HubSpot B2B Contact List Setup — GL Food & Beverage Test

Overview

This article documents the first B2B contact list upload into HubSpot, using a Great Lakes Food & Beverage segment as a test run. The goal was to establish a working baseline for the new B2B sales process — validating field mappings, segment naming conventions, and data quality — before scaling outreach to additional segments.

Related context: ^[1] | ^[2]

Segment Details

Note: HubSpot has renamed "Lists" to Segments in the UI. If you can't find your lists, look under Segments.

Naming Convention

All segments follow this pattern:

[Region Abbreviation] - [Industry/Category] - [Companies | Contacts]

Examples:
- GL - Food and Beverage - Contacts
- GL - Food and Beverage - Companies

GL = Great Lakes area. Apply the same pattern when creating segments for new regions or verticals.

Upload Process

1. Export contacts and companies from Clay as separate CSVs.
2. Upload contacts to HubSpot → map fields during import.
3. Upload companies separately → verify that company records auto-associate with their contacts.
4. Create two segments (Contacts + Companies) using the naming convention above.
5. Spot-check a sample of records to confirm associations are correct.

Data Quality Issues

Missing Emails

The majority of contacts were sourced with LinkedIn profiles only — email addresses were not populated. This blocks immediate email sequence enrollment.

Workaround: Use ^[2] to bulk-enrich the list, or filter the segment down to contacts where email is known before launching sequences.

Phone Number Formatting

Phone numbers imported from CSV come in as plain text strings rather than HubSpot's phone number type. HubSpot may prompt you to reformat when you open and save an individual record, but this does not apply retroactively in bulk.

Impact: Automated dialer tools and click-to-call features may not recognize the field correctly until numbers are reformatted.

Recommended fix: Before using phone numbers in any automated tool, verify that HubSpot is storing them as phone-type fields, not text. Consider a bulk re-import or manual spot-check on a sample.

Property Cleanup — Removing B2C Fields

The HubSpot instance previously contained properties from B2C work that are irrelevant to B2B outreach. These should be hidden or deleted to reduce noise in the contact and company views.

Fields to remove (examples):
- Wealth Score
- Net Worth
- Household Income
- Any other consumer demographic properties

How to clean up:
- Navigate to Settings → Properties
- Filter by contact or company properties
- Hide or delete fields that have no B2B use case

Keep only fields relevant to B2B qualification: company name, title, industry, phone, email, LinkedIn URL, and any custom fields added for the sales process.

Segment Filtering for Outreach

Once the list is uploaded, filter down to an actionable subset before enrolling contacts in sequences:

1. Filter by email known — only contacts with a valid email address can enter email cadences.
2. Filter by phone formatted — only contacts with properly formatted phone numbers should be used for call tasks.
3. Save filtered views as sub-segments or use HubSpot's active list filters to keep them dynamic.

Related Processes

• Pre-call research automation: Before calling any contact, run them through the Clay "Talking Points" template to generate AI-powered call prep notes. See ^[1].
• Data enrichment: Use ZoomInfo's bulk enrichment feature (CSV export from Clay → upload to ZoomInfo) to fill in missing emails and phone numbers. See ^[2].
• Outreach segments: This list is one of four initial target segments. See ^[3] for the full breakdown.
• Sales playbook: OKRs, email/voicemail templates, call scripts, and objection handling are documented in the sales playbook. See ^[4].

Source Meeting

Discussed in: ^[5]
Attendees: Mark Hope, Jacob Jones