video: How to Master the Art of Date-Stamping

What's up everybody back again. And today, um, I want to talk about the art of date stamping in HubSpot because I think date stamping is a really powerful tool to make your life a whole lot easier as a HubSpot professional. Um, so in this video I wanna talk about what date stamping actually is, how HubSpot is using date stamping and how you can use it as a, uh, HubSpot professional to make your life, uh, a little bit easier. So, first of all, what actually is date stamping? Date stamping is basically storing the date and time when a certain action or change happens. Uh, and you might think to yourself, why do I need date stamping in my portal? Well, you need date stamping. The moment you ask yourself the question of when, so when did something happen? When did a contact metaform? When did a contact became an mql?

When did we close this deal? When did this person submit a service ticket? If you want to use that time, that date in reports, in lists, filters, workflows, you actually need that date and time as a single property so you can use it. And HubSpot itself does a pretty good job in leveraging date stamping out of the box. Uh, and to show you a couple of examples, let's let's navigate to a contact record here cuz if you actually look at a couple of default properties, you can already see date stamping in effect. For example, this property right here, if we look at the last contacted property, this is a date property. As you can see, I cannot edit this property cause this property's automatically set by HubSpot based on when you actually last contacted this, uh, contact. So if I would now send an email to this, uh, to this contact, this property would automatically be updated to today's date and time. So now if I want to filter on, uh, you know, showing me a list of all, uh, people I have contacted the last week, I can use this property to build that. And another,

Uh, really good example of date stamping that HubSpot uses is based around the lifecycle stage property, right? As you can see, this contact has the lifecycle stage lead, and we can move him through the lifecycle stage, uh, stages. Um, but this single property does not necessarily tell us when, uh, this contact became a lead. I can look at the details to actually see, okay, uh, the, at the end of January, uh, this contact became a lead, but I cannot use this date to filter or build a report. For example, if I wanna know how many leads I gathered in January, I cannot use this, um, date field here to build that report. Uh, to counter this HubSpot created a couple of extra date properties that are automatically populated based on the lifecycle stage. Now you might have seen these already cause these are default, uh, properties.

Every lifecycle stage option also has a date property tied to it. So now we see, hey, this contact became a lead at the end of January. If I now change this to MQL and I save it, the MQL date is automatically populated with today's date. So now you can use these properties to build out your reports, um, you know, to, to create your views using my workflows, what have you. Uh, so it's really powerful to actually store the date and time of when a change actually happens. Uh, and I think lifecycle stages are a really good example of the date stamping principle. And that is basically date stamping in a nutshell. It's basically creating an extra date property that you automatically populate when something happens. Um, so to give you a couple of examples of how that would work, uh, for your business, what you could do, for example, if you want to know when someone requested a demo, because that's a really important kpi, you wanna report on the number of demo requests within a certain timeframe, you might want to use a workflow, um, like this one right here, where we simply create an extra date property that gets populated.

The moment someone submits that form, submits a a a demo request form. Um, and you can select the

Date of step here as the, um, uh, as the action. So the moment someone fills in this form, the date is actually stored in this single property. So you can use that property to build out your reports on. Let's say, for example, if you want to build a report on the number of, uh, demo requests, um, each month you would use this property to actually set it up. Because without this, specifically this date property, it would be really difficult to generate such reports because we do not necessarily have a single date property for every form conversion. Um, and another, uh, example, uh, this is the one I shared a couple of, uh, uh, a couple of weeks ago. If you wanna report on or at least store the moment when someone actually opts out of your, um, marketing information, you could use the same principle.

Hey, when someone actually opts out of marketing information or, uh, unsubscribes, uh, itself from all email communication, we'll simply set that date in a custom property. So now you can also, uh, run reports or, or use filters based on that. Um, because like I said, HubSpot is really, you know, trying to provide you with, uh, some really key dates out of the box, right? Again, these live cycle stages a pretty good example, but HubSpot does not store every single change, uh, that way. So you might want to use workflows like the one we just saw to really give you some guardrails and some, some data that you can actually use in your, uh, in your reports, in your, in your views, in your filters. So yeah, hopefully, uh, this was helpful. Um, I'm very curious on what you actually use as, uh, a date stamp, um, you know, use case. Uh, so definitely let me know in the comments. Hope this helped. And as always, uh, happy hub spotting.