New feature: Company blocklists in HubSpot

We are thrilled to announce a new feature in OutboundSync called company block lists, which now supports company lists in HubSpot!

Previously, you could only create contact-based block lists. Now you can block whole lists of companies, such as competitors, vendors, or suppliers.

This is particularly useful for situations where you don’t want to email certain companies cold, but lack individual contact context.

In this video, we share an example using Ocean in Clay to build a list and then import it to HubSpot. Then we use OutboundSync to turn that list into a blocklist in Smartlead.

This update helps ensure you’re emailing the right people and avoids reaching out to the wrong ones. See how it works below.

Transcript

Introduction to Company Block Lists

[00:00:00] Harris Kenny: I am super excited to announce a new feature in OutboundSync called company block lists. Now, before you could only do contact based block lists. Now we support company lists in HubSpot. And I’m just going to share a few examples of when you might want to do that. Competitors, vendors, or suppliers, all sorts of situations where you have companies that you don’t want to email cold, but.

[00:00:24] Harris Kenny: You don’t necessarily have context for them. That’s what we’re solving for. And, you know, also there’s situations where with association labels and things like that, company lists might just be easier to build. So here we go.

Building a Competitor List

[00:00:36] Harris Kenny: I built a competitor list in clay using ocean. And this is the kind of thing that if you’re working with an agency, I just highly recommend having them do this for you because there’s a lot of nuance when you’re working with this kind of data.

[00:00:47] Harris Kenny: Um, incorrect URLs, incorrect company names, the things that can be cleaned up in clay, um, but they take time. And if you’ve not done this before, you know, it’s probably not worth it if you have an expert. that you can just give them a call and have them set it up for you. But you build a comprehensive competitor list.

[00:01:04] Harris Kenny: And in this case we did competitors with a score of 0. 85 or higher. And we used smart lead as our example. Um, of course, up on sync being a smart lead integration. And so, yeah, we picked, we ended up with, uh, you know, close to 300 companies. And we did a little bit of magic here, normalizing the domains and then searching for alternative domains.

[00:01:26] Harris Kenny: Because of some discrepancies I noticed in the data.

Implementing the Competitor List in HubSpot

[00:01:28] Harris Kenny: And so we pushed all of that over into HubSpot, creating companies, and then updating the company type to be. Looking over at HubSpot, we’ve got our active list of companies where the type is competitor. And this is an active list. So as new companies are flagged as competitors, This list will be updated.

[00:01:48] Harris Kenny: And as this list is updated without bouncing connected, those domains will be blocked in smartly.

Blocking Competitors with Smart Lead

[00:01:54] Harris Kenny: So I’ve got an example here of what it looks like. So we selected that company list. We selected our smartly API key. And then if you’re working with an agency, or if you have multiple clients, you would select that client and start blocking.

[00:02:08] Harris Kenny: And this is what it looks like. All of these domains that we determined to be competitors. Push through the API into smart lead. And now we’re not going to email them anymore. So you can build lists and not have to worry necessarily as much about catching competitors.

Advanced Tips and Conclusion

[00:02:23] Harris Kenny: And remember that those lists that you send over that block list can be really big.

[00:02:27] Harris Kenny: I just picked 0. 85 or higher, um, for, you know, for the sake of the video, basically, but you know, you can have as many competitors blocked as you want. And you could also use GPT to refine and segment that competitor list and make sure it’s exactly right. Um, so yeah, I’m really excited about this new feature.

[00:02:44] Harris Kenny: Thank you. Block lists in general are something that we’ve invested a lot of engineering hours into. Um, it’s, it’s harder than it appears. Uh, and we spent a lot of time making sure that we could get that really quick throughput, get all these domains and email addresses when, you know, when it’s a contact list pushed over to smartly.

[00:02:59] Harris Kenny: Um, so you’re emailing the right people and, uh, not emailing the wrong people, but you don’t want to email. So yeah, I was super excited about this feature. Uh, more to come. We’ve got some pretty exciting stuff happening in other areas. Um, but this is a big one that we’ve been working on for a little bit.

[00:03:11] Harris Kenny: And I think you’re going to find it really useful. At least I hope you do. And, uh, yeah, let me know what questions you have.