Hey there! I need help figuring out the best way to organize our HubSpot setup. We have a pretty complex situation where people can wear different hats in our business.
Our company works with:
- Multiple types of partner relationships (3 different kinds)
- Two categories of direct customers
- Our sales team only manages partners, not direct customer sales
The tricky part is that one person might be a partner AND a customer at the same time. Plus, our sales folks should only see partner info, not customer details.
Right now we’re thinking about:
- Keeping all contact info in one place
- Hiding customer fields from the sales team
- Setting up different deal workflows for partners vs customers
I’m wondering:
- Does this approach make sense for HubSpot?
- Should we create custom objects instead for different partner types?
- What problems might we run into when someone has both roles?
- Is there a smarter way to control who sees what while keeping contacts together?
Anyone dealt with something like this before? Really appreciate any tips or warnings about what to avoid!
been there! we had similar mess with overlapping roles. honestly the biggest headache was reportng - hubspot gets confused when contacts span multiple categories. consider using contact properties instead of custom objects, way less complicated. just make sure your data stays clean or you’ll regret it later.
Your approach is solid but I’d recommend a slightly different angle. We implemented role-based permissions using teams and pipelines rather than hiding fields. Created separate deal pipelines for partners versus customers, then assigned sales team members only to partner pipelines. This way contacts stay unified but deal management stays separated naturally. The permission structure becomes much cleaner and you avoid the complexity of field-level hiding which can break workflows unexpectedly. For the dual-role contacts, we use a primary relationship property to determine default pipeline assignment, then handle exceptions manually when needed. Works much better than trying to manage visibility at the field level.
We tackled something very similar and learned the hard way that custom objects might actually be your friend here. Started with the unified contact approach like you’re considering, but data integrity became a nightmare when contacts had multiple relationships. What worked better was keeping basic contact info centralized but creating custom objects for each partner type and customer category. This lets you maintain clean association lines without the messy overlap issues. For access control, we used record-level permissions tied to object ownership rather than field hiding. Sales team gets full access to partner objects but zero visibility on customer objects associated with the same contact. Takes more initial setup but scales much better and reporting becomes actually useful instead of a confusing mess of mixed data.