Using Contacts
How to work with customer contacts in HubSpot day to day so that orders, invoices and QuickBooks all land on the same customer. Ten minutes. The longer story of why it works this way is in Handling Contacts.
The one rule
One customer, one customer number. A customer can have several email addresses and several shipping addresses; those all belong to the one customer. A new email is not a new customer. Two people at the same organisation who both order are two customers with two numbers; what they share is the company.
The customer number is the field called Customer Number on the HubSpot contact. It comes from MOM today. An invoice cannot be finished without it.
Before you create a contact
- Search first. Search HubSpot by name, then by email, then by phone. Check the contact's additional emails too; a customer who has used two addresses shows up under one contact with both.
- Ask for one email. If the customer might already exist under another address, ask which one they use with us and use that. One email per person is the single biggest thing that stops duplicates.
- Do not create a second contact for a known customer. If they give you a new email, add it to their existing contact instead.
When you press Revise and the contact has no number
The Revise button checks the contact before it does anything else. If the contact has no customer number, it stops and tells you what to do.
On the live portal today the message is: enter the order in MOM first, then put the MOM customer number on the HubSpot contact, then press Revise again. Do exactly that, in that order. Do not finish the invoice by hand without a number; that is how incomplete invoices reach QuickBooks.
On the AP Test portal (the proof of concept) the same button resolves the contact by itself:
- a customer we already have under that email gets their number stamped;
- a customer we already have under a different email is merged into
their existing contact, and the invoice moves with it;
- a genuinely new customer gets a new number;
- a contact that could be one of several customers becomes a case,
and the message gives you a link to it.
This is what the live portal will do after the changeover.
When a case shows up
A case is one question: are these records the same person, and if so which customer number survives. Open the link, read the records side by side and the sentence that says why they were linked, and press one of four answers. Your answer is kept for good; the same question is never asked twice. When in doubt choose different people: that is easy to undo, a wrong merge is not.
- How to resolve contact cases: the page, the answers, the scenarios by name.
- Picking the survivor: a yes/no flow for which customer number to keep, and what to look for.
- How merge works: what happens to every field after you answer.
- Practice on the sandbox: one made-up case per scenario, same layout, answers go nowhere.
Do and do not
| Do | Do not |
|---|---|
| Search before you create | Create a second contact for a known customer |
| Add a new email to the existing contact | Overwrite the email that is there |
| Use HubSpot's merge for a duplicate you are sure of | Delete a contact; history is lost, merges keep it |
| Enter the order in MOM first when Revise asks for a number | Type a number you are not sure of onto a contact |
| Answer cases from the urgent bucket first | Guess on a case; defer is an answer |
Words used here
- Customer number: the one identifier for a billable customer; never shared, never reused.
- Contact: HubSpot's record for a person, keyed by email; one contact can carry several emails.
- Merge: HubSpot folding two contacts into one, keeping both histories.
- Case: one question the checker could not answer by itself.
- Sandbox: the practice copy of the cases page.