Hubspot

the go-to Sales CRM for most these days, including myself.

23 Jun 2023 | in apps

Salesforce is bloated and expensive. Good for large companies with a dedicated SalesOps/Salesforce team. Not for small companies.

Hubspot is easy to use, feature-complete & free to start with, which makes it a no-brainer.

The only catch is that upgrading to their Marketing module (their original product) is expensive, and based on number of contacts in your database. Beware making the jump.

Hubspot Sales CRM without the Marketing module is a great CRM for small & medium companies.

And even at scale, it seems to have taken over the Salesforce crown for a large part of the Startups market:

30 Sep 2022

Export

fields exported in CSV

See Hubspot fields

Importing

best practices

importing Company records

One of the great things about Hubspot, is that it will populate company data automatically, based on what it has in its database for that domain name, and structured with the fields listed above.

So it is important to ensure Hubspot does this when you import your data.

The absolute minimum you can upload is a list of domain names (see format below).

You can append to this list other fields (eg. company owner and custom company type in my example below) but importing only the domain works perfectly.

importing CSVs

Format used for import of domain names of target accounts + company owner assignment + specific company type:

Company domain name,Company owner,Company type
xxx.com,n@d.com,University
yyy.com,n@d.com,University
zzz.xom,n@d.com,University

where n@d.com is the email address of the Hubspot user/owner.

Hubspot will dedupe the list of domain names, and will automatically populate the company name, and other fields.
If the domain name already exists in Hubspot, the Company record will be updated.
This behaviour can be changed.

hubspot/230321-hubspot-import-companies.jpg

delete last import

If you made a mistake with your import, it's easy to delete only the imported records.

You can access the pre-filtered view here:

hubspot/hubspot-import-view.jpg

and from there mass delete as usual:

hubspot/hubspot-mass-delete.jpg

Log emails automatically

Obviously, you can connect your email account (eg Google) to Hubspot, and it will log all your emails automatically.

But I dislike this nuclear approach, and prefer to log emails "manually" - keeping granular control over what I log and don't log. Both for privacy reasons ("Ooops didn't want to have my confidential info/banter in the CRM") and for CRM data health quality reasons.
Overbloated logging clouds automatations, reports, workflows, etc.

The best & easy way for me to use Hubspot with emails is by adding your unique Hubspot email address in Bcc.

This is the unique email address of your Hubspot account (unique per user), to be found under Settings > Data Management > Activities > Email Log & Track > Manual Logging:

hubspot/hubspot-manual-email-logging.jpg

Now this can be used in different ways:

  • added in Bcc ad-hoc, manually
  • included by default in Bcc when you open a new email in your email client (easier to delete when not needed vs. adding manually each time)
  • added as a Bcc field in email automation systems Mailingee

Hubspot will automatically log the email, and associate it with the company record - or create a new company record if the domain name is not already in Hubspot.

See:

never log certain emails

To avoid polluting Hubspot logging internal or personal emails, you can add domains to your Never Log list:

hubspot/hubspot-never-log.jpg

API

Private Apps

21 Mar 2023

Seems the standard API has changed - replaced with "Private Apps".

hubspot/private-apps-replacing-api.jpg

Similar to eg. Google API, need to create a project/app and assign scope:

hubspot/nic-api-scope.jpg

"Your HubSpot account is allowed to make 250.000 API calls per day."

Authentication

Working library

See Hubspot API

links

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