We want to treat every location at a company as a seperate branch with seperate contacts working at each location.
We’re importing 677 companies from ZoomInfo, many of which have multiple branches across the UK. Our aim is to treat each branch as a separate company in HubSpot, with only the relevant local contacts associated to each branch, so we can target each location separately.
The issue we’re facing is that ZoomInfo data comes in at parent company level, so contacts are being associated with one company rather than split into their correct local branches. This doesn’t work for us because if one location becomes a customer (e.g Manchester), the whole company becomes a customer. This means a contact at the London branch who is not (yet) a customer, would no longer be a prospect lead and would not be a part of our MQL/SQL segments. It then also creates the risk of a contact who isn’t a customer, recieving customer communications.
We’d love guidance on:
Best practice for structuring this in HubSpot
Whether this can be automated during import or via workflows
How to reliably map contacts to the correct branch using location data
Any advice or examples would be really appreciated. Thanks.
Hi @Hollybishop! This sounds like a complex and delicate procedure. I’ll share some insights into how HubSpot works, but I haven’t done something on the scale you’re describing, so I hope others will chime in with a more experienced perspective.
Regarding structuring this in HubSpot -- you’re definitely going to want to rely on parent-child relationships for companies. These relationships can be setup during import, so I’d recommend familiarizing yourself with that process to save yourself the trouble of doing them all manually.
That will get the company records structured correctly, but if the data you have doesn’t already tell you which branch an employee belongs to, it won’t help much with getting contacts associated with the right branch. Assuming the contacts all have accurate location data, there’s likely some spreadsheet magic you can do to get contacts on the right rows with their branches, and then you could import contacts and companies from a single file. I think that’s probably going to be the safest, least error-prone way to get the data into HubSpot initially.
You mentioned automating this through workflows -- it would be great if you could find a way to do this so that when contacts get added in the future (through form submissions or sales email conversations or phone calls or whatever) they would get associated to the right branch, but I’m not entirely confident there’s a reliable way to do that. There is a workflow action to create associations based on matching properties, but the action only supports single-property matching. So you could create a workflow that associates newly created contacts to a company with a matching city property (for example), but if you have two different companies that both have branches in Manchester, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether the contact would get associated with the right one. Someone who is cleverer than me at workflows would need to help you sort through that. There might be a way to get there with branching logic or something similar, but I’m not sure how.
I work on a tool that handles this: Merge | FutureSearch . You feed it your contacts export and your branches list, tell it to match on location/city, and it figures out “Manchester, UK” should map to “Acme Corp - Manchester Office.” The output is your contacts with the correct branch company ID filled in, ready for import.
As KyleJepson (HubSpot Employee) noted, creating parent–child company relationships is the foundation for handling multi-branch companies in HubSpot. HubSpot workflows alone can associate records based on matching properties, but they only support single-property matching. When multiple companies share the same city, domain, or country, automated association becomes non-deterministic and can attach contacts to the wrong branch.
The safest approach is to handle branch-level company and contact associations before importing into HubSpot:
1. Maintain a master database where each branch is a unique company record.
2. Define explicit parent–child relationships for the parent company and its branches.
3. Pre-align contacts to the exact branch using a branch identifier, exact company name, or other unique mapping.
4. Flag any inconsistent naming or missing branch info during preparation for review.
This ensures that future automation, segmentation, and lifecycle stage management work reliably, and avoids misclassifying leads or customers. Once the data is clean, HubSpot (or other systems like Salesforce) can store and enforce these relationships, but they cannot reliably infer them from messy raw data.
Drafted with AI assistance, reviewed and validated by me.