topic Re: Association label vs field property for attribution in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Association label vs field property for attribution

xpgws23 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:20:41 GMT

Hi all,
We run a service company and receive referrals from our partner companies and we want a better way of tracking the reps/partners who refer these leads to us. We get referrals from more than 10 partners. Each partner company has over 100+ reps sending leads our way.

Current setup:

- The referrer’s name is being added to a dropdown option in Deal

- When we need to add a new rep, they submit the name under a single-line text field and we manually update the dropdown options

- The reps select the name from the pick list and the field is visible in the Deal object

I want to know whether using contacts + association label is the way to go here. Are there any benefits or risks to using that approach?

would be great to understand from a data modeling standpoint as well as I'm a newbie

Thanks for sharing your best practices!

Re: Association label vs field property for attribution

karstenkoehler — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:31:28 GMT

Hi @xpgws23,

How exactly are referrals received, through a HubSpot form?

In general, replacing your current solution with association labels would have the benefit that you wouldn't have to manually add dropdown options. A process could look like this:

Set up referral association label between contact/contact
Create a referral rep self registration form (rep submits the form, is created as a contact in your CRM)
In your lead referral form, add a new custom single-line field for the email address of the referring rep
Create a contact-based workflow that associates the newly registered lead to the referral rep based on matching field values (email address of the referring rep from the lead capture form + email address of the actual rep record) - there is a dedicated "Create association" workflow action for this

The big benefit would be that you'd have a process that maintains itself. No need to manually add new reps.

Best regards!

Re: Association label vs field property for attribution

xpgws23 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:49:22 GMT

Hi Karsten,

Appreciate the response. We receive the leads from informal channels currently. The referring rep/partner sends us an email and then we log the email in HS. Sometimes we also receive them from Slack.

The lead form is definitely a great option, but wondering if we could set up a way that makes it seamless for our partners?

The process you mentioned definitely makes sense as well! Are we able to exclude the domains of our partners from marketing emails, etc?

Re: Association label vs field property for attribution

karstenkoehler — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:55:07 GMT

@xpgws23 you could also maintain this process in an informal way - your sales reps would simply have to add the referring rep's email address in the field that I proposed is used in a lead capture form. The workflow that takes care of the ascociation doesn't mind if the field is filled via form or by someone on your team.

Generally, I'd say that a lead referral form is a great way to formalize and standardize that process - it also makes it measurable and gives you a central place to see how many referrals are coming in.

Regarding the exclusion, sure - however you're building your marketing lists, they shouldn't be pulling in uneligible contacts any way and filter only for those with consent. If that currently includes referral partners, then you could assign these a specific contact type (dropdown property) and exclude them from your email lists that way.

Re: Association label vs field property for attribution

xpgws23 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:05:06 GMT

This makes sense!

For the email address field in the lead form, I wonder if we could use a dropdown option here so that the rep only has to type in the first name of an existing referring rep, and their corresponding email would appear? Or will this complicate further the workflows?

Re: Association label vs field property for attribution

karstenkoehler — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:05:54 GMT

@xpgws23 that's the part that would not make this scalable - you want it to be free text so that you don't have to update a dropdown every single time.

Re: Association label vs field property for attribution

xpgws23 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:48:16 GMT

Got that - so to recap my understanding: setting up an association label ('Referrer') will be used to create the relationship between the lead and the referring rep/partner. We could also automate the association using workflows which will be triggered by lead capture.