Create HubSpot Age Calculation properties with the PocketKnife Add-On

While HubSpot offers a wide range of marketing and contact relationship management tools, Age Calculation isn't a native function on the platform.

There are cases where customers grow with our business, whether as individuals or as an organization. And this requires you to segment them and target your efforts based on their changing need.

A way to calculate age would then be practical!

To address this need, our team worked to craft the Age Calculator workflow action on the PocketKnife HubSpot add-on.  

The Functionality Behind the Age Calculator  

We engineered this workflow action to determine the age of a specific entity by utilizing a date property as the reference point. This action allows you to choose whether you want the age to be calculated in years or days, giving you flexibility in analyzing and categorizing your data.

Use Cases for Age Calculation

Let's look at real-world scenarios in which the Age Calculation on PocketKnife can be very useful.

• Person's Age: You can use this workflow action to compute contacts' exact age based on their birthdate. This information can benefit social media ads, email marketing send-outs to targeted contact lists by age, customized content delivery, token-based smart or dynamic websites, or landing pages on HubSpot.
• Contract Duration: In the case of deals or contracts, you can leverage this feature to calculate the duration in terms of days or years. Knowing the duration provides insights into the lifecycle of deals, helping you identify trends or have supporting data to identify long-standing key customers. This information will then feed into how to optimize your sales strategies.  
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM): If your CRM tracks company establishment dates, you can use the Age Calculation feature to review a company's historical and aging reports and gauge the longevity of your business relationships. This information helps you prioritize long-standing clients, uncover potential key accounts, and enrich your account-based marketing (ABM) and sales strategy. Learn more about ABM on HubSpot.
• Subscription Duration: When it comes to subscriptions or renewals, the Age Calculator can help you see the subscription period at a glance. Knowing these aids in tracking and managing subscription-based business models.  
• Project Progress: There are cases where deals are partially closed with down payments for projects managed within HubSpot. Feedback from the HubSpot community indicates a need to help sales teams track if a project is in the delivery stage within deals. But as of mid-2023, there is still room to improve how Deals and Projects relate to each other on the CRM, with workarounds including integrating Project Management tools with HubSpot. With PocketKnife's Age Calculator, you can view Projects within Deals and measure the time a project has been in progress, helping you monitor timelines and allocate resources more effectively.  
• Event Participation: Some leadstreet contacts and clients manage paid events like training sessions, networking lunches, or panel discussions. Businesses with similar activities can use date properties by contacts or companies. From there, they can answer questions like "For how long has a person been a regular at our events?" The answer can help you analyze attendance history and tailor future event invitations accordingly.
• Product Usage: In a SaaS environment, you can calculate how long a user has used your product since signing up. From there, you can gain insights into user engagement and identify potential upsell or cross opportunities. 

• make better decisions
• craft more data-driven strategies
• create and deliver personalized content and engagement
• improve process management in different parts of your organization. 

Using the Age Calculator Workflow Action  

To illustrate how the workflow action works, let's look at a step-by-step guide to using it to determine a contact's age, every year.

• Step 1: Create two date contact properties. In this case, these properties are Birthday and Age.  
• Step 2: Create a contact-based workflow using the contact property Birthday: Calculate Age each Birthday.
• Step 3: Toggle to switch on re-enrollment.
• Step 4: Add the PocketKnife workflow action.
• Step 5: Update the action, unit, and accuracy. After that, store the calculation in the contact property Age.
• Step 6: Set a delay for 1 minute and wait until it's ready.  
• Step 7: In the left sidebar of the contact record, you'll see Birthday and Calculated Age as extra fields. The workflow action will then update the Calculated Age property every year on the person's birthday.  

The Need for an Age Calculator on HubSpot

If you've been observing posts on Hub Ideas discussions in the HubSpot Community, you can find comments like:

"It would be great to have a native feature that will calculate the age for contacts."  

"PLEASE make this a native function in HubSpot or give clear examples of workflows to make it happen. Age is extremely necessary for our business."  

"It would be great to have a DOB field native. Then from there let the display types be the various things people want."

We found these sentiments reflected when talking to our leadstreet customers. So, our project team worked to address this need with the Age Calculator workflow action.

As a whole set of tools, we developed PocketKnife to support HubSpot users through pain points like: 

1. Having Limited Functionalities in HubSpot: While increasing their usage and mastery of HubSpot, many teams discovered they had requirements beyond the platform’s standard offerings. As clients’ businesses grew, they realized they needed specialized tools to get the job done easier in their unique industries or business models. These functionalities were not readily available within the HubSpot ecosystem, prompting them to seek external solutions.  
2. Needing Pro or Enterprise Licenses to Access Functionalities: Beyond adding more accessible functionalities, the PocketKnife app gained the interest of those looking for enhanced ways to calculate age within their HubSpot portals. 

Those interested are typically external consultants or internal marketing teams who use HubSpot and are looking for solutions that are:  

• User-Friendly: We designed the PocketKnife HubSpot add-on/app to be intuitive and user-friendly. Unlike other complex solutions, our app is easy to integrate and use within HubSpot.
• Not dependent on custom coding or manual steps: In using Age Calculator, you have one less decision to make per contact or company. Internal developers don't need to custom code. And sales and marketing teams don't need someone to update the database with each person or company's age every year. This means you have more time and capacity to maximize HubSpot's full potential without the headaches associated with traditional software integration or manual processes. 
• Easy enough with basic HubSpot knowledge: When building the add-on, we wanted to empower small businesses led mainly by marketers and owners. Teams with a fundamental understanding of the CRM's core features can complement their current HubSpot tools with PocketKnife. So, you can go beyond the limits and basic functionalities and explore more sophisticated campaigns and projects. 

Explore the Age Calculator with the HubSpot add-on 

Installing the app in your HubSpot portal can boost your business processes. If you’re ready to enhance your HubSpot portal, you can add PocketKnife today. Take it for a spin: https://pocketknife.leadstreet.be/. 

 

We're here to assist you with any questions, technical support, or feedback. Connect with us at sales@leadstreet.be. Let's transform your HubSpot experience together!