BluepointATM — Contact Type Property Setup

Overview

During a HubSpot training session with BluePoint, the team identified a gap in their contact segmentation: HubSpot's native Lifecycle Stage property tracks where a contact is in the sales funnel, but there was no field to capture what kind of relationship a contact represents. A new custom property — Contact Type — was created to fill this gap and enable targeted communication, filtered views, and bulk editing workflows.

See also: ^[1] | ^[2]

The Problem

BluePoint's HubSpot instance contained a mix of contact types — active leads, past customers, GPO partners, and vendors — all stored without differentiation. This made it difficult to:

• Exclude non-leads from sales automation and drip campaigns
• Build filtered views scoped to a specific relationship type
• Audit past customer relationships at a glance

The Solution: Contact Type Property

A new custom contact property was created manually in HubSpot with the following configuration:

Dropdown Options

Design note: The team debated whether to include Vendors. The consensus was to err on the side of inclusion — having vendor contacts in HubSpot allows email history to be tracked centrally, even if vendors are excluded from all marketing automation.

Relationship to Lifecycle Stage

Contact Type and Lifecycle Stage serve complementary but distinct purposes:

• Lifecycle Stage = position in the sales funnel (Lead → MQL → SQL → Opportunity → Customer)
• Contact Type = the nature of the relationship (Lead, Customer, GPO Partner, Vendor)

A contact tagged as Contact Type: GPO Partner would not progress through the lifecycle funnel at all — they exist outside of it. This distinction is what makes Contact Type necessary as a separate field rather than a lifecycle stage value.

How to Add the Property to the Sidebar View

1. Open any contact record
2. Click Actions → Customize Properties
3. Search for Contact Type and check the box to add it
4. Drag it to a logical position (recommended: near Lifecycle Stage)
5. Click Save — this updates the sidebar layout for your user account

Note: Sidebar customizations in HubSpot are per-user by default. Wade and Mike may need to configure their views independently to ensure alignment.

Bulk Editing Existing Contacts

To assign Contact Type to a large group of existing contacts at once:

1. Navigate to Contacts → Views
2. Create or open a filtered view (e.g., filter by Lead Status to isolate active leads)
3. Set the page size to 100 to see all contacts at once
4. Check the select all checkbox at the top of the list
5. Click Edit from the action bar
6. Set Contact Type = Lead (or the appropriate value) and confirm
7. HubSpot will apply the update to all selected records in bulk

Tip: Use Edit Columns in the list view to add Contact Type as a visible column before bulk editing — this makes it easy to verify the update applied correctly.

Action Items (from session)

• [ ] Mike Stebbins — Begin updating existing contacts with the new Contact Type property, starting with the Active Leads view
• [ ] Mike Stebbins — Verify that sidebar changes made by Mark are reflected in Mike's own HubSpot view; reconfigure if needed

Related

• ^[2]
• ^[3]
• ^[4]
• ^[1]