Best Practice - Who and How Many Contacts to Associate with a Deal

[Lucy2]

What are some best practices for who and how many contacts to associate with a deal?  big thanks.

[JoseGarcia99]

Hi,

I do not know about best practices, I have only my own experience. I used additional contacts to know provider contacts and others... I just removed all additional contacts. There is no 'main contact' tag auto added. When you send an email campaign, you can filter by contacts tagged with certain tag, but you cannot exclude based on certain tags. So if you have more than a contact, each campaign would be sent to all conctats. Or if you make a deal workflow, and you need to make anything to some of the involved contacts, there is no way to filter to a certain contact.

If you use more than a contact, keep in mind you need to label each association, main contact included. If you work with many contacts this is not a real option. We make a hundred deals each day. If our sales team forget to manually choose an association label (for the main contact) each time they create a deal, you will experience many problems each time you need to make any auto action at main contact. You would have some deals without 'main contact' and there is no way to make a list of deal/contacts without a association label.

Feel free to try yourself, it is the best learning. But I lost many time and resources trying to use additional contacts at deals integrating them with APIs, custom cards... and I just deleted all.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @Lucy2,

This depends a lot on the product and the business, whether it's B2B or B2C etc.

There are scenarios where it could make sense to have all contacts who are associated to the company also associated to the deals. More often however, it's recommended to only associate those contacts to a deal who are relevant to the purchasing process. There isn't an exact number.

You could look at this from an angle of all the potential buying roles: https://uk.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/buying-roles-in-sales-process

I would see all other roles as eligible to be associated with the deal:

• decider
• buyer
• approver
• promoter
• executive sponsor
• influencer
• gatekeeper

As a sales person, I would want to keep track of these. Whether an end user should be associated is already debatable. If you're selling to the entire company, then probably not. If there are only a handful of end users, then maybe.

How many contacts exactly you associate also depends on whether you plan to set up automation based on the contacts associated with the deal. HubSpot has some limitations in enrollment and segmentation and that could affect who you associate.

Lastly, think about reporting. If you want to be able to report on the number of associated deals by contact, for whom would you like a deal to 'count'?

These are the guiding questions I'd use to determine which contacts should be associated.

Best regards

[DCristea]

No. What are hubspot's limitations?