Hi all, I FOUND A REAL SOLUTION to this. I don’t know why this is not more publicly supported, but Insycle has a data management product that is fairly inexpensive that can solve this through two main things:
1. I turn off the auto-associate, and use Insycle to manage my associations
2. I turn on the plugins, and auto-log and auto-track all emails and Contacts. When new Contacts are created by the plugin and NOT appropriately associated to any Company, I then have the job auto-delete them. The HUGE benefit here is that if my reps have a new Contact from an existing Company (great, the account penetration is growing!), it keeps them in the system. If not, or if it’s a junky free email account, it’ll delete it, unless my team associates this person to a Company that day.
The way this works is Insycle will allow you to turn off HubSpot’s auto-association (which also auto-creates Contacts, causing sprawl) and then just associate them using Insycle each evening (or every hour, if you’d rather).
And, here’s how we’re deleting the junky Contacts each night/morning that were not associated with a Company. Note that we are using Source Drilldown 1 and Source Drilldown 2 to identify which plugin or behavior created it, and those that were not automatically associated already to ensure we don’t accidentally delete good Contacts.
We’ve also put in place a secondary auto-association template that links Contacts to Companies by a second, custom field we call “school”. Feel free to check it out if this works for you:
p.s. - I am not being paid by Insycle, but I spent months fighting this issue, trying out Threads (which I am not a fan of b/c it takes away all email open/click tracking), using the email plugins, turning them off, creating alerts to identify all newly-created Companies and Contacts and removing them manually… it was a mess and took far too much of my and my team’s time. If I can save you some pain, that’s my do-good action of the day.