How to Standardize Job Titles in HubSpot for Better Segmentation

You dive into your CRM, only to find a mess of job titles: "VP of Sales," "Vice President of Sales," "Sales VP," and a dozen more variations. While these all represent the same role, their differing formats create significant headaches. This is the reality for many HubSpot teams dealing with non-standardized job titles, and it’s a much bigger issue than it seems on the surface.

When job titles aren’t standardized, personalization becomes a nightmare. Tailoring communications to specific roles is key to effective marketing and sales strategies. However, with so many variations, ensuring that your messaging reaches the right person in the right way is nearly impossible. Non-standardized job titles lead to inconsistent and impersonal customer interactions, reducing engagement and potentially losing valuable leads.

Duplicates are another major consequence. Different formats and abbreviations for the same job title result in multiple records for the same person, as your team may think they are different people due to having different job titles. Not only does this clutter your CRM, but it also skews lead scoring, routing, and reporting. For example, a “Sr. Marketing Manager” and “Senior Marketing Mgr” might be scored differently, routed incorrectly, and reported on separately, leading to inaccurate data and poor decision-making.

Effective segmentation relies on clean, standardized data. When job titles vary wildly, creating targeted segments becomes an uphill battle. Your carefully crafted segments lose their precision, and the effectiveness of your campaigns diminishes. Instead of hitting the bullseye, you’re throwing darts blindfolded, hoping something sticks.

Accurate reporting is the backbone of strategic planning and performance measurement. Non-standardized job titles wreak havoc on reports, leading to inconsistent data that can misguide your strategies. The insights you depend on to drive growth become muddled, making it difficult to track progress and identify opportunities.

The RevOps Impact of Not Having Standardized Job Title Formatting

Non-standardized job titles can cause a cascade of problems in your RevOps ecosystem.

Here are five specific issues that can arise:

• Personalization pitfalls: When job titles lack consistency, personalized campaigns based on roles become a hit or miss. If you attempt to target "Managers" but your database includes variations like "Mgr." and "Mngr," your personalization efforts will fall flat, leading to poor engagement and potential unsubscribes.
• Segmentation roadblocks: Inconsistent job title formatting makes segmenting your database by role time-consuming and error-prone. You'll spend hours trying to identify and group together all the variations of a single job title, only to end up with incomplete and inaccurate segments that hinder your targeting efforts.
• Duplicate data: Non-standardized job titles contribute to duplicate contacts in your CRM. If "John Smith, Manager" and "John Smith, Mgr." exist as separate records, your database will inflate, leading to skewed metrics and wasted resources when engaging with these contacts.
• Lead scoring inaccuracies: Inconsistent job titles make it difficult to assign accurate lead scores based on a contact's role. If your scoring model assigns different values to "Director" and "Dir." you'll have unreliable prioritization of leads, causing your sales team to focus on the wrong prospects.
• Reporting discrepancies: Reporting on role-based metrics becomes challenging when job titles aren't standardized. If you want to report on the number of "Vice Presidents" in your database, you'll need to account for all variations, such as "VP" and "V.P." This extra effort can lead to inaccurate insights and flawed decision-making.

To fix these problems, you must take a systematic approach to standardizing job titles in your CRM. Next, we'll walk through how to do job title standardization in HubSpot.

How to Standardize Job Titles in HubSpot

Standardizing job titles manually in HubSpot can be a tedious and error-prone process. Here are the steps involved:

1. Navigate to the Contacts section in HubSpot
2. Filter contacts based on job title variations you want to standardize
3. Export the list as a CSV file
4. Open the CSV file and manually standardize the job titles by editing the entries one by one
5. Save the edited CSV file
6. Navigate back to HubSpot and import the updated CSV file
7. Use the "Update existing contacts" option during importing to overwrite the old job titles with the standardized versions

While this manual approach can work for small datasets, it has several significant limitations for larger companies with even bigger databases:

• Eats up your team's time: Manually editing job titles one by one in a spreadsheet is incredibly time-consuming, especially for databases with thousands of contacts.
• Creates more errors: Human error is inevitable when manually editing large datasets. Typos, missed entries, and inconsistencies can easily creep in, undermining the standardization effort.
• Feels demoralizing: Spending hours on tedious data entry tasks can demoralize your team, leading to low morale and potential mistakes due to fatigue or lack of focus.
• Requires ongoing manual maintenance: As you add new contacts to your database, you must regularly repeat the job title standardization process, compounding the time and effort required.

These limitations directly tie back to the RevOps impacts discussed earlier, such as:

• Inability to personalize campaigns based on job titles
• Difficulties with lead scoring and routing
• Inaccurate reporting, leading to poor decision-making

Manual standardization isn't scalable or sustainable for maintaining data quality in a growing HubSpot database. It's error-prone and time-consuming, leading to missed opportunities, inefficient processes, and a negative impact on revenue operations.

Let's explore an alternative option to automate job title standardization in HubSpot.

How Insycle Automates Job Title Standardization

Why struggle with the unreliable, time-wasting task of manually standardizing job titles? It's time to upgrade your workflow with a solution that can automate the process to free your team of headaches and wasted hours of manual data cleaning.

Insycle, a customer data platform that integrates with HubSpot, has a Transform Data module for bulk standardization of job titles and other free-text fields.

With Insycle, you can set filter criteria to narrow down the records you want to update.

In our example, we're looking for records containing vice, vice president, and VP.

Then, you can choose the job titles to standardize and define the formatting rules.

You can also preview the changes to ensure they meet your expectations.

After previewing how the update will look, you can then run your template in update mode to push the changes live. Then, Insycle will run through and fix all of your records within minutes, with hours shaved off your process.

But don't stop here--let's review Insycle's other features that make job standardization easier.

Job Title Standardization Automation: Set It and Forget It

The real beauty of Insycle lies in its automation capabilities. After setting up your standardization rules using the Transform Data module, you can save them as a template and schedule them to run automatically on a set schedule—hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

For example, every Saturday afternoon, while your teams are at home, Insycle is at work, ensuring new and updated records adhere to your standardization rules. No more manual updates, no more inconsistencies creeping in over time.

The only thing better than scheduled automation is seamless workflows. Insycle integrates with HubSpot Workflows, incorporating job title standardization into your existing processes and ensuring properly formatted data throughout the customer's journey with sales, marketing, and customer service.

By leveraging Insycle's automation and integration features, you eliminate the pain points of manual job title standardization:

• No more tedious, time-consuming manual updates
• Reduced risk of human error and inconsistencies
• Increased efficiency and productivity for your RevOps team
• Consistent, reliable data for personalization, segmentation, and reporting

With Insycle, job title standardization becomes a seamless, automated process that runs in the background, allowing you to focus on what matters: driving revenue and making data-driven decisions.

Get Job Titles Consistent with Insycle's Automated Formatting

In the world of RevOps, data is king. By leveraging powerful data tools like Insycle, you can automate job title standardization, remove manual updates, and ensure your data remains consistent, reliable, and ready to drive revenue.

But Insycle's benefits extend past job title standardization. Insycle can tackle various data quality challenges in HubSpot, from deduplicating contacts and merging records to standardizing industries, states, and countries. Adopting a comprehensive data management solution allows you to unlock the full potential of your HubSpot database, enabling personalized campaigns, accurate reporting, and data-driven decision-making.

So, why wait? Take the first step towards RevOps excellence and explore the world of automated data management for HubSpot. With Insycle at your fingertips, you can transform your database into a well-oiled machine, driving growth, efficiency, and success.

Ready to learn more? Discover how you can revolutionize your HubSpot data management today.