Importing Companies without custom domains + 2 other Q's :)

Smart CRM & Sales Hub CRM
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Hello lovely HubSpot support community - I’ve enjoyed reading lots of threads so far, seems like some really helpful support is offered here :slightly_smiling_face: I have another set of issues I’m experiencing recently…

I’m doing some test imports before doing my BIG imports (thousands of individuals) and I’m making good progress but still running into trouble on a couple of things.

The main issue stems from this: I work mainly with artists, so in CRM their individual person name is their Contact and their artist name is the Company - and a majority of them do not have unique company domains.

It’s unfortunate that hubspot is so dependant on company domains to create/differentiate companies, but we try to work with it, so…

I’ve figured out how to do a multi-object import (create Contact and Company all at once).

At first I was struggling to have the “Artist/Org” name (i.e. the name of the artist) create a Company and ALSO show up in the Company field of the Contact. The solution to this involved duplicating the “Artist/Org” name into two columns in the import spreadsheet - one column for the Contact object Company Name, and another column for the Company object Company Name.

First problem I’m encountering: this import method creates duplicate Company object Company names. For example: two individuals who are in the same “Artist/Org” (think: multiple band members) -the spreadsheet lists the same “Artist/Org” name, but HubSpot creates different Companies of the same name (instead of putting both individuals into the same company). --> See my below screenshot for examples “Nortec Collective” and “Spacebar Society”

To try to solve this, and keeping in mind that I don’t have Company Domain as an option for unique identifier, I tried to then utilize the Custom Unique Value system (i.e. a series of numbers I made up) to attach to each Company as a unique identifier - and for “Nortec Collective” and “Spacebar Society” I put the same Unique Value number for each instance of individual band members… but duplicate Companies of the same name were still created upon import (rather than putting the two individuals in Nortec Collective into one Company of that name // or putting the two individuals in Spacebar Sociert into one Company of that name).

Here’s the import spreadsheet screenshot (I’m keeping out the email/phone etc from the spreadsheet screenshot due to info sensitivity - these fields are importing fine anyway) - you can see the Unique Value column and how it’s the same number for two individuals in Artist/Org “Nortec Collective” or “Spacebar Society.”

GranderGestures_0-1726100678235.png
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Q1: Do you have any recommendations for how to do this multi-object import to create Contacts and Companies, where Company Domain doesnt exist (and we instead use a custom Unique Value) AND ALSO a way to prevent duplicate Companies being created?

Second problem I’m encountering: when an individual with the same email is associated to two different companies. In this spreadsheet, the example individual is “Mike Shinoda” who is in both the bands (Artist/Org) “Linkin Park” and “Fort Minor.” I’ve got two separate lines of the spreadsheet to represent the same individual but in different bands, using his only one email. What ends up happening is the “Linkin Park” version of Mike Shinoda imports, but then the “Fort Minor” version doesn’t import (I think because the hubspot system found the same email and considered it a duplicate).

Q2: Is there a way to import the same individual/email and have it relate/attach to multiple different Companies?

Third problem I’m encountering: I want to use association labels to group these individuals by their different qualities in CRM - and sometimes an individual has multiple of these qualities. The association labels I have already created in my account: “Artist” “Educator” “Creator” “Manager” “Press” “Client” etc. The problem occurs for individuals that have multiple association labels.

I created an Association Label column in the import spreadsheet. For the first attempt, for individuals with multiple Associal Labels, I tried to include them all in the same cell, i.e. “Artist; Educator; Creator” -- but the hubspot importer would not accept multiple Association Labels in one cell… so second attempt, I split the association labels out into their own unique columns in the import spreadsheet ('Association Label 1, Association Label 2, Association Label 3, etc) - but then the Hubspot importer only let me select Association Label 1 (it would not let me import Label 2 and Label 3).

Q3: Can a Contact only have one Association Label, or is there a way to import multiple? Am I just misundersanding what an association label is, and if so, can you please define it for me?

Q4: Do I even need to create Companies? Maybe I can just get by with creating Contacts and putting their “Artist/Org” name into their Contact object Company Name property, and just forego entirely creating Company object Companies. Can you see any reason why this would be a problem down the road, though?

I really don’t understand why it’s so difficult to just create Contacts and Companies from an import - it would all be fine if the company domain weren’t required as unique identifier for companies - this seems pretty shortsighted for any small business contacts that don’t have their own domain yet.

FYI below are the resources I’ve already read through and nothing really clarifies my exact situation/problems.

Create and use association labels
Set up your import files
Import records and activities
Automatically create and associate companies with contacts
Create and edit properties
Deduplicate records in HubSpot
Organize, delete, and export properties

importing contacts with companies no domain name 2020 ticket thread

can’t add a new company without a domain 2018 ticket thread

Thanks so much again for any of your guidance and insights ~~ warm regards from SoCal

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@GranderGestures when you don’t have a unique identifier (i.e. the company domain for companies) multi-object import isn’t ideal.

I would recommend importing the companies first (only one per “company” by removing duplicates from your column in the spreadsheet) - once you have all of the companies imported you can then export the company name and record ID.

Now you have a unique identifier for the company with the record ID, so you can do a VLOOKUP to add the record ID to your contact spreadsheet instead of company name.

This will let you import the contacts and assocaite them to the right company.

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Thank you so much for your response @Jnix284, I’m really grateful for your time.

I’ve done a test import and successfully imported 17 Companies into Hubspot. I’ve also exported these companies and got 17 unique Record IDs.

*I don’t know what a VLOOKUP is or what it does (I’m not an excel wiz). I read online a lil but but am not clear on how I would use it in my case.

I opened the exported spreadsheet with Company Names and Record IDs from Hubspot and sorted the companies alphabetically. I then went to my original import spreadsheet and sorted those Companies alphabetically, and created a new column for Record ID. I copy/pasted in the Record IDs and saved as a new import spreadsheet, went back to HubSpot, and did another import - this time 1) creating new Contacts only and associating them with existing Companies via the Record ID, and 2) “update Company only” (no create new, but hoping to associate the newly created Contact) - and it WORKED!!!

SO jazzed about this.

Pls let me know if I’ve done the process appropriately enough and I may try doing a much larger batch import with all my contacts now using this method. Thanks in advance for letting me know any watchouts, or if I need to ise the VLOOKUP thingy for any reason.

Also, I had other questions in my original post that weren’t yet discussed:

  • Is there a way to import the same individual/email and have it relate/attach to multiple different Companies? (i.e. one individual that has multiple artist monikers)
  • Is there a way to import multiple individuals (each w their own email) and have it relate/attach to THE SAME Company? (i.e. multiple people in the same band)
  • Q3: Can a Contact only have one Association Label, or is there a way to import multiple? Am I just misundersanding what an association label is, and if so, can you please define it for me?
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@GranderGestures I’m glad that your test import worked!

Manually sorting them is fine if you don’t have too much data, but a VLOOKUP would allow you to check your first dataset for the company name, then check the exported dataset for a match and then you could add the record ID to your new column. It might be worth learning how to make it work.

For the other questions (I wasn’t overlooking those, only trying to tackle the main one first to make sure you could import successfully):

  • Is there a way to import the same individual/email and have it relate/attach to multiple different Companies? (i.e. one individual that has multiple artist monikers)
    • Yes, you would need one row per company, where you have the individual’s info duplicated, but the company name and record ID would be different. This is where you could also add your association label value to distinguish their roles for each company
  • Is there a way to import multiple individuals (each w their own email) and have it relate/attach to THE SAME Company? (i.e. multiple people in the same band)
    • Yes, this would be resolved by the record ID column, you would add a row per individual and as long as the record ID is the same it will add each individual and associate to the same company
  • Q3: Can a Contact only have one Association Label, or is there a way to import multiple? Am I just misundersanding what an association label is, and if so, can you please define it for me?
    • There can be more than one association label, but there is only one label per association (contact 1 < > company A would have only one label set, but contact a < > company B could have a different label set) - more on association labels here