relating contacts to each other

[ULending]

Hi, am looking to document relationship between a loan borrower (Contact) and the referring person/real estate agent, etc (Ideally, a contact). I've seen the suggestion to use companies, or deals? Thanks for the insight. I want to have a hyperlink available to go to referring agents, etc. thanks.

[lindahouben]

I would love to see this feature. It would be helpful for us as a client of ours uses secretaries. These secretaries should be associated to certain contact, which is now not available to do so. 

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @lindahouben,

Thanks for your feedback!

If you haven't done so yet, I would encourage you to upvote the idea that @MiaSrebrnjak linked in her reply, and explain why this feature would be useful.  Our product team, who monitors the ideas forum regularly, can read your specific use case and understand why this would be a useful functionality or change. 

Thank you,

Kristen

[lindahouben]

Thanks! I did upvote that idea and explained my reason of usage. 

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi, 

I want to share two relevant resources here for visibility: 

• Product Idea: Linking two contacts for association. The Ideas forum is a place for HubSpot users to discuss feature requests with each other and the HubSpot Product Team. Please upvote this idea and share your use case in the comment section to show our product team why you would like to have this feature built.

• While associating contacts with contacts is not possible at the moment, I wanted to share this Community post where users describe another great workaround (besides creating a custom property). You could use a Company or Custom Object to manage associations between contacts.

I hope this helps!

Cheers
Mia, Community Team

[MaxGuenther]

Seriously, what's the matter about this? Is it that difficult to integrate a simple connection between two data sets? How can it be possible to connect e.g. companies to contacts, which are two different types of data, and simultaneously being not able to match data of the same type? 

[drufner]

Yes, it is actually quite amazing/shocking that this is not a part of HubSpot. I could make an argument - and a strong one I believe - that not being able to do so makes a mockery of sorts concerning how personal and human inbound marketing is. The marketing may be just that, but the CRM married to it is simply not at this point. I have little negative to say about HubSpot, but this is one glaring item. 

[ACintron]

Insightly CRM, which I used prior to switching, has relationships available in the basic version.  I didn't use it as much then but am in need now🙄.  

[GMarcilhacy]

Hi all and @PamCotton 

Do you know if this element of contact relationship will be made available soon ? 

Thank you very much in advance

Gregoire

[MiaSrebrnjak]

Hi @GMarcilhacy,

Thank you for your comment! I'm also a member of the Community team and I'll be glad to share more information on this matter. It's currently not possible to associate contacts between each other in the same way you would associate a company to a contact. 

Therefore the best way to manage relationships between contacts would still be to create a custom property or to associate them to a different CRM object: a Company, Deal or a Ticket. Users of our Enterprise Hubs are also able to create Custom Objects, you can read more about this here. 

You might also be interested in the recent improvements to associations our product team is working on - you'll find more information in this Knowledge Base article. 

Cheers
Mia, Community Team

[RLam]

SAD

[drufner]

Though not so elegant a solution as when Hubspot finally fixes this, I have a suggested patch:

1. Create a contact note. (in that note in plain text list the relationships

2. Associate that note with other searchable 'Records' (aka Contacts). 

3. Pin that note to the top of a contact page.

OUTSTANDING QUESTIONS: Does this pin the note to the top in everyone's CRM display?

OUTSTANDING ISSUE: While folks can thus be related record-to-record, I still don't see how you can use that relation to toggle between contacts.

[PamCotton]

Hello @drufner 

I would highly recommend you to please post this idea at our ideas forum (here).

Our product team, who monitors the forum regularly, can read your specific use case and understand why this would be a useful functionality or change. It also helps other customers facing the same issue to advocate for its implementation on your behalf by upvoting on the thread as well.

Kindly,

Pam

[drufner]

Yes, Yes, and Yes. We are a non-profit using Hubspot afresh. The inbound process emphasizes the 'human' side of things. 'Realted' individuals is a VERY 'human' attribute that should be accounted for! Furthermore, with all the other wizardry that goes on under the Hubspot hood, this seems like it should be VERY easy to implement. 

[pingland222]

We also have the same issue. We have contacts that have dynamic relationships and it's imperative that we show the relationship. I feel like this should be a simple request. I know Virtuous does it. 

Ideally you can select the contact that is related and what that relationship is (partner, employee, secretary, marketing manager, co-owner, etc). These fields should be customisable. 

[mrijnders78]

We have the same problem. Maximizer CRM has 'Related Entries'. A good way to link contacts to other contacts or to other companies. We need this badly in HubSpot.

[jc]

We have the same problem. I can't see how this problem is marked as solved. It isn't. A text field isn't a relationship.

[Colorscene]

This is a simple yet fundamental request that should be implemented. I still use insightly for another business and Associations between contacts, Associations between companies and Associating contacts to multiple companies is just that. I don't see why this is not a core part of a CRM. 

[hohmann]

We used to work with Act! and they had a tab for Relationships. We have a dozen applications for this. Couples that are in the system with both contacts, but we need to relate them somehow, artists and their agents, clients and their designers, clients and their friends or family that are also clients. This feature in Act! is really old and we used it a lot. There must be a way to implement that easily. A Hubspot representative suggested to create "relationship" deals to relate people but that seams incredibly cumbersome.

[bkinnard]

I agree with this. We also used to use ACT and used this a lot. I always hate having to give up features. 

[relabidin · Accepted solution]

Hi @ULending,

We do not have a feature that formally relates contacts to one another. However, you can create a custom contact property (of the single-line text field type) and use that to store a link from one contact to its related contact. This could be cumbersome because you would need to ensure that Contact A links to Contact B, and then Contact B links back to Contact A. If you use companies or deals to relate these contacts to one another then that would make things more simple.

Rami

HubSpot Support