HubSpot Associations: New and Improved

[adimare]

Please note: as of April 18, 2022, this update is live to all accounts. The text of this post will not be updated moving forward. For up to date information about the rollout and what's included, refer to this post. For detailed product instructions, visit the Associate records and Create and use association labels Knowledge Base articles.

Do you have a contact who is an employee at one company, but an advisor for another? Are you working on a deal or ticket that involves multiple companies? Your business has its own unique relationships, and it’s time for your CRM to reflect that. 

With HubSpot’s new association improvements, you can associate multiple companies to a contact, deal, or ticket record. If you’re a Super admin in a Professional or Enterprise tier portal, you can also create association labels to describe the relationships between associated records -- and users can run lists or workflows based off of those labels.

 

What is an association? Why should I care about this update?

Associations are connections between records in HubSpot. For example, if John Doe is the owner of the company Doe’s, you should have a contact record for John Doe that is associated with a company record, Doe’s. If you’re selling a service to his company, you can associate a deal with both John’s contact record and the Doe’s company record to keep all of your interactions organized and connected across objects. Learn more about objects and records in your CRM.

Now let’s say John Doe is also an advisor to another company. Previously in HubSpot, you couldn’t associate John with that additional company, which means your CRM wasn’t truly reflecting your business. With the association enhancements, you can associate John Doe with Doe’s, and with the company he advises for. Additionally, in a Professional or Enterprise account, you can label John as the Owner for Doe’s, and an Advisor for the other company. Finally, your HubSpot CRM can tell the whole story.

 

I want the update! How do I start?

Please note: as of January 18, 2022, associations improvements are included in all newly created HubSpot accounts.

If you're in an existing HubSpot account, these new associations improvements are currently in public beta, and you can opt-in for early access. Users with Super admin permissions can go to any object settings page and click the beta modal on the bottom-right-hand side of the screen. For full instructions to opt-in and use the new association features, refer to this knowledge base article.

I’m a Super admin. What do I need to know before I opt-in?

To ensure you feel comfortable before opting-in, learn what will happen to your HubSpot account.

 

Will any data be lost or removed?

No, all of your data will remain in your account.

 

What happens to my existing associations and tools using associated records?

All of your existing associations will be maintained. For existing associated companies, a single company associated with a record will now be considered the record’s Primary associated company. The Primary company of a record will be the company shown on each index page in the Associated company column, and will be referenced in any lists, workflows, reports, or personalization tokens used in your account. Those tools will continue to function as they did when the limit was one associated company per record, now just using the Primary company. Moving forward, you can modify existing, or create new lists and workflows to use multiple associations or association labels. Once you’ve associated multiple companies to a contact, you can also change which company is primary.

If you have any concerns about your existing associations, lists, or workflows, reach out to your Customer Success Team or Manager.

Possible exception: if in the past you’ve associated multiple companies to deal or ticket records via an API workaround, any workflows you created for all associated companies will no longer work as intended. With the new associations turned on, the workflow will use the Primary company. Once opted-in, you need to manually edit your workflows to include all associated companies rather than the Primary company.

 

Can I change back if I don’t like the enhancements?

No, you are not able to opt-out once you’ve opted-in. Opting-in for the new associations means you’re gaining early access to features which will become standard in HubSpot. If you’re a current customer who is curious about these changes, we recommend reaching out to your Customer Success Team or Manager for guidance.

 

How many companies can I associate with each record if I opt-in?

The one associated company per contact, deal, or ticket record limit will be lifted. You can now associate up to 10,000 company records with any contact, deal, or ticket record in HubSpot.

 

Are association labels only for companies?

No! You can create association labels to explain the relationships between all standard CRM objects, including contacts, companies, deals, and tickets.

 

I opted in! How should I use these new associations?

The new association functionality is designed for flexibility, which means there are lots of ways to associate and label records specific to your business. That said, if you’re looking for some guidance to get started, below are possible use cases for when to associate certain records, how to label the associations, and where to use these labels in other HubSpot tools. 

 

Associate multiple companies to a contact, deal, or ticket

The following are possible scenarios where you could associate multiple companies to your records:

• A contact is an employee at one company, a former employee at another company, and an advisor to a third company. 
• A deal involves a company who will receive and purchase your service, as well as a re-seller who is selling the service on behalf of your company.
• A ticket involves a company who is having a problem with your service, as well as an agency who helps resolve their clients’ issue and communicates with your business on their behalf.
• A contact is a teacher at one school and also a parent at another school where her child attends.

Create and use association labels to define relationships between records (Professional and Enterprise only)

With the latest association improvements, you can create up to 10 labels for each object pair to describe the relationships between records. We recommend that these labels are terms that can be used often, across many records, and that do not need to be updated frequently.

The following are scenarios where association labels can help provide clarity about your records’ relationships:

• For contacts with roles at multiple companies, you might want to create Employee, Advisor, Investor, and Board member labels.
• For companies with many associated contacts, you might want to create Billing contact, Point of contact, and Decision maker labels to keep track of who to reach out to.
• For deals with multiple companies involved, you might want to create Re-seller, Purchasing company, and Agency labels.
• For tickets with multiple contacts involved, you might want to create Issue reporter and Point of contact labels.

Use association labels in lists and workflows (Professional and Enterprise only)

Once you’ve created association labels, you can use them to filter your records in lists and workflows. The association labels you create will depend on how your business operates, but the following are possible use cases.

 

Lists

• Create a contact-based list to include contacts associated with a company in a specific region, who have the label Decision maker. You can provide this list to a sales rep for that region to reach out.
• Create a contact-based list to include all contacts associated with a closed ticket with the label Point of contact. You can send them an email with a survey to ask about their experience working with your support team.
• Create a company-based list to include all companies associated with an open deal with no recent activity, and have the label Re-seller. You can reach out to those re-sellers to check in if they need help closing the deals.

Workflows

• Create a company-based workflow to automatically send a billing-related email to any associated contacts with a Billing contact label.

• Create a contact-based workflow to set a company to a target account if an associated contact with a Decision maker label fills out a sales form.

Resources

• Looking for an app that helps automate the association between records in your system? Check out operations-related apps in the HubSpot App Marketplace.
• Need more help setting up your associations or association labels? Refer to this knowledge base article for full instructions.

[daniloguerra]

Hello, @adimare ! Can we also have this to the level of contact to deal? Pleeeeeease 🙏

[adimare]

Yes! If you're a user in a Professional or Enterprise account, you can
create association labels to describe the relationship between any two
objects (contacts, companies, deals, and tickets). This includes contact to
deal associations.

[Levi]

Hello! @adimare i just want to request a functionality to set the association label based on a contact / company property via a workflow.

E.g. job title = X, set association label to X via a workflow. Is that something that is possible? 🙂 

And how and when can we delete the labels? 

[adimare]

Hi @Levi, thanks for your comment! Setting an association label via a workflow is not currently possible. This idea has been brought to the product team's attention but there is not currently a timeline in place for when that will be available. 

As for the option to delete association labels, this is currently in progress and the product team expects it will be available before the end of 2021.

[daniloguerra]

Thank you, @adimare! This is awesome! Another question, can I set/removed this label via API too?

[KaraBarnes]

Please please please can you add this functionality for company + company associations? Being able to map out competitors, partners, customers etc would be a game changer! (Like the parent/child related companies feature but with more options). This is great, thanks!! 😁

[adimare]

@daniloguerra Yes, you can create and manage association labels, as well as apply them, via API. Here is the API documentation: https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/api/crm/associations/v4

[adimare]

Hi @KaraBarnes ! The ability to associate records of the same object type, like Company > Company, is being considered but there is not a timeline in place for that currently.  Thank you for sharing the idea - we will let you know if there are any updates!

[PlyWood]

Thanks for the info on the Company --> Company associations functionality! Is there a known or estimated timeline for when Custom Objects might be pulled into the mix?

[AdamAllcock]

How can I target only the primary company when copying properties in workflows? At the moment, I can only target a specific custom label for a workflow, but not the 'primary' label. This makes the feature unusable for us as now all our workflows will trigger against all associated companies on a deal which is not what we want.

Either give me the ability to target only primary, or at least allow me to select which labels NOT to copy to.

[KaraBarnes]

Thank you @adimare for the update! To add our use case - we're trying to map out the networks of our clients on a company level - so if Client A has 3 customers we can easily market to these using our existing connection with Client A. It's something we've always managed manually in spreadsheets, so introducing this as a feature would save us so much time. Thank you!

[egrotkin]

If you opt into this beta, does it opt your entire portal (i.e.all users in that portal) into the beta or just the individual who opted-in?

[adimare]

Hi @egrotkin! If you opt-in, it will opt-in your entire account (all users), rather than just your individual user. From there, users will have access to the new association functionality depending on their user permissions. For example, users with Edit access for contacts can associate multiple companies to a contact, whereas users without Edit access will not be able to.

[adimare]

Hi @AdamAllcock ! Thank you for your feedback on this. I have shared your comment with the product team so they can evaluate moving forward!

To explain why primary does not appear in your workflow, the Primary label currently only applies to companies (e.g., a deal can have a primary company, but a company can’t have a primary deal). This means the Primary label is an option in other object-based workflows which target company properties, but not in company-based workflows. For example, if you create a deal-based workflow and choose Company as the Target property type in your Copy property action, Primary will be an option, like in the screenshot below.  

For more guidance building a workflow that can work for your specific use case, I recommend reaching out to Support or your Customer Success Manager.

[MMojsiewicz]

Hi, at INBOUND 2021 has been said that Selling should be a team effort so could you pease make it possible to track and add association Deal <-> multiple HubSpot users. Not only Sales Reps but marketin team as well, as those teams are the first to reach new contact/companies with ABM. So the end effect will be One deal - multiple owners it would be nice touch to select one of HubSpot users as Primary deal owner.

[AdamAllcock]

@adimare While it may be true there is no such thing as a primary deal, I am asking to be able to target deals associated with primary companies (ie that deal is directly related to them and not an agency or reseller), which is a thing in HubSpot. Currently, I am unable to copy fields from the primary company to the deal, and instead if would try to do this, the workflow would copy from the first (typically primary) company, and then rerun the workflow copying the fields from the secondary (often non-primary) field, overwriting it.

This now means I can't do something as simple as copy the company name from the primary company as I always used to, if I try and do any sort of multiple company -> deal associations, rendering the functionality unuseable.

[MMojsiewicz]

@AdamAllcock well, looks like HubSpot was working on it already coz they just introduced what I was refering to 
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/deals/split-deal-credit-among-users 

[AdamAllcock]

@MMojsiewicz this isn't actually what you asked for as its not one object to multiple owners, but splitting revenue across multiple reps in the forecasting tools only.

[Huti]

Is it possible to filter reports (e.g. Stages) according to the new fields (e.g. associated reseller deals)?

[mikeadams]

Does this support many-to-many relationships or what Salesforce calls a Junction Object?

[SComeau]

When will we be able to use these Associations in Reports? It looks like I can not filter a report based on the Association at this time. We really need this. Ex: I want to filter to only those Contacts with a "Partner" Association. Is this in the works? I would also love to be able to filter in list views as well.

[adimare]

@mikeadams Thanks for your question! This update currently supports one to many type relationships only, but I will pass along your comment to the product team. If you have specific questions about how this could work for your many to many use case, I recommend reaching out to your Customer Success Manager.

[adimare]

@Huti and @SComeau - thanks for your questions! Association labels are not currently supported in reports but the product team is currently planning this. They don't have an exact timeline yet but we will keep you updated!

Also @SComeau, you can filter by association labels in lists (and workflows)! The instructions are in this knowledge base article, but you can also reach out to Customer Support if you need additional help.

[Courtney_Clark]

How can I bulk import associations? I have about 500 contacts and the companies they're associated with. For example, contact Bob Smith is associated with two companies. For one he's a Manager and the other he's a Chairperson. How many I bulk import this information? Any help would be appreciated so it's not a manual process. Thanks!

[RS_4056]

We desperatly need Company - Company associations.  Especially when selling through other companies (e.g. agencies). It would be a massive game changer for us if we could filter agencies by indirect revenue / indirect sales. E.g. if the recommend us to other companies.

[KaraBarnes]

@RS_4056 I've made an idea here if you can upvote it 🙂 hopefully it gets seen to faster by the development team. https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Create-associations-between-the-same-object-company-t...

[EEnglish3]

Thanks for the update @adimare! It would also be helpful if we could create associations as properties with a 'Lookup (contacts)' field type option that would allow us to select an existing contact. 

Right now, there's no Hubspot field type that's compatible with the Salesforce 'Lookup (contact)' field type. So, for those of us using the Salesforce integration, if we need to map an associated contact from Salesforce, like a billing contact, the only way to do this is with a Single Line Text field, and Single Line Text doesn't link any of the objects together.

That being said, while a 'Lookup (contact)' field type would be benificial for Salesforce integration users, I think it would be super helpful for all users. I've seen a few ideas submitted about this already - here's one I've upvoted specifically.

[SMcCann2]

Is it on the roadmap to be able to exclude certain association labels when filtering a list? For example, one of the suggested use cases above is "Former employee" but there's no way to exclude former employees from a given list. It also seems a bit limited that we'd have to build out a Company list to be able to reference the Contact labels; functionally, we would want to be able to filter out any contacts who are labeled as a "Former employee" to a company meeting our list criteria. 

Also, will association labels be available as a column we can view when looking at contacts/companies so we can see at a glance what those relationships are? Right now you can only see it on the association card, so if there are 47 contacts associated with a company and one of them is a former employee, you won't see that unless it's one of the 5 contact cards previewing; once you view all the contacts, that information is only visible if you click into or preview the contact and scroll down to the associated company card.

[RebeccaMudler]

Good Morning - before I opted into the associations functionality, there was a video by Kyle reviewing how it all works. Where can I find that video to share with my HubSpot implementation team? I looked in the HubSpot Academy and could not find it there or anywhere in the Knowledge Base article. 

[adimare]

Thank you all for your questions and suggestions! I have passed along these comments to the product team so they know what you all are hoping to see for the future of this update. Of your ideas, a few are currently in the works: 

•  @Courtney_Clark - The ability to import or bulk add association labels is currently being worked on but is not available at this stage of the BETA. We will let you know when this functionality is available. 
• Same object associations are also being assessed. I know many of you are looking for this, and I recommend upvoting this Ideas Forum post started by @KaraBarnes to bring more attention to it!

[adimare]

@RebeccaMudler - here's a link to the opt-in video! Let me know if you have any issues.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1U_Pomdydi5GVz1CFAvJo32Es3FRR2lD9/view 

[RebeccaMudler]

@adimare - Thank you very much! 🙂

[AdamAllcock]

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Community-Blog/HubSpot-Associations-New-and-Improved/bc-p/5... guessing this isn't getting looked at?

[adimare]

Hi @AdamAllcock ! I passed along that comment to the product team, but at this time it is not currently planned. I'll send a note again to the team to make sure they're familiar with your use case and how it may affect other users as well. I will let you know if there is work being done with this as the beta progresses.

[AdamAllcock]

Thanks @adimare. The main issue with this is it not only makes multiple associations non-functional for our use case, but dangerously broken. If someone links one deal to two companies, workflows between the deal and two companies will fight with no resolution as you can't filter the workflows to say which link to look at (or ignore).

Ie one deal, two companies, a deal-level field called 'Company Name'. What is the company name that will get passed? Currently, it's literally random and depends on which of the companies triggers last.

[SThompson7]

Do you know when this will Go Live?

[DanielCENTURY]

Adding onto @AdamAllcock 's points, how does this affect lifecycle syncing? 

Would having a Won deal sync ALL attached company lifecycles to Customer, or only the primary?

Would having any deal at all, mark all attached companies as Opportunity or only primary?

[KaraBarnes]

Thanks  @adimare for the update! 😄 Absolutely delighted this is being assessed, it would be such a game-changer for us. Just to repeat for anyone here who's missed it - here's the idea Create associations between the same object (company to company, contact to contact, deal to deal) 

[jeffvincent]

👋 hey all, I'm the product manager for this update. Really appreciate your interest in this, and good to see your comments on some functionality that could be improved. Worth noting: when @adimare mentions "sharing that with the product team", that really does happen.

• @AdamAllcock we're discussing this case with the automation team. It's an oversight on my part, we'll figure out how to address it.
• @SThompson7 we're not quite ready to set a go live date, still some gaps to get closed up. There will be plenty of heads up ahead of a full rollout.
• @DanielCENTURY the primary company on the deal is the only one affected for lifecycle syncing.
• @KaraBarnes I really appreciate your enthusiasm for same object associations (company:company etc). As @adimare mentioned, we're evaluating what it would take to support this. So far, I can tell you it will be a very large project, but I recognize how important it is.
• @SMcCann2 "exclude" for filters was a major performance issue. We're not sure if that's going to be possible and when. Association labels in index pages will likely be a thing, unsure how it will work but I think the problem you're describing needs to be solved.

Thanks again for your comments and feedback. We're far from done with this work.

jeff

[KaraBarnes]

Hey @jeffvincent ooh that is exciting 🙂 great to know that it's in the mix. The more I use HubSpot, the more scenarios I come across where this could really help us out. I'll keep an eye out for updates!

[daniloguerra]

Hello @adimare and @jeffvincent we are now going to use the advanced association labels to address some major needs in our integration to our backend in the next release. However, I have a major blocker:

we are not able to create more than 10 labels and we have to add 25 labels to cover all our scenarios. Can you please help us extend this limit for us? On top of that, if you are not able to extend this during the BETA, can you do it after the BETA? If so, when the BETA period ends?

Also, do we have any estimation of when we will be able to delete labels?

Thanks a lot!

Danilo.

[mvdbree]

@jeffvincent 

Hi Jeff, great work on this feature!

I had a brief conversation with Support about an issue we ran into our ERP integration through API's, the rep suggested I also post it here.

We have a custom integration that pulls all Deals and associated records from Hubspot to our ERP using the V3 API. After opting in to the beta, this integration began throwing duplicate record errors while processing Deals, even those without a multiple association.

We tracked the issue to the V3 API now spitting out 2 ID's for a Deal with one company:

As all the regular functionality defaults to the Primary association, this extra ID in the V3 API appears redundant and might throw a spanner in the works for other customers as well.

Of course, I understand that to make full use of the new features we'll have to update our API calls to the new V4 API, but I would expect that current functionality would remain the same and only return the primary association.

Was this intentional? If so, I reckon it would be worth adding this to the knowledge base article or the V3 API documentation.

[JEpstein1]

@adimare @jeffvincent Thanks for your work on this! Quick question for you. I see how we are able to create lists for contacts and companies based on labels. I'm wondering if it's possible to create a filter for deals as well. I'm hoping to be able to use this feature to track partner-referred deals by adding the partner as an additional associated company using an object label. From reading through the comments I can see that doing this filtering/ trying to do this in reports is not currently supported. Any way to isolate deals with a Partner label associated?

[csconnor]

Exciting to see this - this is one reason we don't use HS like we could. We can't associate deals easily with companies...will this allow us to associate a deal with a company from within the Deals page? I would love to be able to select multiple deals then associate them with a company. As it is now, we have to pick them one at a time and associate them manually. Thank you!

[adimare]

• Hi @daniloguerra! As of right now, I'm not aware of any plans to extend the limit on labels, but will let you know if the product team tells me otherwise. As for deleting labels, this is planned to be ready by the end of this year! I will post in this thread once it is ready.

• Hi @JEpstein1! You're correct that deals don't have the option for lists, and it's not yet possible to filter by association labels on index pages either. I recognize that the following suggestions are not ideal, so I will let you know when filtering by association labels is in the works. For now some options I can think of:
  
  • Filter on the deals index page based on Associated company - is equal to Partner name. This will filter deals where at least one of a deal's associated companies is the partner company. So in this case, no label to clarify partner, but still a view of all deals the partner is involved in.
  • Create a deal-based workflow that enrolls deals when their associated company has the partner label, with the action to set a custom property value for those deals. You could then filter by that property value in the deals index page. This would create an extra custom property for you to manage, but could be cleared and deleted once filtering labels is available.
• Hi @csconnor! Bulk associating is not currently supported. I will comment in the thread when I know more about the progress on this! 

[adimare]

You can now import to bulk associate companies to records, and to set association labels! Instructions here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/associations-enhancements-beta#import-to-set-company-associa...

@Courtney_Clark @csconnor 

[ck2018]

If you’re looking for additional ways to associate records in bulk and automatically, Insycle is an app in the marketplace that complements and augments this new association feature and other issues related to data management.

Re questions in the thread, using Insycle you can:

• Set an association label based on a contact / company property via a workflow @Levi
• Associate deals, custom objects, parent/child companies, multiple companies per contact and apply any association label @daniloguerra
• Remove or add associations @daniloguerra
• Import association and labels using property names, for example, by matching “Company Name” in the CSV to a Company in HubSpot @Courtney_Clark
• Bulk associate @csconnor

In addition you can also:

• Associate records using multiple fields, for example, Company Name AND Country.
• Append or subtract labels from existing associations.
• Preview changes before they go live with a detailed CSV report. Run association in "Preview Mode” to simulate and test the process and data changes before any updates are made in HubSpot.
• Associate when the underlying data is inconsistent using exact, similar (fuzzy), and partial matching. Fine-tune rules to ignore top-level domains and sub-domains, formatting, spaces, text like "https://", common terms like "Inc" or "Incorporated", and more. 
• Manage parent-child companies and create account hierarchies.
• Analyze millions of records for associations in seconds on-demand.
• Automate associations and alerts using date-based schedules or event-based triggers directly from HubSpot Workflows.

Here is a video and help article about how to add or remove multiple associations and labels in bulk and automatically. 

[adimare]

Update on reporting on association labels - this is now on target to be available in public beta during Q1 of 2022.

Thanks for your patience as the beta progresses, we'll let you know once this is ready!

[Afterglow]

Any idea when this will make it to custom objects? Thanks.

[diensty]

thanks a lot for this update! It is a really useful feature. Here are two additional ideas:

Filter deals by association

it would be great if users could create a filter by secondary associations for deals.

For example: show all deals where companyXY is associated with the association-label-YZ

Filter Data by association in reports

we would like to filter data in reports according to associations.  So for example, show the deals closed won in the last six months where the companyXY is associated via the labelYZ.