Stay in control of your HubSpot data by managing teams and permissions

Your Hubspot portal is one of the central elements of your organization and its operations. The more your structure grows, the more the number of HubSpot users, fulfilling a specific role on your portal, increases.

When talking about an organization of a certain size, not defining a precise framework for using your HubSpot portal is the best way to get an incomprehensible, unusable and not at all secure tool.

Your HubSpot portal contains all of your contact, prospect, and customer data, as well as much of your business operations. Maintaining this space clear and secure is imperative for the proper development of your business.

In this article, we will see together how to use the features of HubSpot's "Enterprise" packages to set a clear and optimized framework for managing your teams and data on your HubSpot portal.

 


Summary :

  1. The consequences of mismanaging its HubSpot users
    1. Operational: A “gas plant” as a HubSpot portal
    2. Security: Data leaks
    3. Collaboratives: Operational complications within your sales teams
  2. Understand HubSpot “teams” and the roles of your collaborators
    1. The users
    2. The teams
    3. Permission sets
  3. Manage HubSpot access
    1. Define in advance the necessary access for each role
    2. Assign the right permissions to the right role
    3. Visibility on the leads of your salespeople
  4. Endnotes

 

The consequences of mismanaging its HubSpot users

 

Mismanagement of your HubSpot users, teams and access comes with its share of negative consequences that can be divided into three categories: operational, security and collaborative consequences.

Operational: A “gas plant” as a HubSpot portal

If your HubSpot users have permissions that aren't appropriate for their role, your portal will quickly look like a gas plant where everyone creates their own lists, workflows, emails, properties, etc. 

By simply carrying out their daily tasks, your employees will gradually prevent your portal data consistency, bring unnecessary complexity to your portal and hamper your CRM management.

It is recommended to only grant access and permissions required for the smooth running of their mission and to establish clear rules of conduct relating to the use of your HubSpot portal.

Security: Data leaks

Now, if everyone can access all the data in your CRM, it becomes very difficult to keep your database secure.

A malicious collaborator could, for example, sabotage an automation or simply export your entire database for personal use.

Another example could be that of a collaborator not trained on the tool thinking of sending a communication to a specific segment of your database but finds himself inadvertently sending to all your leads.

The poor management of your access can have a truly negative impact on the development of your business.

Collaboratives: Operational complications within your sales teams

 I have called the last type of adverse consequences associated with poor access management collaborative consequences.

Indeed, on a portal where each user has a view and potential control on your entire base, disagreements may arise within your sales teams.

A salesperson may feel wronged by observing that a colleague has more leads than him or believes that his leads are of lower quality. But the biggest danger is that your salespeople have the possibility to change lead attribution (HubSpot native settings feature).

Any sales rep can then assign a lead coming from another and claim the sale of the latter or even get more leads to contact.

Of course, these problems will not happen in every organization, but setting up your CRM correctly ensures that you avoid them.

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Understand HubSpot “teams” and the roles of your collaborators

 

Now that we've seen together the different risks associated with the mismanagement of your HubSpot users, let's take a look at the different tools HubSpot has at your disposal to organize your teams.

All of these features are found in the “Users and Teams” tab of your portal settings.

HubSpot Teams 1

The users

This tab allows you to invite collaborators, assign them a team, a defined permission set, or assign custom permissions.

This tab allows you to get an overview of your HubSpot users organization.

The teams

Teams is a great feature and primordial to the proper management of your HubSpot portal. You can recreate your company's org chart on HubSpot with the ability to create "child" teams.

HubSpot Teams 2

In this example, each line of text equals a HubSpot team with “Sales Team” the main team and “Country X team” the child teams of the latter.

Why is this important?

HubSpot allows us to assign objects (contacts, companies, tickets, deals etc.) to the teams of our choice.

In addition, we have the possibility to restrict the visibility of our collaborators on the data of our portal to their team.

Creating this level of organization therefore allows us to better structure access to the various data in our CRM and simplify our operational automation, such as the automatic leads assignment.

Permission sets

These are the ones that allow us to secure our database by assigning the right access to the right collaborators.

Permission sets can be understood as the definition of the access set of a particular role.

For example, you can create the “Sales Manager” permission set and predefine all of the access sales managers in your company will have on the portal.

By defining your different teams, the roles that make them up and the accesses in an organized way related to these roles, you guarantee your portal a good health organization.

 

Manage HubSpot access

 

Define the organization chart of your HubSpot portal in advance

As explained earlier, managing your HubSpot portal revolves around three elements: users, teams, and permission sets (roles).The first step is to list all collaborators using HubSpot, organize them in parent teams and child teams, and define the different accesses required for each role in your organization.

For the sales team, the org chart might look like this:

HubSpot Teams 3

Assign the right permissions to the right role

To do this, go to the “Permission Sets” tab and create a new set (role)

HubSpot Teams 4

Go through each of the tabs and for each option ask yourself the following questions:

  • Does this role need this access?
  • What level of access does it need? (View, Edit, Delete)

HubSpot Teams 5

ATTENTION : 

  • You should not assign accesses based on the hierarchical level of a rôle but based on whether this role needs it or not. For instance, a Sales Director might not need to create or edit a form, but simply to view it. It will avoid that everyone is creating inconsistent and irrelevant assets in your portal?
  • The Marketing or Analytics related roles will most often need to have access to all of your objects (if only in “seen”). Most custom reports are based on these objects (contacts, companies, etc.), limiting their access will distort their view of the created reports.

Visibility on the leads of your salespeople

To avoid the security and collaborative consequences mentioned at the beginning of this post, you can limit the visibility of your sales representatives on your database.

To do so, simply go to the CRM tab of your permission set.

A classic organization of your visibility would be to ensure that:

  • Your Sales Director has access to the entire database
  • Your Sales Manager has access only to the leads of his team
  • Your Sales Rep has access only to the leads assigned to him

In this way, the director has a global vision of the company's activity, the Manager can effectively manage his team, assign incoming leads, measure the performance of these salespeople, etc. and the sales rep can focus solely on his leads while maintaining a clear and optimized workspace for his mission.

In this tab you will have the possibility to define the access levels for each object of a given role.

In our case, we would have the following rules:

Sales Director:

HubSpot Teams 6

Sales Manager: 

HubSpot Teams 7

Sales Rep: 

HubSpot Teams 8

 

Endnotes

I hope this article has helped you consolidate the organization and security of your HubSpot portal.

If you want to develop your HubSpot knowledge and find all the workflows created and presented by HS Simple, do not hesitate to request your free access to the workflow box. A private web page listing all the workflows requested by the community with a video explanation and a simple action plan in the form of a “to-do list”.

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Grégoire Bolnot

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