Multiple companies with the same domain

[Fridrik]

I'm sure there must be an answer to this somewhere, but after searching both the knowledge base and the community without finding an answer, I'll just go ahead and ask.

My customers are schools and other educational institutions, and quite often there are several schools with the same domain. This is due to schools often using an email address provided by local, regional, or national government, and in some cases due to them being part of a much larger group of schools that all use the same domain. However, they have separate marketing budgets (which is where my company comes in) and I need to treat them as different companies in hubspot. Some smaller institutions also use gmail, or microsoft live, etc, which would cause similar issues.

What I'd like to know is, is it possible to have multiple companies with the same domain? And are there any possible issues that I should be aware of?

If I link an existing companies domain with a new company, will it be unlinked from the old company?

Also, if it's not possible to have multiple companies with the same domain, is there any good work-around for this issue?

Thankful for any help!

Fridrik

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hello @Fridrik - welcome to the Community!

In answer to your question, I believe it is possible to create companies with the same domain but what you will want to make sure you do is disable automated contact association. 

Contacts and companies are associated based on a shared domain, so this will get tricky if you have multiple companies with the same domain. Check out how this process works and how you can disable it here. 

I'd reccommend testing adding two companies with the same domain, before doing any mass import. 

I'd also reccommend checking out the parent/child company feature. In HubSpot's CRM, you have the ability to associate two companies in a parent-child relationship. To add a parent or child company to an existing company record in the CRM check out this knowledge article. 

I hope the above is of help to you, let me know how you get on with your test!

[Fridrik]

Hi!

Thank you very much for the help.

I suppose it might be better in my situation to turn off the auto association.

I'll try and see how it works. After all, I'm only dealing with roughly a thousand or so contacts in total, and on average get a few new contacts every week, so even if I would have to connect contacts and companies manually it wouldn't be that much work. 

I saw the parent/child field, but figured it might still require a different domain. But I'll have a second look at it!

Thanks for the quick response.

Fridrik

[ron_kagan]

Rather than simply associating by domain, location by form filled city on creation of contact might help with specifying child acocunts that are meaningful but not identical to the parent

[AdamLPW]

Sorry to resurrect this necro-thread, but this solution isn't ideal for me, and I was wondering if anyone in the community has any better ideas.  

Many of my customers are self-employed representatives of large networks and have "@xyz.com" email addresses.  I'd say these make up 5-10% of my overall customer-base, so I really don't want to be disabling automatic contact association.  

My recommendation would be to be able to opt individual domains out of automatic contact association, particularly domains with parent/child relationships associated with them.  

At the moment I frequently have prospective customers added to existing customers' records, etc., which is annoying and frustrating to unpick.  

[SKluge]

Same Issue here, any better solutions?  I have organizations that have 60+ locations with 20+ possible contacts at each one, all under the same domain structure.  I also have regional reps working with seperate offices so need the communications to be siloed. All the Parent/Child does is allow you to manually create a linked list of related companies.

[kevin_oboyle]

Hi all,

Not an ideal solution - but we need the flexibility to import AND update fields using a unique primary key.  The only key that Hubspot lets you use for this (based on what I know) is company domain name.    For the parent company, we populate the domain field with the actual wesbite domain.   For the child companies, we are using the primary key from our ERP system, and then adding '.com' to the end of it - then relating the companies in HS using the parent-child relationship functionality.

I'd be interested in feedback from the community on this work-around approach.

Thanks,

-Kevin   

[timfresen]

Hi Fridrik,

Another solution would be to simply modify the domain for the company. For example, I sell to companies that have multiple offices in different countries. Let's say I enter American Expres (aexp.com) to the CRM. I then name the Italy office italy.aexp.com and the US office us.aexp.com

Does this help?