Importing

Foreign. Here, you know that these are the events that you can see Today we've got importing with Alex. Next week we got sensitive data. You're going to definitely want to check that out. Especially with the new HIPAA features that have been coming out. We've got prospecting and AI. You'll be able to introduced to some of those new content hub features. You'll be able to take a look and see what that newest hub looks like. On July 30th we've got building a marketing operations playbook with our friends over at Marketing Ops. Mike, he's a great guy. Then we've got CRM UI customization. Definitely want to check that out. Make sure that you're customizing that CRM's UI so that you can best fit your team's needs. And then on August 13th, that's our hundredth meetup. I'm very excited for that. I've been keeping a secret for a couple weeks now and I can't hold it back but I'm going to because I promised I would. So you're definitely going to join that. We've got some special guests coming on August 20th. Access management definitely make sure that you are managing who can do what and where and when and how so that your systems are nice and secure. And then on August 27th we've got Typeform coming so that you can make sure that your forms are worth filling out. And then September 3rd, right before inbound we've got how to close more deals with HubSpot using Portent. So great events coming up and like, you know, with it wouldn't be an admin hug without some links out there. So I'm going to actually share the housekeeping link for you all so that you can follow along with me. But I use super to get my housekeeping done because makes my life a little bit easier. So that's that first event that we are on and then if we want to take a look at any previous events, all we need to do is hop over to the YouTube channel. You can get all of the past events if you've missed one or if you want to catch up on an event. This event will also be on this channel as well when you're done. So make sure you've subscribed if you want to connect with the rest of the community, which is a great thing to do. We are on the HubSpot admin feature community. You can also join the Admin on LinkedIn group. So we've got our own little hug group that you may absolutely welcome to join everyone's favorite place, the Sprocketeer Slack community. You can go ahead and join any of your admins over there, ask questions, get answers to those questions and just really find ways to connect with other admins around the globe. And if you are interested in putting a sprocketeer on your LinkedIn profile, got a little guide and tour to get you started in doing that so that you can be loud and proud as a sprocketeer. And if you've got any other questions and you're looking to just really get your super admin skills honed, we've got that super admin bootcamp that is coming up. It looks like that the event is. Where did it go? It's running until the 27th, so registration is closed. So by next week you should be able to go ahead and see what the next one's coming up and be able to register for that. And of course, Bevy, our fun little platform, sometimes it does what we want it to do, sometimes it doesn't. If it's not, turning it off and turning back on again is generally the easiest way to get it to work. If not, there's some other helpful tips and tricks there that you can check out. And we do this every single solitary week. So if you've got an idea for a hug and we haven't already gotten an event for that, please submit your ideas. You can submit it right here. It comes straight over to Kyle and I and we check those out every single time we get a submission. So appreciate all of the ones that are coming in each week and if you want to connect with Kyle or me, you're absolutely welcome to do that. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and we are excited to connect with you all. So I won't keep us any longer with any housekeeping. Alex, take it away. Share some importing with us. Cool.

How's everyone doing today? Doing well. I see that the chat is active. We got a lot of people here. Before we start, before I share my screen can no longer view the chat. Drop in the chat the last time you did an import, how often are you doing imports in HubSpot? Are you doing them daily, Weekly, monthly? How often are you doing it? Last year, two minutes ago. Love it. Hope you went well, Kelsey. Daily, Weekly. All right, cool, cool. So we have frequent importers here. So hopefully we're going to talk about some things today. They'll be of use to you. Maybe some things that you can use tomorrow as you do your next import. Maybe Next month when you do your next import. But let me share my screen and get right into the content. All right. Can I get a quick thumbs up that y' all can see? This.

Looks great.

All right, I'm cool. So let's talk about our approach to import export before we get started. First, hi, my name is Alex. I've been at HubSpot going on eight years now. I bet spent most of that time on our products marketing team. But for the past two years or so I've been working in product on our import export team. And if after this presentation we didn't get to a specific topic that you wanted to chat about or we missed something, or you want to dive deeper into something we chat about, feel free. Connect with me on LinkedIn. We'd love to connect. But for this presentation today, I want to talk about our approach to import export and how we think about the tools that we should be building up. We at HubSpot believe that our import tools should be quick, complete and actionable. Now, some of you might be saying, okay, Alex, that sounds cool, that sounds great, but what do you actually mean by that? So let's dive into each one individually and dive a little bit further into why we're thinking this is important and some of the features that we're building out to ensure that we're meeting each of these, starting with qwik. So we on the Ember export team, we believe that our number one goal is to ensure that you're not spending on all day long just importing data into HubSpot. And we believe that because import is just a means to an end, you're not buying HubSpot because you really love to bring data into a CRM. You're buying HubSpot because you need to build out a marketing campaign or you're building out a sales process for your sales reps or a process for your support team to manage tickets. And so import is really just a means to that end. And we want to ensure that the process of bringing data into HubSpot is quick. With this in mind, I was looking at the median time to complete imports maybe about a month ago, and I saw that we were hovering just under four minutes for that median time, which is good. I'm not losing sleep over a 4 minute median time to complete an import, but as we continue to think about different features that we want to bring out, I'm constantly thinking about this two by two matrix adding more powerful features and how that impacts our ease of use over the last couple of years. We've been adding a lot of power features into the import export flow, things that make the tools more powerful, enable you to better manage your data as you're bringing it into the CRM. And I want to ensure that as we do that, we're not compromising our ease of use or making it so you can get through the flow easily, especially for those simple imports that you're just running. If we're here today, in the future, I want to make sure that we are up and all the way to the right where we have the most powerful import tool of any CRM out there. And also ensure that it's really easy to use as we do that with all the power features that we've been running, I've been thinking about how can we make our import tool even easier to use so you can get through that flow even quicker. And one thing that I've been thinking about is this point of feedback that we got from Karen which said, hey, you know, it works great. It's a good process. There's a lot of button clicks just to get through that import flow. And as I look deeper into this feedback, I realized it wasn't just Karen that was telling us this. It was quite literally everyone. It is our number one point of feedback that we get on import. That import is not easy to do. There's too many options, too many screens, too many clicks. The feedback went on and on and on. So as we thought through how we can make the import tool even easier, as we start to think through even more power features that we want to add, we took a look at the steps we have and realizing this is quite a few steps that we have in the import flow. And so we decided we can probably remove two of these live. Now we've removed two steps from the import export flow. The first is the step where you ask, how many files are you importing? And the second is where we ask, how many objects are you importing? That latter one we infer off the object selection step and the how many files are you importing? You now select that on the file upload step. So we launched this a couple weeks ago and we said, you know, this will be a good customer delight moment. Addressing our number one point of feedback, we didn't necessarily think that there would be any like big movers and shakers on key metrics as we launch this now. It's far too early to use this as like definitive data, but the early results are really promising. So just by removing two steps from the import flow, we've made the import flow a minute and 46 seconds faster for our customers. It's hovering just above two minutes right now, which is super, super cool. Maybe even cooler. If you start the import flow now that we remove those first two steps, you're now 15% more likely to finish that import flow. We're hovering in the mid-70s now. We're almost pushing 90% completion for the import flow. And what's not listed here, but is equally impactful is that we kept error rates consistent as we did this, making sure that errors are the same as we made the import flow faster and also made it easier to complete that flow. Another thing that keeps me up at night as I'm thinking about ease of use and the quickness of our import tool is that for all these power features that we're adding for super complex imports, most people aren't using them. 85% of all imports are just simple contact imports and only have a couple of columns where you're importing. Maybe first name, last name, email. That's it for those people. They don't need all the bells and whistles in their import tool. They just need a simple, quick way to get data into HubSpot. This is very future looking, not something that we're going to launch anytime soon, but I want you to imagine a future world where you could copy a selection of data from a spreadsheet file and paste it into the CRM. Or maybe you could drag and drop a CSV file from your desktop onto the index page in HubSpot and it starts to create the contacts for you for those really simple imports that you're doing. This is the future that me and the rest of the import export team envisions and something that eventually we want to get to as we think about how we can make those really simple imports that you're doing really quick. Okay, so that's quick. Let's talk about complete for this one. Our number two goal on the import export team is that any data point in the CRM that you can create natively, you should also be able to create it in bulk via import. And you know, I think we've made a lot of really good progress on this. It wasn't too long ago where you can only import contacts, companies, deals, tickets, maybe custom objects. But in the past year or so we've made it so you can import sales activities. So meetings, tasks, notes, calls, you can import marketing events now. So you can say these contacts registered for this event and these contacts attended the event. If you want, you can Import custom events so you can take app clicks or app downloads from third party event tracking service that you're using and import those into our custom events tool. We've also done a lot of work on associations, so now you can create same object associations via import. We're also doing a lot of work to make sure that we're properly handing different validations that the associations team has built out so that import respects those validations as well. But the most impactful thing that we can do as we're thinking about. Okay, what parts of the HubSpot data model do people want to import to is just simply ask our customers. So I cannot see the chat currently, but I'm going to take a quick sip of water and while I do that, I want everyone to drop in the chat. What's something that you want to import into HubSpot that you cannot import today? I'll review the chat after this and we will make sure to take that feedback into account.

Wow, you got some immediate leads and attachments.

Leads and attachments. All right, so we want to be able to import the leads object that was launched last year and also attachments. I'm assuming that's attachments on records like a PDF file or whatever.

Yeah. And then new, let's see, notes, new property, assigning each import to campaigns.

For those attachments. We can dive into this after the presentation maybe, but would love to know what you would expect a CSV file to look like that includes a PDF file. That's my big question for the folks that are looking for attachments into the CRM.

Zach says he's got use cases.

Zach, hit me up. Follow me on LinkedIn. Let's go. Cool. All right, cool. I cannot wait to look at the chat after this. I'm going to keep moving beyond just the HubSpot object data model. We want to enable you to bring in potentially unstructured data into HubSpot, particularly in our Datasets tool, which enables you to take different points of data within HubSpot and create calculated fields, merges, joins and use that to build custom reports. But until recently you were restricted to using HubSpot data to do that. So you had to use contacts and meetings and companies, you know, the specific HubSpot objects that you had access to. If you wanted to report on something that was, you know, offline data, you really couldn't do that. And so we recently launched a beta where you can add CSV data into the datasets tool and import to it and use that offline data as A data source within the Datasets tool. So this is currently in beta, but with the ability to bring offline data into data sets, you can now create custom lead scores based off offline data. We can merge financial data from your ERP with HubSpot data to build out even more robust reports and so much more. We're really just scratching the surface with this. There's so much potential for how you can now build out custom reports when you can import data into data sets that doesn't necessarily fit neatly into HubSpot's object data model. My first CTA for all of you. I want you all to go into your portals now. If you're an Ops Hub customer, I want you to join this beta. We want to know from you, what use cases do you have for importing to datasets, what HubSpot data will be merging with offline data to create these reports? Again, this is really early days. How do you want us to continue to expand this functionality as we build it out? We're in the early days, we can continue to flush this out. So really looking forward to seeing all your feedback on how you plan to use use data set imports to supercharge your reporting in HubSpot. Okay, so quick, done, complete. Let's do actionable for this third one, our goal is really to ensure that imports create clean, predictable data in your portal so you can immediately begin to use the CRM. And this goes back to that point that I made right at the beginning. No one buys a CRM just for import. Import is just a means to an end for that marketing campaign that you're doing or that sales process you're trying to build out for for your reps. And so in order to create this clean, predictable data, I think we have really two levers at our control here. The first is to enable you to manage your data better as you're importing it into HubSpot. And the second is to put up smart guardrails in place so that you don't have to worry that something catastrophic might happen as you're importing into HubSpot. So let's talk about better managing your data. I think the first tool we have to really handle this right now is our preview validation tool. So as you're importing into the mapping step, you can see, oh, if I were to finish this import in this screenshot there are zero errors found, but maybe we found a couple hundred errors and you can see exactly where that is and start to action them now. When we first launched this tool, I think we did three rows of pre validation, which is all fine and good. We later expanded to 100 rows. We're currently at 1,000 rows, which handles, I think, 90% of all imports. But in the future, we want to ensure that we are able to handle every single row in your import. So we're a little bit off on that, but know that the future looks towards doing full file preview validation for our customers. Really excited for when we're able to deliver that deal. One of the coolest features that we're able to do with pre validation is do invalid enumeration option remapping. So let's say you have a file, and in that file you have a column that says yes, no, yes, no down the column. But the property that you're Importing to in HubSpot accepts true false values. With invalid enum option remapping, you can take those yes nos and remap them to the correct values in HubSpot without having to hood out of import, go back to your file, change the options there, and then restart the import process, only to figure out that you have even more errors in your file. When we first launched this tool the month before we launched, we saw 146 million instances of this error every single month. This is by far our most prevalent error that we saw, and so we wanted to build something that enabled customers to action onto it. In the month post launch, we saw that this error rate dropped drastically down to 77 million. Now, 70 million in a month is still a lot, but we cut the error rate nearly in half. So we're really excited to see how customers continue to leverage invalid enum remapping to better take control of their data as they're bringing it into HubSpot. And we're just beginning with our remapping tools, we want to expand our remapping tools to handle even more use cases so you can better manage your data as you're bringing it into the CRM. So in the coming months you can expect to see an owner property remapping. So you can remap owners that you're importing and remap it to the correct one. If you maybe had a spelling mistake in their email address or association label remapping again, simple spelling mistake in a spreadsheet remap. That's the correct value in HubSpot. And then we're also going to explore how we can build out an auto remapping tool. So instead of having to auto manually do every single remapping on that mapping step, we can automatically do that for you with just the click of a button to save you a ton of time as you're bringing your data in HubSpot. And again, this is just the beginning. We have a lot more that we want to do with this and again, your feedback is appreciated. So if you have something specific that you want to do with our remapping tools to better manage your data as you're bringing into the CRM, please hit me up. We'd love to hear about it. Okay, let's talk about Safeguard Rails. Now, this isn't a direct quote, but I'm sure if you haven't said this to yourself, one of your users has said it and then brought the problem to you for you to solve. We hear all the time from customers say, oh my God, I didn't mean for this import to trigger this workflow. What have I done? This is catastrophic. Big problem for me. In beta, we currently have proper usage in the import flow where we'll surface for you all the workflows and lists that could potentially be impacted if you were to execute that import. You can go and you can say, okay, this workflow, I should turn that off before doing this import or this list. I actually expect all these contacts to be added to this list. I'm cool with proceeding. This gives you more control over how you're importing data in top spot. Again, a CTA for all of you. This is currently in beta. We'd love to see everyone here join that beta so you can kick the tires. Try it out, let us know if it's useful for you. If you find use in it, we'll soon take it live to Also every customer HubSpot can use it. The final thing that I wanted to touch on doesn't have to do with import at all. It actually has to do with exports. I sometimes forget that the import export team also works on exports. I'm sure some of you do too. But we also manage the Export functionality in HubSpot and our main goal when we're thinking about admins as it pertains to exports, is that you should never be caught off guard by someone bringing data out of your portal in HubSpot. So last year we launched a large export warning notification. So an admin can say, okay, I have these exports that are being done and every time someone exports more than, let's say, 1,000 rows, I want to be notified that that export occurred. So we launched this functionality, super happy with it, and then immediately you all made it crystal clear that a warning just simply isn't good enough. Something retroactive isn't giving you the control that you need. I love Marcel's quote here. It says nice, but isn't it too late when it is already done in export approval functionality would be nice. I agree with Marcel and so that's exactly what we're building. We're currently developing an export approvals tool to give you more control, more governance over how people are extracting data from your portal. So here's quickly how it works. Again, this is still being developed, so it's all in the works. But first there's going to be users who can approve exports. That'll be all. Admins such as yourself, as well as any users in your portal that you specify have the power to do those approvals. So maybe you have a manager of a team that you want to be able to manage those exports. You can say, hey, they can improve exports. Also, if you are in the sensitive data beta, that's a tongue twister. But if you're in the sensitive data beta, any export that contains a sensitive data property will require an approval by default. We want to make sure that there's that extra layer of security. If someone is extracting financial information or health care information, whatever it might be, the other levers at your control, you can do an export approval approval process by the size of an export. So if someone again is exporting more than 1,000 rows, you can say, okay, that requires an approval. And then again you can specify specific users that you want to be required to either not have an approval or have an approval. You have the power to manage this based on user basis. Cool. We are still building this, but we are actually very close to having a beta up. I want you all to either copy down that bitly link, I'll drop it in the chat after this, or scan that QR code and fill out the form. That's on the other side. We would love to build out a beta group of engaged admins who want to get feedback on this tool to make sure it is valuable for you so you feel like you have proper control over your exports from HubSpot. That's what I got. So those are our three tenants. Quick, complete and actionable imports and exports from HubSpot. I want to thank you all again for having me. I'm really excited to chat with you all, answering questions you might have listen to your feedback. And again, if we didn't touch on anything or we don't get to touch on anything during the rest of the time that we have today, Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Awesome. Alex, there are a ton of questions in the Q and A panel, so I'm glad you left time. So, guys, if you have any more questions, just make sure you're getting those over in the Q and A chat. Going to give you a couple of seconds to go over and upvote the ones that you want. I will keep refreshing just in case you upvote something while we're answering them. Alex, there's all kinds of activity going on in the chat. If you want to stop sharing your screen so you can take a peek, that's absolutely, perfectly fine.

I would love to stop sharing my screen. I just, again, I don't know how to.

If it's not all the way at the top, right, there's a bottom bar. It's like a little square that says screen share. Sometimes it gets hidden by your. Your actual window. I mean, I can always go nuclear and turn you off and turn you back on again.

I might do that. I. I really just don't see the option.

All right, let me do that. Let me do that real quick while you guys are upvoting your questions over there and then we will do that. So give me one second. Turn you off one more time. See? Bring Alex back. There he is. How about now? Alex, what are you seeing?

I'm back. Cool.

I don't know why it wants to do that to you. It's just because, you know, why not?

Why not? Right?

Why not? All right. Tons of questions. All right, I'm going to go to the most update upvoted from Michelle. Is there or will there be a way to import contact lists with associated company? By mapping through the company id, you can add contact info, company name, but would love a way to add contact contact info, which is company id.

I'd love a little bit more, you know, information on what we're asking.