At this time there is no way to enable assocations to mimic the behavior used in Salesforce to link records.
Salesforce uses the “Relationships” and “Relationship Type” objects to link to records. The data it uses is:
- From Contact/From Entity (or Company)
- To Contact/Entity (or Company)
- Relationship Type (for example Parent, Spouse, Business Owner)
At the moment, Hubspots “Associations” object is not included in Custom Objects, there isn’t a view edit history feature, and the object itself can only be adjusted by creating object labels that are manually update. Instead, Hubspot refers to the “account ID” listed on a Contact record to create a Contact to Entity association automatically.
The problem in this set up occurs when one contact has multiple associated accounts.
For example: Jim Smith is associated with Company A (his primary company) with it’s own unique Account ID in Salesforce. When captured by Hubspot, the two are associated Contact to Entity. However Jim is also associated with another Company in Salesforce Company B with it’s own Account ID. Salesforce does not record this additional Account ID on his contact record, so Hubspot doesn’t capture this Account ID and the association is not captured.
Instead, Salesforce captures this using the Relationship and Relationship type object - His relationship to Company A is capture with a Lookup field, as well as his relationship to Company B and both have a designated Relationship Type, such as Company Owner for Company A and Shareholder for Company B, for instance.
Howver, these objects currently bear no weight in Hubspot for association rules, and cannot be adjusted or worked around. Meaning Jim’s second company will never be associated unless manually caught and updated - something that is very conterintuitive to Hubspot’s idealogy.
My suggestion is to update the integration tool to capture the data within the Relationship and Relationship Type objects in Salesforce, natively througth the integration set up - since its a CORE feature of Salesforce.