Strategy to group contacts coming from same company but email is free (i.e: gmail, hotmail, etc)

[GRey1]

I have a problem that is creating tone of duplicate work. We have different sources sending us contacts (leads) directly to Hubspot, just to name a few: LinkedIn forms, Facebook, Sign up on our platform, etc. Then for every lead we create a contact and a compny associated to it. We heavily use workflows and custome code to identify any coming contact where company already exists and just associated the user to this company but the problem is that the strategy of creating a compny for every contact is not really wise so if we stop doing this, how do we track user from same comapny when they have gmail.com or hotmail.com?

To sumarize:

1. If I stop creating a company per contact how do I identify the ones from same company
2. What is a best practice about contacts creation when they are mainly from free domain emails? How to group them all?
3. What is a best practice to avoid our SDRs to call contacts from same company twice or more?
   
   
   Thanks!!

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @GRey1, thanks for reaching out! These are great questions.

Like you're seeing, HubSpot deduplicates contacts by their email address and companies by their company domain name. If you're gathering mostly email addresses from free providers, not company-provided ones, you're going to have a difficult time deduplicating companies without doing so manually. And no matter what you do, you will probably have some level of manual review and merging.

I have responses to your questions below:

If I stop creating a company per contact how do I identify the ones from same company?

If you don't have a company email address that matches the company domain name to associate contacts and companies here, it's going to be a manual process. You could use the "Company name" contact property, but it would likely be a single-line text property which would be difficult to standardize. I would set a list of opt-out domains for automatic company record creation and association (more info in this HubSpot Knowledge Base article). If you set free domains in your opt-out list, you can at least keep those free domain contacts separate and then individually associate them with the respective company.

What is a best practice about contacts creation when they are mainly from free domain emails? How to group them all?

Again, this is really difficult since there's no way to automatically deduplicate the record creation for free domains. Best practice here would be manually reviewing every free domain contact that's created and associating them with the respective company/merging them with an existing contact record with a business email address. You can look into using "Company name" or a custom contact property to categorize contacts, but it's going to be tricky. If you want to limit the number of free domain emails in your CRM, you can also block free domain emails in your forms (more info in this HubSpot Knowledge Base article). That will likely decrease the number of leads you receive, but it will help you better qualify/categorize them.

What is a best practice to avoid our SDRs to call contacts from same company twice or more?

It sounds like you would need to associate all contacts with the respective company record and make sure that you and the SDRs are 100% logging every call in HubSpot. As long as you have the records tied together as needed and are keeping a record of your outreach attempts, you should be able to easily tell whether or not a particular company was contacted recently. Part of this could include evaluating all of your free domain email addresses and the contact information to see if you can find (or take an educated guess at) their business email address. Expect pushback and spam reports if you're cold contacting leads who haven't asked to hear from you though.

Hope this helps!!