Topic:
HubSpot,
Sales Tips
(4 Minute Read)
Trying to work out whether you should use multiple HubSpot accounts or partition one? You’re in the right place.
Hubspot Marketing Enterprise has a cool feature where you can separate one account into multiple partitions within the same CRM. For some businesses, this is a better option than trying to manage multiple HubSpot accounts, but it may not be right for your needs. This might be relevant to you if you have multiple brands in the same account, competing sales teams, or want to separate out your business by different teams across country and language.
Read on for all the information you need in order to decide between partitioning or multiple accounts!
If you have Marketing Hub Enterprise, you can separate the access & content of your HubSpot by teams. This includes pretty much everything: pages, blog posts, CTAs, forms, emails, lists, workflows, campaigns, email preference centres and dashboards. Using partitioning, each team can only see & access the above components of HubSpot that are allocated to their team.
These teams can have different hierarchies, so for instance, a management team could be allowed access to all of the partitions of data, with other teams only seeing certain data. For each element, you can choose which teams can and can’t access/see it - HubSpot calls these parent and child teams, and you can find a comprehensive explanation of how to set up hierarchical teams here.
Image from HubSpot's blog on partitioning your HubSpot Assets
One of the main benefits is that different teams can have cross-over, which makes sharing data between the different accounts super easy. The downside to this is it could also cause issues if that cross-over occurs when it’s not supposed to! You also need to ensure your GDPR compliance covers that cross-over, as email preference centres can be partitioned along with data, and any crossover must still comply with the data sharing that your prospects have agreed to.
Another benefit of having one partitioned account is that comparing different partitions through analytics and reporting in HubSpot is much easier than comparing separate accounts, as you’ll have access to all of HubSpot’s internal reporting.
Using Marketing Hub Enterprise to partition your accounts also means (obviously) that you’ll have Marketing Hub Enterprise... giving you access to even more snazzy functionality than just a Professional tier account - there’s an economy of scale in paying for enterprise in reducing costs for contact limit increases, additional licence fees and seats, etc. If you want to really dig into partitioning in HubSpot, check out their article on it here.
The main downside of this approach is that it’s quite a precision process: each element has to be manually granted or not granted to each team, which could become a long task if you have many different teams all with different access requirements. Setting this up could take a while, and if done wrong, could mean important content would be inaccessible by a team that needs it. That said, you can speed this process up by creating a custom role type. And if you did have an accessibility problem, it’s a very easy toggle button and it’s fixed... which is much easier than importing data between different HubSpot accounts.
I’d suggest allocating someone to have responsibility for managing and allocating elements/assets and keeping track of the team's data needs to prevent any issues. You can find a very detailed how-to article by HubSpot on partitioning permissions here.
Another drawback to consider is that it gets complicated if you have more than one domain. On both Pro and Enterprise, you can have one primary domain and unlimited subdomains. That said, subdomains are just microsites or campaigns, so you won’t be able to run a whole blog or website from these. If you needed to add additional HubSpot domains that weren’t landing pages you can do that, but you have to pay more for it - feel free to get in touch if you’ve got a specific case you want advice on.
To manage multiple non-HubSpot domains, you’ll need to have the same HubSpot analytics code on every domain. Then you can create a filter based on the domain name, enabling you to still report on them separately.
It’s also worth noting that you will still have to stay beneath the marketing contacts limit that your one Enterprise account has, which may get quite full quite quickly if you’re integrating a load of CRMs. You can increase this limit from the starting 10,000 marketing contacts in increments of 10,000 for £82.00/month. This is a benefit of being on Enterprise over Pro, as Pro is £188.76 for every 5,000 additional contacts.
The cost of this depends on the type of HubSpot each team or organisation would need. If you’re wanting to make the most of the amazing marketing tools that HubSpot have to offer, you’d want to be on higher than a Starter account, as that doesn’t include campaigns, lead and company scoring, teams or custom reporting.
Using multiple HubSpot accounts for different groups is pretty straightforward - when you navigate to HubSpot, you’ll see a menu of the different accounts you’re a part of, and you can choose which to enter. Each person can be given access to however many accounts they should have access to, and everything stays separate.
The main drawback of this approach is that you can’t crossover any data without doing imports or an integration - but that is only a limiting functionality if that’s something you’ll actually want to do!
The main benefit of having multiple HubSpot accounts is it completely eliminates the risk of crossing over data or breaching any data security issues through accidentally wrong access settings. So if you’re an agency managing many different clients that have no cross-over at all, or your data safety compliance needs to be particularly stringent, this may be a better option for you.
Marketing Hub Professional starts at £655 p/m for 2000 contacts and additional marketing contacts are sold in increments of 5,000 from £188.76/month. Each account would need to pay this separately, and if one of your accounts is going to need Marketing Hub Enterprise functionality anyway, it might be worth having another look at partitioning.
| Marketing Hub Professional | Marketing Hub Enterprise | |
| Number of marketing contacts | 2,000 | 10,000 |
| Cost per month | £655 | £2,624 |
| Additional monthly cost per additional contacts | £82 p/m for 10,000 additional contacts | £420 p/m for 5,000 additional contacts |
It’s worth mentioning here that the ‘10,000 marketing contacts’ isn’t a limit on the total number of contacts in the CRM, just the ones set to ‘Marketing contacts’ who you can target with emails and campaigns.
Marketing Hub Enterprise is £2,624/month for 10,000 marketing contacts, while Marketing Hub Professional is £843.76/month for 7,000 marketing contacts. The contact limits go up in different increments: Enterprise increases by 10,000 for £82.00/month, and Professional by 5,000 from £188.76/month.
This means that on Marketing Hub Professional you could have 7,000 marketing contacts for £843.76/month or 12,000 marketing contacts for £1032.52/month. Whereas, for £2,624/month you could have 10,000 contacts on Enterprise.
So you could have 3 Marketing Professional accounts at 7,000 contacts for the cost of 1 Enterprise account with as many partitions as you like. Or you could have 2 (.5) Professional accounts at 12,000 contacts for 1 Enterprise account with as many partitions as you like.
Interestingly, additional marketing contacts are much cheaper on Enterprise than Professional, so if you're absolutely swimming in millions of marketing contacts, Enterprise might be a cheaper option for you overall.
The answer you may have been expecting… it depends. I can’t say exactly what’s better for your business, but these are key things you should focus on when making your decision:
How many different accounts do you need, and how many contacts do they have? If you’ve got loads of little teams with not too many contacts, partitioning is right for you. If you have one or two accounts with loads of marketing contacts, multiple HubSpot accounts may be a better fit.
Do you need Marketing Hub Enterprise functionality, or are any of your teams already on this tier? If so, you may save money using partitioning instead of having multiple accounts.
Do you actually need to cross over any of the data between teams? If that’s going to be a really helpful piece of functionality, partition, but if not, it could be easier to keep things simple and separate.
If you’re looking for help in your HubSpot set-up, management or marketing, we’re always happy to help - even if it’s just a quick bit of advice. We love a chat: get in touch here and let us know what you need.
Featured image: Patrick Wilver (HubSpot) Taken from HubSpot's Style Guide Photography Library
Saving clients from bad marketing and design is Andy's MO. He writes helpful blog content on all sorts of marketing topics so that you get the advice you need to take your job by storm.
