How to change a Contact into a Company

[mbrasseaux1]

Is there a way to switch up a Contact into a Company?

A "Contact" was collected by an email that I sent out, but it is not a contact, it is one of our vendors.  Is there a way to simply switch it over?

EDIT:  So that same contact, when I added its company name, was automatically added to the Company side.  But previous contacts did not.  Can someone explain why/how?  Neither a search in the community posts, nor the Knowldedge Base, adequately explains this. 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @mbrasseaux1,

Contacts and companies are objects and usually associated with each other, they're not mutually exclusive. A company record stores information like like annual revenue, industry, year founded). At the same time, this company record is associated with contact records (which store contact, email and conversion information as well as web analytics history). A vendor, for example, would have both the company record and one or multiple contact records.

That's why you wouldn't convert a contact record into a company record. You could, of course, delete the record and create a separate company record if you really don't want to have vendor contact records in your system.

A better option would be to assign the Lifecycle stage "Other" and/or a separate "Vendor" Persona to these contacts. You can then suppress them from your marketing and sales process.

The automatic association that you noticed depends on your settings. This feature is explained here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/automatically-create-and-associate-companies-with-contacts

Hope this helps!

[mbrasseaux1]

That helps tremendously. Thank you!