What Are HubSpot Business Units?

Managing sales and marketing for one company is tough enough, but managing multiple brands for one company can feel next to impossible for most teams. This is where HubSpot Business Units can save the day.

I should mention right now if your company offers multiple brands but markets them to the same audience with a unified communication and sales approach – this article won’t be relevant to you at all. 

Go ahead and get yourself a latte and consider your homework done for the day.

If your parent company has several brands, manages them on different domains, and sells those products to distinct audiences – keep reading!

What Are Business Units With HubSpot? 

HubSpot Business Units is an add-on to your Marketing Hub subscription that allows you to add and manage several brands in a shared HubSpot portal, eliminating the need to create a separate subscription and account for each brand.

With all brands under one “roof,” your teams will be able to manage each brand using the same set of tools without jumping from one portal to another. 

Sounds nice, right? You might be wondering what this looks like from a practical sense. Here are a few things you will need from the outset:

·       HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise subscription for your “parent” account

·       Designated Super Admin for adding and editing business units

·       Plan for managing Business Units going forward (see below)

Difference Between Business Units and Domains

Right off the top, it's important to understand the difference between Business Units and Domains on HubSpot, especially since Domains have gotten a recent upgrade.

A domain is the address of your website, and you can now add more domains to your HubSpot subscription to expand your audience reach. 

If you own a domain for “John Robertson Esq” and another for “Best Legal Attorney in Texas,” and don’t mind sending the same marketing communications to users of both websites, Domains will enable you to host content on that additional website for a small fee. 

If your needs include additional domains and custom email subscriptions, tool configurations, and permissions for internal teams, Business Units is what you need. 

"Examine how all of your contacts are created before implementing HubSpot Business Units. If you import contact records through app integrations, you will need to plan for how those new contacts will be added to the correct Business Unit."

Benefits of Using HubSpot Business Units 

The most obvious advantages of using Business Units are cost savings and efficiency. Not only will your teams manage all aspects of your solution in one place, you will also save a bundle of money.

If you have three brands with 50,000 contacts each, you would spend close to $9,000 a month on a Marketing Professional subscription alone.

By switching to Marketing Enterprise and adding two Business Units with the same number of contacts, you’d spend closer to $6,400 a month on the tools. As your brands continue to grow, the difference in cost gets even more dramatic. 

Another key benefit of Business Units is your Marketing Hub Enterprise subscription. You will have access to the most advanced marketing tools, analytics, and settings HubSpot has to offer, including partitioning, predictive lead scoring, and custom objects.  

Related Content: What Do HubSpot Business Units Cost?

How Many Business Units Can You Have in HubSpot?

You can add as many as 100 Business Units by purchasing and implementing instances of the add-on. If you add that many, you might just inspire HubSpot to buy a small city and name it after your company.  

HubSpot Business Units Features

If you've used HubSpot Marketing Professional or Enterprise before, you will find the UX isn't different from what you're used to. But you will find settings and capabilities that need attention. 

Segment Audiences

First, you can segment audiences for each brand. Instead of spending hours building lists, you can quickly filter audiences by brand and limit communication with one only or cross-sell to others.  

Create Teams & Permission Sets

You can also create teams for various roles and brands. This will help you organize the hierarchy of all your HubSpot users for reporting and partitioning purposes. 

For instance, senior executives that oversee all brands might belong to the “parent team” that sits above all other teams in your portal. They will have access to all contacts, companies, deals, and tasks related to the “child” teams.

Marketing, Sales, and Service employees can be organized into teams with permissions that keep them focused on their work without messing up data that belongs to other Business Units. When editing permission sets, you might grant CRM access to contact records and conversations that are “owned only,” which means HubSpot users can see only contacts that are assigned to them.

Partitioning HubSpot Assets

Similar to contacts, you can assign Business Units to your HubSpot assets, which helps keep your portal organized and free from error. 

Assets you can partition with Marketing Hub Enterprise include:

·      CRM records and views

·      Conversations inbox

·      Deal and ticket pipelines

·      Social accounts

·      Files

·      Dashboards and reports

·      Properties

·      Blog articles, landing pages, and website pages

·      Emails

·      Forms

·      Calls-to-action

·      Workflows

·      Lists

·      Ads 

A Word of Caution Before Getting Started... 

Before you start your Business Unit implementation, you'll want to think very carefully about how each aspect of your portal is going to be assigned to the appropriate business unit. 

Some of the asset allocations will be manual, others automated. Either way, you will want to audit your HubSpot portal and make lists of everything that will be assigned a Business Unit and who should have access to it. 

If you are using lists in your workflows, it’s easy to overlook one and create an embarrassing situation where the wrong contacts are getting the wrong emails. We've seen this happen, so it's a good idea to get everything organized on paper before getting started.

It’s equally important to make sure all of your HubSpot users are creating and naming assets the same way. We like to create a “HubSpot User Protocol” that specifies how assets should be created, named, and managed, and require every team member to read and understand it.  

Naming conventions are critical, especially if you have a lot of lists and workflows. Make sure the Business Unit is clearly identified in the name of the asset. Renaming old assets is a time-consuming but necessary task if you want to get your portal organized for success. 

Lastly, I strongly encourage you to examine how your contacts are being created before implementing Business Units. If your Sales team imports contact records through app integrations, you will need to plan for how those new contacts will be added to the correct Business Unit in the data sync. 

If you are planning to cross-sell products to different audiences and add contacts to more than one Business Unit, I would advise you to create a plan for that in the months ahead. For now, focus on getting all objects in your CRM assigned to one Business Unit first. That will allow for easier troubleshooting if some contacts start getting assigned to the wrong brand in error.

Business Units is a great addition to the HubSpot toolbox. It can help you streamline processes and workflows in ways never possible before. But it also requires attention to detail and planning to ensure everything is managed correctly. By investing a little extra time in the planning process, you will have a much easier time post-launch. Good luck!