Making associated companies the parent companies

[LenB813]

I imported my first batch of contacts, and it created the companies for them based on domain, but it assigned the comapny as an associated company and not as a parent company.  Can I re-assign them so it properly reflects under company name, not associated company? 

[roisinkirby · Accepted solution]

Hey @LenB813 this is the CRM working as designed.

Parent company  is a company property that applies to the parent company of a company e.g. you could have a company record for Disney and make that the parent company of Marvel.

Associated company is a contact property that applies to an employee of a company you have recorded in the CRM.

...does this make sense? @kcooper I'll loop you in here, how best do you use these properties?

[roisinkirby · Accepted solution]

Hey @LenB813 this is the CRM working as designed.

Parent company  is a company property that applies to the parent company of a company e.g. you could have a company record for Disney and make that the parent company of Marvel.

Associated company is a contact property that applies to an employee of a company you have recorded in the CRM.

...does this make sense? @kcooper I'll loop you in here, how best do you use these properties?

[kcooper · Accepted solution]

As Ro said, your CRM is working as expected - but I hear you!

Associated Company is a relationship between a Contact Record and a Company Record, and Company name is a text field on the Contact Record - the two are completely independent of each other.

It sounds like you want them to be one and the same - and there is a way to do that!

Create a workflow that enrolls all contacts (I do that by selecting the enrolment criteria "Create date is known") that copies the Company property Name to the Contact record property Company name. This would mean that a Contact Record whose Associated Company was Disney would also have the value "Disney" in the Company name field. 

The only hiccup you will run into is if a Contact Record ever has a different Associated Company (say Contact X moved from Disney to Apple) you would have to manually populate the Company name field with "Apple" as the Contact Record won't be re-enrolled in your workflow...but that won't happen too often, and this piece of automation you put in place will save you a TON of time, make everyone using your HubSpot happy, and help keep your data accuracy up. 

Did I hit the nail on the head, or completely miss the point?