HubSpot Ideas

taasted

Cross-Object Workflow

Currently, you can't create a workflow that contains cross-object properties (i.e., Deal, Contact, Company) like you can with Reports. As an example, some organizations transition accounts from Sales to Account Managers post-sale. Therefore, the sales rep that sold the deal is typically not the person that will be the account manager going forward. As it stands, when an account comes up for renewal, you can either notitify the Deal Owner in a deal-based workflow or you can notify the Company Owner in a company-based workflow, but you cannot include a Company Owner in a Deal workflow. 

 

This capability seems like it would be needed by many HubSpot customers.

10 Replies
shan2
Participant

Yes! I'm so surprised this isn't already possible. So many uses for this, too! 

For example, we have a field that indicates a company's status (customer, prospect, etc) and when a deal is won, they become a customer. 

Until there's more cross-object functionality, I guess I'll have to use a workflow to create a task for users to manually update anything cross-object-based. If anyone has other ideas, fixes, or workarounds, please share!

Capptions_Frank
Member

I really need this as I'm trying to setup a renewal workflow and I'd like to send an automated email to the 'billing admin' or key user or whatsoever. Right now I can only send emails from a company based workflow to all associated contacts...

kelseyingram392
Contributor | Platinum Partner

This is a very high need! For nonprofits, there are a lot of contact and company properties that need to be updated based on their deal history. For example, you need to know the total $ value of deals over the past 18 months. The limitations of calculated properties means you can't use date fields as a condition in the calculated property, so I was thinking of using a Deal workflow to increase the value on a Total Gifts Past 18 Months field on the Contact record. This is extremely important and might cause us to have to use Salesforce as the primary CRM! 

JDonald1
Participant

Yes! I need to include deal properties along with contact properties for enrollment triggers in a workflow. Should function similar to cross-object reports.

teamgi
Participant | Diamond Partner

It sounds like what you need to do is a workflow that updates the deal owner once it gets moved to a won stage. Then the right owner can be notified after.

CrisitnaLucas
Participant

I was looking for threads on cross-object workflows / email content and I'm shocked how little traction this has! This is an issue that we run into on a regular basis.

 

Why cross-objects can be supported in things like reporting but not in workflows or email (both internal templates and marketing templates) is an inconsistent approach. It's limited to assume a recipient only needs info from a locked set of HubSpot-defined data. As long as we as the administrators know where the properties are to manage them in the settings, this should not be a limitation that is extended through other parts of the software.

 

Due to HubSpot not allowing any access to edit auto-generated emails (in today's case, I could solve my internal tension by just being able to update the email subject line so it's not the default "contact re/conversion" that seems to tag to all form submissions - different forum topic), I have to go through the following steps to make this work:

- create duplicate properties between contact or ticket (never a great idea to duplicate)

- create a workflow that will take said properties and populate them into the other data set

- then create a workflow to trigger an internal email notification, using the original set of fields + the now duplicated fields

 

Far from ideal.

 

Johnsobm09
Member

I would love the ability to set workflows based on Cross Object functions (Deals + Contacts) vs. having to first build a new Deal Property, then set a workflow to copy the Contact property to the Deal property.  It feels like an extra spot for something to go wrong and wasted efforts. 

JBudd
Member

We also REALLY need cross-object workflows.

For example, our CSMs are assigned at the company level. When a ticket comes into the Service Hub from an existing customer, we need to be able to notify the CSM assigned to that company so they can be the first to review the issue and assign it to 2nd level service if need be.

HubSpot, please-please-please look into this!!

 

Thank you 🙂

faithantion
Contributor

We also need cross-object workflows that allow us to use personalization tokens from multiple objects in internal workflows. Our company is large and not all team members are HubSpot users. Our use case is using workflows and internal email notifications to generate email with information from HubSpot to teams that do not work within HubSpot. Ideally, the email notification would contain all the infromation the team needs to complete the internal service request, such as company name, company address, contact name, deal name, etc. but we can't do that unless we create many duplicate properties and associated workflows to copy those properties to another object - i.e., company address as a deal property. I agree with prior replies that creating duplicate information is never a good idea, but the fact that we're all doing this as a workaround (I've even been advised by HubSpot to use this method) indicates the need for this seemingly basic feature. If we can do cross-object reporting, we should be able to build cross-object workflows.

03687
Member

I just ran up against this this morning. Would love to have cross-object workflows for things as simple as dropping a congratulations in Slack for a win and being able to associate the amount of the deal with the company name. Pretty straightforward once the multi-objects are available. Please develop!