Workflow - Associate Contact to Company?

[HubSpotMaster]

Use Case:

I have a common identifier as a contact + company property that is not related to email (the traditional way to associate contacts to companies). I am not using associate contacts and companies because the emails are different

Questions:

Is there a best practice to do this that is not manual? I do not believe workflows can associate a contact with a company but that's what I was searching for. 

Thanks in advance, 

Adam

[Bryantworks · Accepted solution]

Hey @HubSpotMaster 

I believe you are correct, I don't think there's a way to associate a contact to a company via workflows.  I believe the baseline of either manual association or association by domain is all that is offered.

You might be able to do something via Zapier with your common identifier of when that property is updated, it looks for a like company?

[ILANG]

It's also a big problem when more than 1 company has the same domain and automatic association of contacts to companies is on, thus it can associate a contact with the wrong company in the wrong country. This is problematic for big corporations. Can't believe, there is not native solution to this.

[RBozeman]

I definitely agree with this idea! It would be very useful to have association functionality in Workflows. 

Insycle (full disclosure, I work there) allows you to associate in Workflows. Insycle allows for you to associate contacts, companies, and deals, in bulk, using any field in your database as a matching field. You can also manage primary associations/labels/child-parent associations. 

Then you can add an Insycle Recipe into your HubSpot Workflows. Here's an example of what that would look like:

[kvlschaefer]

Thanks for sharing, @RBozeman! 

[RandallF]

Similar use case as above. 

We want to have new customers fill out a form to give us the financial contacts etc. While creating the contacts is relatively straightforward, associating it to the right company will require manual association? Seems like being able to say that any contacts created from an email sent can be associated to the same company, somehow. Obviously, anyone using HS consistently is accustomed to creating custom fields and building intricate workflows, but using Zapier or another app for something so fundamental to the data organization of HubSpot seems comical.

By the way, auto-association via email and/or URL is not possible with our setup.

[danhammari]

It would be great if there was a workflow that would allow me to associate a company with a contact. I am creating contacts from a HubSpot form which has the HubSpot Company ID already set in a custom field. However, HubSpot cannot leverage this field as it only looks at the email address to do its dubious domain matching. I would love to add a workflow to my HubSpot form that would take the value from my HubSpot Company ID field and use it to associate the contact with the precise company I intend. Since there currently is no such workflow option, I am using HubSpot's contact create webhook to send the HubSpot Contact ID to my external web application. My external web application will call the HubSpot Contact API to fetch my custom HubSpot Company ID property for the given HubSpot Contact ID and then fire the CRM Association API to associate the HubSpot Contact ID with the HubSpot Company ID. It would be much simpler if I could just do this internally in a HubSpot workflow. Instead, I need to piggy-back on a HubSpot webhook to my external web application and manually associate the contact and company through a couple of HubSpot API calls.

[david-cook-ome]

Danhammari - if you have an external application that does this, you might want to consider putting a small license fee and making it a SAAS product. This is a major issue with HubSpot, and there is very limited competition today from a solutions standpoint. A simple point-solution that maintains low cost should be eaten up by SMBs.

[BrianCarter]

Hey there!

For custom properties or data, I typically use the export/import feature to mass update any data. One option is that you can pull the company ID that you'd like assigned to each contact/email and copy it to all of the email addresses you have in an excel spreadsheet.

This works if you have contacts already created by exporting the list of contacts you need to assign a company to OR you can start fresh and have the contacts created upon upload.

Hope this helps!

Brian Carter

[Willson · Accepted solution]

Hi @HubSpotMaster,

Great use-case here! The option to do this via a workflow would indeed not be possible as you're attempting to work with very specific values on multiple records in your account. 

A secondary option to working with instead of the Email address is to work with the Website URL property found in a Contact Record. When this is property is filled, it can be used as a secondary unique identifier which will allow for a contact to be associated to a company, should the Website URL match the Company domain name property found in the Company Record.

In this case as an example, if I were to add myself as a contact under the address 'mwillson@gmail.com' but also pass the Website URL as 'hubspot.com', we would see my record created and the Associated Companies updated to show HubSpot - this is because the Website URL matches the value of the Company domain name. 

I hope this helps in your scenario and happy HubSpotting! 

[LCisneros]

I'm finding Hubspot very clunky, inelegant, and for most of my purposes, useless.  At this point I'm using excel to organize my contacts and assign companies.  Rediculous. 

[nikolajovanovic]

Hello @Willson ,

We've encountered one confusing use case and wanna double-check it if it's correct behavior. Let's say we have company with domain name "hubspot.com".

1.

- Option to associate contact to company via domain in settings is turned off.

- We've set properties "Email" and "Website URL" on the form.

- We submit form with params "123@gmail.com" and "hubspot.com").

- Contact is not associated to company (due to associate option being turned off).

2.

- Option to associate contact to company via domain in settings is turned on.

- We've set properties "Email" and "Website URL" on the form.

- We submit form with params "123@gmail.com" and "hubspot.com".

- Contact is associated to company (due to associate option being turned on).

3.

- Option to associate contact to company via domain in settings is turned on.

- We've set properties "Email" and "Website URL" on the form.

- We submit form with params "123@depositfix.com" and "hubspot.com".

- New company is created ("depositfix.com") and contact is associated to company with that domain, not to one with domain "hubspot.com".

Seems like contact is not being associated to existing company always, but instead it's associated to a new company that is created, based on some domains? First we thought it will work when associate option is turned off, but it doesn't. Then, even if that option is turned on, property "Website URL" doesn't override email's domain.

Can you confirm it's meant to work this way? We'd like to have only couple of companies and associate contacts to existing ones, instead of creating new companies.

Best regards,

Nikola

[Willson]

Hi @nikolajovanovic 

This is currently working as designed! The website_URL is used as a 2nd identifier should the email value not be passed (or in some cases be a generic domain such as Gmail.com)

However, if the primary identifier, in this case email, is passed we will see that the record created comes for the domain of the email i.e In your example, we see the company 'depositfix.com' created.

I hope this helps!

[grahamfcr]

I can't understand why a workflow to create companies from contacts is not available in HubSpot. We are limited to domain name. 

Lets say for example we collect leads through a typeform form. Typeform syncs with hubspot and we can create a contact and a deal. But, not a company unless the auto associate with domain name is on. 

The only workaround is to do a list import and create companies after the fact. 

[rachelbjordan]

This is true...but really, give Insycle a try - https://blog.insycle.com/hubspot-contact-company-associations. They've solved this and a bunch of other Hubspot data monster problems in very simple, effective ways. 

Here's another one...you can't merge duplicate companies in HS when HS is set to sync with Salesforce. But, with Insycle, you can.

[mwille64]

I find it ridiculous that for such a simple and absolute required function one must add the minimum cost of Euro 480/pa to the already considerable subscription cost of Hubspot.

This limitation in the way contacts are linked to companies makes Hubspot almost unusable. In matter of fact, coming week our sales representative at Hubspot will get a good piece of our mind.

[rachelbjordan]

Hi. I'm trying to figure out this very thing. I see where I can turn on the option to automatically associate a contact to a company based on email and URL, but not a way to ensure a contact is associated to a company by URL but not email.

Or...is it a workflow that does this?

Most of our contacts are volunteers whose email addresses will never match the company URL. But the company URL does get populated at the contact level eventually.

[rachelbjordan]

Success!!!! Insycle does this. It's not perfect, but it's way better than not being able to do this at all. And their help staff is excellent if you get stuck.

https://blog.insycle.com/hubspot-contact-company-associations

[Bryantworks · Accepted solution]

Hey @HubSpotMaster 

I believe you are correct, I don't think there's a way to associate a contact to a company via workflows.  I believe the baseline of either manual association or association by domain is all that is offered.

You might be able to do something via Zapier with your common identifier of when that property is updated, it looks for a like company?

[KDupont]

Hi Chris,

Do you have any experience with this? I have tried to do that but I cant make it work. I have a field on a the contact which contains a custom ID of a company.. the id is also in a custom field on the company. not the standard ID field. 

Here in the last sted do you know if I have to make my custom id field on account a searchable field for it to work?