How can we force the company association when creating a new contact?

[Gabriel_Guigue]

Hello,

When creating a new contact, I'd like my Hubspot users to be forced to link an associated company, either by selecting an existing one or by creating one.

Is it possible, and if yes, how?

thanks a lot

-Gabriel

[willsmith]

Hi @Gabriel_Guigue 

This may not be exactly what you're looking for, however, there is a way to require the company field to be filled in when creating a contact. It is difficult to force the creation of a company record or select a specific already created company. 
You can also set HubSpot to automatically create and associate companies when new contacts are created. HubSpot does this based on the domain name. 

To require the company field be filled in: 

(This applies to Sales PRO or Enterprise and Service PRO or Enterprise)

1. In the main navigation, go to the Settings menu by clicking the gear icon in the upper right side. 

2. In the left side menu, select Contacts and Companies.

3. Select Manage to the right of "Set the properties all users in your account see when creating contacts."

 

4. In the left column, search and select (by checking) the properties you would like to appear. In the right column, adjust the order. In your case, search and select Company name. 

5. If you are a Sales PRO or Enterprise user, select Required to make the property (or properties) required. Once finished, click Save.

For more details, check this resource. 

To Set HubSpot to Auto-Create and Associate Companies with Contacts:

Here is a video explaining how to do this. 

In summary:

1. Go to Settings. (gear icon in the main navigation)

2. Select Contacts and Companies. (from the left column)

3. Select the second tab Companies. 

4. Turn the switch on. 

I hope this helps. If it does, please mark it as a solution to help the rest of the community. Thank you. 

[Gabriel_Guigue]

Thanks Will for your fast answer, but this does not solve my problem at all...

I actually want to avoid as much as possible the use of the "Company name" property because it's a free text entry and as such it creates too much duplicate values.

I much prefer the property "Associated Company" because then it's a true data relation between one company and all associated contacts.

Thanks anyway, and if anyone else has a working solution, I'm very interested! 😉 

[AdamLPW]

Hi Gabriel,

Do your contacts have a shared company email domain?  

I use the "Automatically create and associate companies with contacts" setting (see below) to automate the link with associated companies.  Works really well for me.  

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/automatically-create-and-associate-companies-with-contacts 

Is this what you were looking for?

[Gabriel_Guigue]

Thanks but unfortunately it does not solve my problem. this "Automatically create and associate companies with contacts" setting create tens of duplicate companies because it's only based on the email domain. For instance I have some duplicate companies with exactly the same company name but a different domain: fr.abcd.com and de.abcd.com where 'fr' and 'de' are both language derivations of their email addresses ...

Thanks anyway!

[JustinPerkinsC]

Yeah, I had the same problem automatically at first overtime though merging them together once it scanned the duplicates has cleaned up the majority of the DB. 

Sadly with sub-records, I think you are going to have to let the system do it, or true the users to. I don't know of a way as of this moment to force someone to attach an associated record. 

It should be possible to assign someone a task or send an email via workflow when they create a contact without an associated company though. Least to get them in the habit of doing these items might be good for muscle memory.