[Guide] How to add count of calls in Contacts & Deals

[Ferran]

More info in the first comment below 👇

[DChepik · Accepted solution]

Hello! 

Denis here from HubSpot Support.
With the new Event trigger in workflows it is possible to trigger a workflow based on started or completed call. With this you can achieve the goal without relying on a third party solution 🙂 

[Jnix284]

Thank you for sharing the update @DChepik 🙌

[Jnix284]

This is very intersting @Ferran , we've used similar custom properties to create count metrics, but not specifically for calls. I'm curious, once you have this data, what type of reporting are you using it for?

[Ferran]

Sorry for the late reply, I missed this!
We track how much effort it takes to move a deal through stages. 

Calls is an essential activity in our sales process : more calls -> more close deals.

[Ferran]

Problem 
· Hubspot doesn't allow natively to count the number of calls in a contact, or a deal.
Current options that Hubspot natively counts sales activities in contacts and sales are : number of times contacted (which includes calls, chats, meetings, emails, etc...) and number of sales activities (which includes all the fields in number of times contacted + tasks, notes and other activities)

· Hubspot does keep a record of activities related to a contact or a deal BUT they don't allow to use  #count of activities OR #count of calls, as a dimension in the Y axis  or as in break down by in Advanced Builder reports . You can only use them as filters or in the X axis which is pretty useless if you want to pull something like : show me a breakdown of deals based on number of calls made. Also reportings based on activities is much less convenient that running those reports based on contacts or deals.

Solution

We will use workflows to count calls count on contacts and deals.

Pre-requisites: Use a 3rd party phone integration that has a "last call timestamp" or similar field in Hubspot

Step 1: Create a property "Count of calls" in contacts

Step 2: Create a workflow to increase "Count of calls" by 1 each time there is a new timestamp for a call.

Please note that you need to reenroll contacts when the field is known.

If you only needed to have this count on contacts, you are finished! If you need to copy the count to deals, continue to the next steps:

Step 3  Create two properties on deals : Count of calls and Updated count of calls from contacts.

Step 4: Create 2 workflows to copy count of calls from contacts to deals.

First workflow checks if there is an associated deal, and if true, checks if the deal has already count of calls set. If the deal doesn't have any count of calls yet (for example, when  the contact already has some calls BEFORE the deal was created), it copies the value of count of calls. If the deal already has count of calls, it updates the field updated count of calls.

Second workflow increases the count of calls by 1, if count of calls was al based on the previous workflow branch) . The reason a second workflow is needed is because Hubspot doesn't natively allow to increase/decrease a property count if it's contact based.

Hope that helps to anyone! Happy to answer to questions if it needs clarifying

[danmoyle]

Nice solution @Ferran. Definitely an interesting use for those brands counting calls made (or recieved) for accounts they're working (companies) or contacts as well.