Ask Me Anything: Growing Better In 2019 Using HubSpot Free and Starter

[#1]

As we all know, January can be a time for resolutions, new starts, and exciting changes. So, let’s start this year off on the right foot, together! My name is Juli G, I’m an expert in the HubSpot Free and Starter tools and I want to help you make 2019 the best year ever for your business!

Over the next two weeks, I’ll be answering all of your technical and strategic questions on how you can grow better with HubSpot Free and Starter products!

Some great examples of questions are:

• “How can I use HubSpot to report on the productivity of my team?”
• “I would really love to make a deeper connection with my website visitors, how can I do that using HubSpot’s tools?”
• “What are some tips and tricks to make sure none of my leads fall through the cracks?”
  
  

This thread is meant to be helpful to everyone. So, if you have a question about any technical issues that are unique to your portal, Starter customers can file a Technical Support Ticket through their portal and Free users can create a new thread here in the community.

This AMA will start on Monday, January 14th at 9:00 AM EST and I will be accepting new questions until 5:00 PM EST on Monday, January 28th. 

Juli Gaudette
Inbound Success Coach

[#2]

Hi community,

We are now shifting all data from salesforce to hubspot. Currently I am not sure how to manage bringing all our renewals and expires data to hubspot. 

I have read quite a few posts in the community, what I have learnt is that i will need to create a new Renewal Pipeline in Deals, with different stages such as Renewal Anticipated, Quote confirmation (with winning percentages). However, a few questions came up:

- We have some deals, which is client subcription/ domain renewals, in our Sales pipeline already, does it mean they (renewal businesses) will appear both in sales pipeline and the renewal pipeline?

- how would I transfer all renewals from salesforce to Hubspot? is there a CVS file to upload and bam - all the work are done?

- Can I set up the timeline in the deal property for all renewals, such as Renewal A, for 1 year, then write workflow to send ourselves email reminders 30 days before the current license expires?

I am learning Hubspot only for two month, apologies if some of the questions are basic and simple

Thank you 

[#3]

Hey there @Hengwho!

First off, I would like to thank you for all of the hard work you have put into finding this answer. It sounds like you’ve done a lot of research on this topic and moving data can take a lot of time and effort. So, keep up the good work!

I do love the idea of creating a deal pipeline for the purpose of renewals, that is how I would approach this solution as well.

To answer your first question, just because a Company record exists in one pipeline, does not mean that it can not exist in another. The beauty of the HubSpot deals tool is that any company, for the sake of this explanation let’s call it Acme Corp, can have multiple deals open at the same time. So, you could create two completely separate deals associated with Acme Corp, one for the sales pipeline and one for the renewal pipeline.

As for your second question, if you can export all of your current renewals from Salesforce to a CSV file, then you should definitely make this your top priority. From there, you could add a column to the file with a header of “Deal Stage” and assign a stage you want each of the renewals to be placed in upon import into HubSpot. Then, you could import the file as a Deal import and, as you put it, BAM all of the information is there. Please keep in mind, deals will still need to be associated with companies after the fact. So, you will have a little bit more footwork before the task is complete.

For your final question, you would indeed need to use our workflows tool. You wouldn’t be able to use a property that says  expiration is “one year from today.” However, you could create and use a date picker property to set the exact date of expiration and then use a date based workflow to send notifications while counting down to the specified date.

If you have any questions at all about the implementation of this, please feel free to reach out to our HubSpot Technical Support team. They would be more than happy to walk you through this solution step by step! You can find their contact information here: https://help.hubspot.com/

[#4]

Hi everyone.  I'm pretty new to Hubspot and have discovered that a ton of contacts are being sync'd back to the system as I use one email address for all my life (and business).

Is there a way that just once I can tell the system not to sync XYZ contact (so like gas bills, friends etc), rather than delete them after they do sync?

Thanks for your help

Pippa

[#5]

@PippaP I know this was set up for @juli to respond but thought I would throw this out there.

Go to the cog gear and select filtering. Scroll down till you get to black list.  I believe this should work.  @juli please confirm.

Good luck.

[#6]

Hi @PippaP and @gelflex-cc! 

Love to see you guys helping each other out here! 

@PippaP, @gelflex-cc definitley covered a part of this. If you follow his instructions, you will be able to prevent these friends and family members from coming into your HubSpot Conversations shared inbox.  

However, if you are using one of our email extensions (Google, Outlook or Office365), it will not prevent the contacts from being created over and over again in the CRM. For this part, you are going to want to use your Never Log settings.  You can get there following these steps:

1. In your HubSpot account, click the settings icon settings in the main navigation bar.
2. In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Sales > Log emails in CRM. 
3. In the Never Log section, click Add contact.

This will allow you tell the system, just once, not to sync emails with these specific contacts. You can also set up this feature directly in your inbox in Gmail or Outlook. 

Read more about it here! 

[#7]

@juli Did not know about never log. Thanks for sharing and applauding my jumping in. 

[#8]

Thanks @juli, that's just the ticket and all sorted.  And thanks @gelflex-cc for your suggestion too 😊

Pippa

[#9]

Hello,

Is there a clear way to track sales compensation based on closed deals within Hubspot? In a related matter, the Contract Management still needs to occur through third parties (like Pandadoc) or does Hubspot offer already an internal solution for this?

Thank you for feedback

Loraine

[#10]

Hi @LoLombardi!

Though we do not have a built in compensation calculator, many of our users will utilize the Deal Leaderboard report on their Sales Dashboard ignorer to calculate compensation. This report will show you all of your sales reps listed and their closed revenue for a given timeframe. You can filter the report for any timeframe you please and then calculate the commissions from there.

Additionally, I’m not clear on what you mean by ‘contract management.’ If you could explain a bit further what you are trying to do with these documents, I would be happy to revisit the question!

[#11]

It's useful to be able to create a task for my co-worker and have an email reminder sent to him day-of, but he's also receiving an email just to say the task was created for him by me, which is a lot of extra email he doesn't need.  Is there a way to change this?

[#12]

Hi @fergbreath! 

Great question! We can absolutely turn the emails off for when you assign a task to your team. 

The key to notifications in HubSpot is that everyone can control their own preferences. So, everyone can customize it to their own own personal preference. 

In order to turn off the email notifications off when he is assigned a task, he can follow these stps:

1. In your HubSpot account, click your account name in the top right corner, then click Profile & Preferences.
2. In the left sidebar menu, navigate to Notifications > HubSpot.
3. The specific notification we are looking to turn off is called "CRM task assign,"which can be found in the "Crm" section of the list. 
4. Turn off the check box in the Email column! 

If you want to learn more about user preferences, you can read more here! 

[#13]

Thank you!

[#14]

@juli Thanks for doing this.

I am poor at the Community. Would love a tutorial. Does one exist?

How do I find all the questions I have posted?

How do I pm/dm someone in the community? IE if I wanted to send you a message and I go to the envelope, you do not come up.

Thanks.

Chris

[#15]

Hey @gelflex-cc!

I'm going to loop in our Community Manager @jennysowyrda here. She will be able to answer your question!

[#16]

@juli THANK YOU

[#17]

@juli

Hi Juli,

This may seem odd,  I have been a software beta tester in other environments and in my personal HubSpot account, where can I find known bugs?  I am not trying to highlight issues rather look outside the box gaining a better understanding of the software capabilities vs needs. 

Through conversations, I understand the intent and the use of products are not always the same.  At each company I have brought HubSpot to there is always a slightly different need. 

Thanks.

Chris

[#18]

Hi @gelflex-cc

At this time, we do not publish a list of our existing know bugs, primarily because we have a very dedicated team of developers who work extremely hard to make sure those bugs don’t stick around for very long. If you do come across something specifically that you believe is a bug and you want to report it , I would encourage you to create a new thread here in the appropriate section of the Community. Our moderators will always do their best to follow up and report it to the development team.

[#19]

Hello!

Wondering about best practices on how to address a new year in the deals pipeline. We have worked with hubspot during 2018 and would like to see fresh statistics, closed deals, etc. for 2019. 

Thank you in advanced!

[#20]

Hello @dwachowicz and Happy New Year!

I hope your 2019 is off to a fruitful start and that your deal pipeline is already rockin’! You can absolutely filter all of your reporting down to just this year.

On your Sales Dashboard, you have the option to filter your reports to any time frame you want. We even include a default option of This Year to make it easy for you.

There are two ways you can filter your dashboard by Date Range: individually by report or you can filter the entire dashboard at once.

For instructions on how to filter the entire Sales Dashboard by date range, please check out this article. (Linking it here instead of typing the instructions because it comes with handy reference pictures.)

To edit the date range of any individual report on your dashboard, you can hover your mouse of the report you want to edit and click the small blue link that says "Report Settings." It will appear in the second line of text in the report (just under the title).

When you see the Report Settings options slide in from the right side of the screen, you’ll know you’re in the right place. In that pop-up you can set the date range to whatever you want it to be. In your case, you would set it to be This Year.

[#21]

Hi @gelflex-cc,

If you have specific questions about the Community, please let me know. 

You can find all of the threads you have engaged with by going to your profile (either by clicking on your username, or by navigating to the outline of a person in the top navigation and selecting "my profile")

Similarly for DM'ing someone in the Community, you can either click on the envelope icon from the top navigation and select "new message" or you can click on their username and then select "send message". 

If you have further questions, please feel free to start a new thread and tag me in (@jennysowyrda) and we can assist.

Thanks,

Jenny

[#22]

@jennysowyrda 

I can not find you in the list to send a dm.  I could send one to @juli and it included me.

Posts - great thank you.

[#23]

@juli

Hi Juli,

I am not asking the question in a way that nets me a usable answer in the community. Hoping you can help.

It would be extremely helpful to know EXACTLY what fields auto-populate under which circumstances. 

• I.E. lifecycle stage auto-populates to contacts, when changed in company, (highly publicized option)
• I.E. facebook (not sure about other social media) auto-populates from HubSpot Insights (I think that is what it is called) or leave this blank if not available
• I.E. parent company auto-populates when child company is added (this was painful to find out and it was accidental - I manually added the parent company to over 200 companies before discovering this) knowledge base on parent/child not helpful.

I do not know of any others and am referred to workflows to make auto-populating happen.  Workflow is a paid service not sure it will do what I need. Sales is not the place to discover what I need.

Thanks.

Chris

[#24]

Hi again @gelflex-cc!

One of our very talented Professors, @KyleJepson just wrote a really cool blog post about this exact topic. It covers the majority of contact properties that will automatically update for you. 

Additionally, our HubSpot Insights tool will fill in as many of the following as it can on any Company record that has a company domain included:

Name
Company Domain
Industry
Phone Number
City
State/Region

Postal Code

Number of Employees
Annual Revenue

Time Zone

Descripton

Is Public

Total Money Raised

Year Founded
LinkedIn Company Page

Facebook Company Page

Twitter Handle

You can learn more about HubSpot Insights here. 

Please also keep in mind, any property regarding an association between two objects will also update on its own for you. This includes but is not limited to:

Parent Company
Child Company

Number of Child Companies
Associated Company (on Contact Records)

Associated Contacts
Associated Deals

Recent Deal Amount
First Deal Create Date

Hope this helps! 

[#25]

@juli Thank you.  @KyleJepson is great. I enjoy his lessons and tracks. Printing the blog post now.

[#26]

How do i reduce the size of the activity feed boxes?  I feel like there is a lot of wasted space?  I'd like to fit more info in one screen.

[#27]

Hi @1722023!

Welcome to the AMA! I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Activity Feed Boxes" any chance you might be able to include a screenshot here for reference?

[#28]

I make a lot of records and i'd like to see more than a few contacts/actions.  Can you reconfigure the size of the section in red?
Activity feed?

[#29]

Thanks for the context @1722023 !

At this time, we are unable to customize the look and feel of the contact timelines. My apologis for any frustration or inconvinence the current layout may cause for you and your team. 

If you feel strongly about this, I would reccommend posting it as an idea on ideas.hubspot.com. Our developers like to consult that forum while building their product roadmaps and they love to hear the use cases directly from our users! 

[#30]

@juli  I was reluctant to use the Community when first introduced.  Of course, instant answers are desired and correct answers (or maybe what I want to hear).  Over time, I am embracing this and will need to create logins for my other users.  Ultimately it was @jennysowyrda whose assistance made me a believer. Jenny, it's Lauren's fault..... I thought you were a user at first.

Thank you to all the staff who monitor and contribute to the Community.