The foundations of HubSpot are built on the importance of data. Your company's information on contacts, deals, companies, tickets, and every object (native and custom) lives within the CRM. Understanding specific aspects of your business processes is your source of truth. To ensure this truth is easily accessible and understandable, HubSpot has created hubs and tools to help you grow your data. However, gathering information would be useless without both organization and visualization, which is why HubSpot's tools are designed to excel in these areas.
The reports tool is a practical solution for visualizing information about specific processes. It can help you answer questions like “What’s the click-through rate of my last email?”, “How many leads, MQLs, and SQLs do I have in my contacts?” and more. But there’s another tool that takes this a step further, allowing you to see the bigger picture of how every piece of information in your CRM interacts: HubSpot’s Data Model.
Let’s start with objects. Within HubSpot, objects represent relationships and processes your company establishes or carries out with customers, vendors, suppliers, etc. Each one of these objects is connected to individual records. For instance: your Contacts object is associated to individual contact records, which at the same time can be associated to a different object, like a Company. In the real world, the previous association would be translated to: John Doe (Individual Contact Record) is a person that is associated to XYZ (Individual Company Record).
Now, on your CRM, and within a specific record like a Contact Record, you have different pieces of information stored inside Properties. This information can come from various sources, most commonly from HubSpot forms. Back to the example, John (Individual Contact Record) could live in Florida (Country Property) and be 45 years old (Age Property). In addition, John can interact with XYZ through various channels. Within HubSpot, those interactions would be tracked through Activities.
So, it’s time to answer the initial question: What is HubSpot’s Data Model? HubSpot’s Data Model is a complex system of relationships between objects, records, and properties. But its key aspect is that it’s not an intricate web of information and interactions that you have to mentally map by yourself and after becoming a HubSpot expert. It’s right there for you to visualize it, and, given HubSpot’s adaptability, every data model in every HubSpot instance is not quite the same.
This data model allows companies to gain information at a highly granular level on every relationship and interaction occurring between objects. With this resource, it’s up to your company to leverage that information and turn it into actionable insights that drive your marketing and sales efforts.
Having established the Data Model's definition, it's time to examine its components. Although each data model can be slightly different, it shares the same five key elements.
This blog covers Contacts and Companies, so let's skip to Deals. The deals object in HubSpot stores potential revenue and sales opportunities that your company is actively pursuing. HubSpot's pipelines come into play here since deals move through them following different stages, allowing you to visualize the progress made on every opportunity.
Tickets, conversely, contain records reflecting support requests, reported issues, or inquiries made by your customers. Much like Deals, tickets also move through a pipeline containing different stages, allowing you to see if problems are being addressed, questions are being answered, and support actively provides solutions to your customers.
Finally, Engagements involve every interaction between your company and its contacts. If you go back to the previous title, you will see that interactions are tracked through activities. Therefore, Engagements comprise all your company's activities.
To start leveraging the information in the data model, you have to access the Data Model overview by navigating to Reporting & Data in your HubSpot instance and then clicking on Data Model.
Once there, you can visualize your instance's complete network of interactions. By analyzing how this network is laid out, you will gain a deeper understanding of your current processes and, therefore, can also tweak those areas where information is not being stored in the right place or connected to the correct object.
In addition, you will be able to gain insights into how your data is used and optimize processes to ensure the information you obtain from your customers and prospects is relevant to your operations. By optimizing this, you will have better HubSpot data accuracy and quality throughout your instance.
Visualizing and understanding your data model can help you identify pain points where HubSpot's integration capabilities can be helpful. If certain records contain insufficient information, you can leverage the ZoomInfo integration. On the other hand, if there are obstacles to team communication within your organization, Slack helps with integration.
HubSpot adds new native integrations to its marketplace almost every day. So, analyzing your data model can give you a fresh perspective on that part of your CRM and solve many of your business's current issues.
The most helpful outcome of analyzing your data model is understanding your HubSpot instance holistically. This understanding must be leveraged to make truly data-driven decisions about how you use your HubSpot instance.
Through the data model, you can understand the importance of associating contacts and companies, modify your current deal stages to improve your sales process, and remove pain points that decrease customer satisfaction from your support pipeline. All this information, which will unlock your HubSpot instance’s true potential, lies within the Data Model and constitutes its ultimate value.
Even though your data model is the key to unlocking your full potential, understanding and restructuring it as needed is easier said than done. To avoid mistakes that could cause significant data losses or information mix-ups, it's imperative to leave it in the hands of experts who can handle your sensitive information cautiously.
That's where S.R. Professional Marketing comes in. Our team of experts can manage your HubSpot instance, analyze your current data model, and provide tailored solutions to optimize your processes and structure your data so that your business can unlock its full potential.
Contact us today to get a free consultation to discuss your HubSpot needs.