Create and associate Companies with Contacts for subset of contact

[PvPHS]

Hi,

We are currently facing the challenge that this setting 'Create and associate Companies with Contacts' is creating a lot of unwanted assoiciations and company records when we receice emails from our customers. 

For example, we have a company named 'example'. The mother company is called 'Mother Example'. Example has a lot of locations like Example New York, Example Washington and Example Chicago. The domain of contacts of those locations is @example.com the domain of the mother company is @motherexample.com. If we get mails form person@example.com Hubspot creates a faulthy company called 'Example', because the domain name of the mother company is @motherexample and not @example. We can also not assign a location-specific domain, because the domains for the child company are all the same (@example) regardless of the location. So we do not know from which location this person is sending us an email. This causes a lot of disruption in our data quality. We are looking into our options.

So far I found two options.

1) turn off the automatic associations. This would create manual work for us to keep our CRM up to date, but it would help us control data quality.

2) According to my friend ChatGPT, we can create a workflow. In this workflow we can filter the trigger to only associate new contacts to a company if they are created after something like a form submission. This way we can prevent the associations happening for each mail that we get. This would help us a lot because the problem mostly arises when we get emails from current customers with a unknown domain. However, after some digging, I think ChatGPT might have lied to me and this option is not possble.

Can anyone help me out with recommendations and explain if option 2 is possible?

Thanks in afvance.

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @PvPHS,

In this scenario, I've found that the automatic association is still the best way to go. Yes, it requires clean-up, but it's easier than establishing new processes. If you have workflows, you could notify HubSpot user(s) for them to review whether the association with the company record is correct.

As far as automation goes here, there is a workflow action "Create associations" – this relies on an identifier shared by the contact and the company in a text property. This could be the the name of the company + location but would have to be an exact match. It's also not necessarily information that would be auto-populated when you receive an email.

In other words, retroactively cleaning up is probably your best option. Unless you are maintaining fields that would allow for an exact match between fields on the correct contact and company records?

Best regards

[PvPHS]

Hi @karstenkoehler,

Thanks for the reply. The problem is that we are currently working with a system in which we retroactively clean. However, this does not work for us, because of the data quality that is being damaged.

Maybe I wasn't quite clear, but the second option that I mentioned in my first post, is not so much about associating on a different property, it is more about which new contacts trigger an automatic association based on domain. In my case, if a conact gets created after a form submission, we want to trigger the automatic association, if a contact gets created after an email sent (to our service inbox), we don't want to the association to trigger and we want to do it manually. Is this scenario possible?

I think that this would greatly decrease our data quality issues.

Thanks in advance!

[karstenkoehler]

@PvPHS yes, you would simply have to use company properties (minimum: Company domain name) in your form and HubSpot will establish the association upon submission.

[PvPHS]

@karstenkoehler Thanks! You mention a company property in the form. But if someone leaves their email adress, (for example, John@Company.com), and we have a company record with the domain Company.com. Then we can also make the association based on domain right?  So we would not need a domain company property in the form.

I am quite new to Hubspot, so excuse me if these are all very beginner questions :).

[karstenkoehler]

@PvPHS not a beginner question at all – what you're mentioning does however rely on the automatic association. With the feature turned off, HubSpot wouldn't establish an association and create/update a company upon submission. (That's exactly what the turned off feature would do – for all companies.)

So while yes, technically the info is contained in the email address, you would still need the "Company domain name" field in HubSpot to force HubSpot to create/update and associate a company record.

[PvPHS]

@karstenkoehler I don't understand.

We want to use the exact functionality of 'automatic association', but we only want to use this functionality on contacts that are getting created through specific sources such as Forms. And we do not want to use this functionality for contact created with Conversation as source. 

I was hoping we could do this in a workflow, because they original association functionality is only ON or OFF, so you cannot filter on which contact creations triggers the functionality.

Is that possible?

So we have the domain as one of our company properties. If a contact gets created through a form (or another specified source) we want the automatic association to look for a company with the same domain or create one if this does not exist already in our CRM. If a contact gets created though an email sent to our service inbox, we don't want 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

@PvPHS the default feature to create and associate companies cannot be made conditional.

Association via workflow is possible, yes, via the "Create associations" workflow action, but this requires a shared value on both sides of the association within a text field.

This would however not create company records for new contacts – which could in turn be solved with the "Create record" workflow action or using company properties in HubSpot forms.

The association workflow action fails if there's nothing to associate. The record creation workflow action fails if a record with the same unique identifier (company domain name) exists already. The setup here needs to be thought through well.