Segment or partition contacts per Business Unit

[rjbudding]

I am implementing the new Business Unit feature, and I see that an extra property has been created, called Business Unit in which I can pick the correct BU per contact. 

But now I am thinking, what would be the best way to automaticly segment contacts to one of the BU's? 

Can a contact be segmented by asset? For example, contact created via form that's part of BU A, so contact's BU property will be BU A. 

Any ideas/best practices?

Thanks!

[TJWright]

I can advise that we have found two suitable workarounds:

1.  Create another workflow/automation that directly applies the Business Unit value for every contact created by a particular form or process - this effectively overwrites the BU value and works well, however the new Contact is still initially created in the default BU which could lead to other issues down the track or may trigger other automation created by the default BU.

2.  Create an hidden field in the Gravity form with the correct Business Unit value.  I realised that the BU value is not a text string which makes this difficult to implement properly.  I discovered that the BU value is actually a numerical value - and you can find the exact value by looking at a workflow that has a step that assigns the correct BU value - when opening the workflow, the BU value briefly appears as a number before changing to a text string equivalent.  Applying this numerical value into the hidden field in the Gravity form, and mapping that to the BU field in the Contact property when the form is submitted successfully assigns the Contact to the correct BU when it is created.

Hope this helps other people who have similar issues with managing different BUs.

[NBraden]

Hi there! I see this is an old post, but I was wondering if you could still share some details on this. Once you assign a contact to the business unit, how do you restrict access from the other business unit? Our company just got access to business units, but it seems like you can only set access based on who owns the record.

[CBingham]

How has this solution been working out for you? I'm about to deploy BU with a GF form on my site so I'm going to need to test/deploy this too. Thank you for providing you solution! It saved me some time.

[TJWright]

Working very well.  We use both the hidden BU field in the form and overwriting the BU value in our Automated workflows just to make sure our new Contacts are assigned to the right BU.

The only issue we have found to date is some Contacts are overwriting the values of existing Contact records - we believe this is when they submit forms using other people's devices or computers (due to cookies).  The solution here is to go to the HubSpot form that is automatically created for your Gravity Form, edit the form and go to Options, and switch on the option to "Always create contact for new email address".

Important note - Each time you update the HubSpot intergration inside Gravity Forms, it republishes the HubSpot form and by default turns this option off, so you need to go back and turn it back on whenever you make any changes in your Gravity Form!

[kvlschaefer]

Thanks for sharing, @TJWright!

[Ian_Matt · Accepted solution]

Hi @rjbudding ! When creating your forms you can select which business unit it is connected to. This way whenever a contact submits this form they will be associated with that business unit.

You'll see the same experience for pages, emails, etc. This is currently in BETA but you can read more about how this works here: Manage Brands With Business Units

[TJWright]

What about forms that are already created?  I cannot find a way to edit the Business Unit after they are created, which means we need to make sure the right BU is selected from the very start.

I am using Gravity Forms integrated with HubSpot to develop a multi-step form on our website and found out that there is an issue with the integration - Gravity Forms by default chooses the default BU which is not the one we want to use, and there is no other option to correct this as far as I can see.

Would there be a way to edit this with some type of super admin access?  Or would HubSpot support be able to assist with changing this for us?