Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hey, it's Jeff. And welcome to another episode of the Home Builder, Marketing and Growth Show.
[00:00:06] Question for you today. Is your sales team wasting hours of time digging through your HubSpot database trying to find prospects to follow up with amongst all the competitors and vendors and all the other random contacts? What if I told you that with just 15 minutes of setup time, you could give them a crystal clear view of who they need to follow up with? In this episode of HubSpot for Home Builders, I'm sharing with you a simple but powerful custom property that will turn your messy database into an organized powerhouse. It's called the contact type property. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly how to implement this game. Changing property and start boosting your team's efficiency immediately. Sound good? Let's go. So We've been a HubSpot certified partner now for 13 years, and, and we specialize in real estate marketing, home builder marketing. And when a home builder comes to us, the number one challenge that they typically have is that their HubSpot portal is a mess. And usually the number one complaint is that their salespeople can't figure out who to follow up with next and what the next action is that they need to take in order to keep moving that sale forward. The other challenge that we sometimes see is that marketing doesn't know how to properly segment their contacts. And sometimes they have an oops and they send a promotional email over to somebody that recently signed a contract and now that person's saying, hey, I want that deal too. And that can be kind of embarrassing, and it definitely makes things stressful for the salespeople. But the number one problem with having a messy database like that is just simply how much longer it takes for everybody to do the things that they need to do. Now, there is a property inside of HubSpot called lead status. And Lead Status was designed to help salespeople understand who to follow up with and what they need to do next. The problem is, is that it's really misunderstood and oftentimes we find that HubSpot administrators are plunking all kinds of different values into that field that salespeople and marketers need. So, for example, they might put in, you know, this is an A lead, or this is a B lead or a C lead. So those are like lead quality, right? That's not a lead status. Or oftentimes they write, this is a realtor or this is a vendor or things like that. And that's not a lead status either. Those are contact types.
[00:02:34] So what it does is it muddies up the lead status property and really creates confusion for salespeople. We know that salespeople are really, really good at what they do and they usually love what they do. They just need to have a straight, clear line of sight of who to contact and let them go and they'll do their thing. Right. So what we need to do is make sure that we're not filling up that lead status property with all sorts of other miscellaneous values that really don't belong in there. So to help combat this, we've come up with this new contact property that we call simply contact type. And so a contact type property is exactly as it sounds. It is a drop down menu with a list of values that include things like prospect, customer, realtor, vendor, employee, partner. So we use different contact type values like that in order to help segment the contact list. Now this does a couple of different things. One is it helps your sales team to be able to segment out just their prospects, which makes their life a whole lot easier because they're not wading through all of the customers and all the realtors and vendors and everybody else in your database.
[00:03:48] The second thing is it helps your marketing team be able to segment your contacts for email sending. So by selecting a contact type list, your marketing team can determine who they want to send an email to, and they can also use those lists to determine who they want to suppress in an email send, which makes it really efficient. So the benefits of having the contact type property are that it gives you a better organization of your contact database, it helps you to do more targeted communications, and it gives you better reporting. So it's a win, win, win all the way around. All right, so for this next part, we're going to dive into HubSpot and I'm going to show you exactly how to set this up step by step. If you're tuning into this episode on an audio only platform, I suggest taking a look for it on either YouTube or Spotify or Apple podcasts or one of the platforms that does have the accompanying video. Because you'll get a lot more value out of being able to see the visual of setting this up. But I'll do my best as we go to explain what it is that I'm doing. All right, so let's dive into HubSpot. Okay, so keep in mind that this is my HubSpot demo portal. I love to experiment and tinker. So you're going to see all sorts of things in here that don't exist in your portal and that's okay, let's get straight to how to set up the contact type. So I'm logged in. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go up here to my settings, which is the little gear icon in the top bar and I'm going to click on that. Then on the left sidebar we're going to scroll down under Data Management and click on Properties. So by default, your Contact properties should be listed as the object. If it's not, just click on the dropdown and make sure to select Contact Properties. Once you're there, click on Create Property on the right hand side in the pop up window. The first thing that we need to do is give this property a label. So we're going to call it Contact Type. Now keep in mind that this is my demo portal and I've already set this property up. So I'm getting a warning message here that says, hey, this already exists for this demo. I'm just going to change the internal name so that we can carry on. Okay, now that we've got our label in, the next thing we need to do is select a group for this property. Now, by default, most people tend to put in the new contact properties that they create into this group called Contact Information. Now this is the HubSpot default group and it's full of all the default HubSpot properties. And what I've found in my experience is that sometimes it gets really difficult if you're searching through the list for something to find the one that you set up because there's just so many properties in there. And so what I recommend you do is just create a new property group called Additional Contact Information. Or you could call it Custom Contact Information. You can call it whatever you want. But the point is, just don't put your custom properties into the Contact information group because it makes it a lot harder to find them later. So I'm going to put mine into this additional Contact information group and then the next step is a description. This one's pretty straightforward, but if you want to put a description in there, knock yourself out, go right ahead. You have that freedom. Okay, now we need to put in the field type on this one. So on the left sidebar I'm going to click on Field type and we're going to select a drop down. All right, so now we can put in our values and there's a few different ways to do that. The first way is you can just put your labels in one by one right here. The second way is you can load options and to make creating this contact type property a lot easier for you, I actually created an SOP or a step by step procedure for you that you can download. I'm going to share that link with you at the end of the video so that you can download it and then you can just copy and paste your options in it. Makes it really, really easy. But let me show you how to do that. So you can click here on load options and then you can click on paste your own, and then you just paste them all in one option or value per line. So you just copy paste and then hit load options and they'll all be in that list for you. Makes it really, really easy.
[00:07:51] For the sake of this demo, I'm just going to put them in one by one. So the first one and the most important one that we want to do is prospect because we want to help our sales team be able to find the prospects easier. The next one that we want to do is customer, because we want to be able to put our customers in a bucket so we don't send them marketing promotions.
[00:08:13] And then the next one we want to put in there is Realtor because, hey, we all love realtors. They bring us business, right? Then we want to put in vendors because we always get those vendor inquiries on our website forms. So we can put those people into the vendor bucket. And then I like to do a catch all that I call other. And so that just means that if this contact doesn't fit into any of the other groups, we're going to put them into the other bucket. Now you can put in as many different values as you want. And on that cheat sheet that I have for you, that step by step guide that I'm going to give you the link for shortly, you can download all 16 different values that I have on that list. That's right. There's 16 different categories that we put our contacts into. So definitely make sure that you grab that guide.
[00:09:00] So we've got five of them in here for now. This is good for the sake of the demo, let's go ahead and create this field. Going to click on create and in the top right corner and boom, that's done. All right, so we have our contact type created. Now the next thing, in order to be able to make this particular field usable, we want to create some lists. So I'm going to go over to my CRM on the left, click on that and I'm going to scroll down to lists. All right, so now what we want to do is create a smart list for each value in our dropdown. So I'm going to click on create list and for list name, we're going to call that one contact type prospects. Again, you can put a description in if you want to. I'm not going to bother for this. And we want to just make sure that this is an active list. And then I'm going to click on next. And now we need to add a filter to this list. So I'm going to click on add a filter, I'm going to click on contact properties, and we are going to do a quick search for our contact type. We got to spell it right or it's not going to come up. And that's this guy here and that's is any of Prospect. Okay, once I got that selected, I can close my editor and I'm going to save this list. All right, so now it's going to populate that list. And obviously we don't have any contacts in here because we just set this property up. So that makes sense. Okay, so now what we need to do is set it up for the other ones. So I'm not going to do all of them, but I'll do a couple more just to show you how I do this quickly. So I'm going to go into actions and I'm going to click on clone list. Then I'm just going to change the contact name here to customers. We want to clone this as an active list. I'm going to click on clone list and when this opens up, all we need to do now is just edit our filters. So I'm going to change my contact type from prospect to customer, close my editor, save my list, and let's do one more. So just wait for this to finish. There we go. And we're going to do actions. We're going to clone this list again. And this time let's do our realtors clone as an active list, Clone the list, please and save the list. Then edit our filters and we're going to change this from customer to realtor. Close my editor and then we can save the list.
[00:11:15] All right, now that we have our list set up, the next thing that we need to do is we need to populate some of our contacts with this property. So I'm going to go back over to my CRM and we're going to go to contacts. So there's a couple of different ways to do this. The first thing that we need to do is we want to add this property to this table view. So I'm going to go over to the right hand side. I'm going to click on Edit Columns and we're going to do a search for contact type. And I'm just going to check that box. And when I check that box, it's going to get added to this list of selected columns. It'll be at the bottom always. Now you can either click on this and drag it up to the top or wherever you want it to go, or you can just click here and move to top. If I scroll up, there it is right beside the name. That's exactly where we want it. And I'm going to click on Apply. All right, so now we'll see that we have our contact type column in here. So what we can do now is we can just go through and change people in here one by one. So let's say that Jeff Test is a prospect. Jeff Realtor would be a realtor, Jeff Admin, let's say that he's an other. So we can do this one by one. Just make sure all the ones that you change, when you're done, click Save down here.
[00:12:24] The other way that we can do this is we can select a few of these at the same time. So I can select the boxes here on the left hand side and then I can click on edit. And then in the popup it says select a property to edit. I'm going to click on that. We're going to do a search for our contact type. So it's always going to list these life cycle stage properties at the top. And I don't know why it does that. Just scroll down and you'll see your contact type down here. So I'm going to click on that and the contact type that we're adding for these people is a realtor. Then I'm going to click on update. All right, so now we've just added a bunch of realtors.
[00:12:59] You know what, we haven't added any customers and we don't have very many prospects. So I'm just going to do that process one more time here. We'll just do a couple more. So do those three as prospects. So edit, search for the contact type. And we're going to call these people prospects and update them and then we'll do just a whoops, I updated all my realtors at the same time. So make sure that you clear your checkboxes before you do that again. Sorry, I got to update that. So we'll just do these people here as realtors really quickly. Contact type, scroll down, set those people as realtors, update all right, problem solved. Crisis averted. Okay, now we're going to select these four people and we'll make these people customers. So I'm going to click on the checkboxes, I'm going to select edit, search for our contact type, and we're going to make these people customers update. Perfect. Uncheck those boxes so we don't repeat that mistake again. All right, so that's another way that you can update your contacts. The third way that you can do this is you can set up a workflow. And so with a workflow, you can set any kind of trigger, event or criteria that you want. Maybe as an example, you set up form submissions. So if you have a form submission for realtors to register in your system, while you can set it up to say that if a contact has submitted that realtor registration form, change their contact type to realtor. So you can use workflows to do this in bulk as well. And that's a really efficient way of doing it. But basically what you want to end up with is every contact in your database has a contact type listed.
[00:14:41] Now the next thing that we want to do is we want to create a filter in our contact view for this. So for our salespeople so that they know which prospects they need to follow up with, make it easy for them. So we're going to click here on advanced filters and then we just need to search for that property and contact type is any of prospects. So once you see the little check mark and it says changes applied, you can exit out. All right, so now you can actually save this view as a different view if you want, so that your salespeople can hop in here at any time. But by adding that advanced filter in here, it's only going to show me the prospects. Now you can do the same thing as well for the realtors. You can set this advanced filter to any one of your different contact types just to see those particular contacts in your database. Okay, what about from a marketing standpoint? Now what if we want to send emails to these different contact types? Let's say that we want to do a open house just for realtors. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go over to my marketing and I'm going to go to email. And then let's just pretend that this new email at the top is the email that I've prepared about our open house specifically for our realtor crowd. So what I'm going to do is once my email is done, I'm going To go into sender schedule and where it says send to select recipients, I can select my contact type realtors and now I can review and send my email or schedule to go out. But now it's only going to go out to the different realtors that I have. So as another example, let's say that we wanted to send out a promotional email to our prospects and we want to make sure that it doesn't go to any of our customers. Well, you can do that here as well. So to do that, I am going to select my prospects list for who I want to send to and I want to select don't send to any of my customers. So now with the way that I have this set up, it's going to send out that email to anybody that's listed as a prospect and it's not going to send to anybody that's listed as a customer. So that's called a suppression list. And so if people exist on both lists, it's basically going to make sure that it doesn't go to people that are in your suppression list. So using suppression list is really powerful. I have another episode coming out soon where, where I dive into subscription and suppression list best practices as well as giving you some examples of ones that you should have set up in your HubSpot portal as well. So make sure you keep an eye out for that episode.
[00:17:11] All right, so that basically covers how to set up the contact type property and some specific use cases for it. All right, so today we covered a really simple contact property in HubSpot that can help you with your contact management and also help streamline how you work and make you more efficient. And remember, implementing the contact type Property is a 15 minute setup and it can help your salespeople be a lot more productive and close more sales. It can also help your marketing team avoid any embarrassing mistakes. So to help you set up the contact type property in your own HubSpot portal, I've put together a step by step guide that covers everything that we talked about in today's video. And it also has a list of 17 different values for this contact type property. That's right. We only covered five in the video, but there's actually 17 values that we put in when we set this field up for clients. So you want to download that guide, go to velocity23.com HSCT that's velocity23.com H just fill in your first name and your email address and I'll send you a link that you can download that guide. So if you found this episode helpful. Please do me a favor. Subscribe to the show and share this particular episode with a colleague who needs some help with HubSpot contact management because this will help them too. And for even more marketing and HubSpot tips, you should join me on LinkedIn. I love to connect with people. I've put a link to my profile in the show notes. Click on that. Give me a follow. Shoot me a dm. If you have questions, let me know. Let me know how I can help you out. And that's all we got for today, folks. Thanks so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the episode and I'll see you on the next one.
