases.

No timing, but hopefully soon 🤞

[SJennings7]

Our company is in the same situation as the others. Is there a way to sign up for alerts when issues like this are resolved? 

[danmoyle]

Agree @kvlschaefer that this is a great use case for specific feedback from @JMayhew6. I'm sure others will experience a similar situation and the team will benefit from the post. I don't have a workaround at this point, and I think this is such a new tool and a new direction, that it won't take long for an improvement or other adjustment. 🙂