Hi everyone! I’m looking for advice on using HubSpot for referral tracking. My company works in B2B and we get tons of business through client referrals. We want to monitor which clients are sending us new leads and when these referrals happen. Has anyone set up something similar in HubSpot? Is it even doable with their platform? I’d really appreciate any guidance before I start building this from scratch. Thanks in advance!
We started doing this 18 months ago but skipped custom properties entirely. Instead, we made a ‘Referral’ deal source and built custom stages just for tracking referrals. New referral comes in? We create the deal with that source and drop the referring client’s name in the description. Here’s the game-changer: use HubSpot’s company associations to directly link the referring client to the new prospect. You get a clean visual connection in your CRM and reporting becomes way easier. The real pain wasn’t setting it up - it was getting our intake team to actually capture referral info every single time from the first contact.
Dealt with this same issue for 6 months. Here’s what worked: I made a custom contact property called “Referred By” with a dropdown of all existing clients. When someone calls, we just pick the referrer from the list - no typing means way fewer mistakes. Built a quick dashboard showing referral activity over time. Now I can see top referrers instantly and actually prove to clients that their referrals matter. Takes 30 seconds per lead, but the setup was totally worth it for the insights.
we just use tags - way simpler than custom properties or deal sources. when someone mentions they heard about us from another client, we tag both contacts with “referral-pair-jan2024” or something similar. takes 2 seconds and you can still pull reports later. not as fancy as other methods but our team actually uses it lol
I’ve used HubSpot for referral tracking for two years - it works great. Set up custom properties on contacts like “Referral Source” and “Referring Company” that get filled during lead intake. Use associations to link new contacts directly to the client who referred them. The hard part? Getting your sales team to actually fill out these fields consistently when they talk to prospects. I created automated workflows that ping us internally when referral fields get populated - helps us send thank you notes to referring clients. Once you’ve got clean data coming in, the reporting is really powerful.