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.

[AdamAllcock]

@jeffvincent @adimare Are there any updates on this?

[Alley-Samantha]

This is a great feature and we currently started to use it a few months ago. 

Currently, we use it to label "Former Employees" of a company. We like to keep seeing at a high level the communication we have with a single account. 

Additionally, though we have different contacts who work with different companies and organizations and when we email them we want to make sure that we are emailing them at the appropriate email address. 

See Idea I posted here -https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Assign-A-Contacts-Secondary-Emails-to-Different-Compa...

We offer educational content that is valuable for an individual as well as a company. Many of our contacts represent different orgs or just like to vie our content for personal growth.

Example 1: John Smith works for "A-Corp" and also has his own business "Startup Company". We would like to assign John@a-corp.com to A-Corp and John@startup.com to "Startup Company"

Example 2: John Smith has a work email & a personal email. Assign Johns work email to company account and his personal to another account

[EliteEx]

this is a fantastic addition, but we'd really like to add more than 10 labels for Contact & Deal specifically. Ideally we'd like this to be unlimited (at least in the hundreds).

Can we please get this in place ASAP! 

Thanks, 

[coop]

@EliteEx 100% agree with this. 10 is way too few labels to get much use out this feature. Some of our CRM goals are stalling on this. TY!

[AAltenburg]

@adimare any idea if association labels for custom objects is on the radar?

[adimare]

Thanks for the comments everyone!

• @AdamAllcock - there is not currently an update on this, I will let you know once I get an update on it.
• @EliteEx and @coop - I have passed along your feedback looking for more labels.
• @AAltenburg - support for custom objects is currently being worked on! The exact release date is TBD, but I will comment here once that is available. 

[nivrad]

Does the Salesforce sync now support "Contacts to Multiple Accounts"?

[StephenW]

Is it possible to use this feature to create an association between two contacts?  We are a B2C organisation and quite commonly two separate contacts may exist for the one household and therefore for practical purposes be the same 'customer'

[LEllison]

@adimare  Any update on when we'll be able to set associate labels via Workflow Automations?  I'd like my automation that creates a ticket, to be able to set the association at the same time. This would greatly help with future workflows that update specific Ticket's Stages.

If you know of a better way to help our automation differentiate which ticket we want it to be updating it would be greatly appreciated. Each Deal has at least 3 tickets in different pipelines. I don't see a fool-proof way to make sure it only updates one Ticket and not the others. Below is what we have been recommended to do but it still doesn't read safe to me with the "of the associated tickets Labeled All Tickets".

[adimare]

Hi everyone! I wanted to share that you can now use association labels in custom reports. cc @diensty @JEpstein1 @Huti @SComeau 
Instructions here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/associations-enhancements-beta#use-association-labels-in-cus... 

The team is currently working on support for custom objects and deleting labels, so I will let you all know once those are available! As for the other requests, I don't have any additional updates at this time, but will let you know once I hear more from the product team.

 

[adimare]

Hello, update for you all! Some new features are being rolled out to the beta.

Please note: These features are currently live to 50% of the beta portals, with plans to roll out to all in the next few days. If you don't see it in your account just yet, you may just have to wait a few more days. I'll keep you updated if anything changes!

• Custom object support: you can now associate multiple companies to a custom object record, set association labels, and use them in tools like lists, workflows, and reports.
• Deleting labels: you can now delete your custom association labels. Instructions here.

You can find instructions for these features and others in the beta knowledge base article: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/associations-enhancements-beta 

cc @Afterglow @PlyWood @daniloguerra @AAltenburg 

[PlyWood]

Thanks @adimare! Looking in our portal I can see where I can create new associations, but the existing custom object to company association doesn't appear in the list. Is that expected for preexisting associations?

[jeffvincent]

Hey @PlyWood, don't have specifics on your portal but if it's related to the issue I expect it is, we'll be rolling out a fix for that early next week. Thanks for the heads up, and hang tight! #beta 

[LWhiting]

With this Beta, can I associate a Company to a Company? 

We need to link companies to "affiliates", they are not a parent/child, but have a different type of relationship. 

This will help sales target the correct accounts with similar affiliates.

[NNestel]

Hi @adimare 
 we are seeing a bug when importing a file with custom objects and association labels according to the documentation.  what happens is that every record gets associated with all of the labels, rather than each record as specified in the label column. 

The result is that each of these 4 records will have the following labels 

Meeting, Registered, Attended

[THammer]

Will it be possible to increase the number of custom association labels between object pairs from 10 when the feature moves out of beta?

[adimare]

Thanks for flagging @NNestel ! I reached out to the product team and turns out they were already working on fixing this - it is now resolved. If you're still running into trouble, please reach out to HubSpot Support or your Customer Success Manager. (They'll be a bit quicker to help than myself here)

Hi @THammer - this is not currently planned but I will let you know if anything changes.

[KaraBarnes]

Hey guys! My post here is getting some traction, seems like a lot of other users would find value in same-object associations - @adimare @jeffvincent is there any update on the likelihood of this being planned soon? Thanks!

[adimare]

Hi everyone! For future updates and information about the roll out, please refer to this new community blog post: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Releases-and-Updates/Heads-Up-CRM-Associations-Improvements-Coming-.... 

[Helli]

Would be great to allow to use the labels in workflows as initial trigger.

Example 1: if a label is set or changed, some workflow can be started

Example 2: if a label is set or removed at a company, contact, etc. a workflow can be started...

[PlyWood]

@HelliNot to say its the ideal solution, but you could create a list (or lists) to say that association x is known and then use that to trigger a workflow. Hope that helps!

[Helli]

The multible associations are great. An improvement in general for associations is to make it easier to find the right association in tasks or Outlook. Example: when we want to associate a company to a deal and we are searching for a certain company it is not possibe to identify the right company if there are several companies with identical company names (but maybe diffrent towns). We would prefer to also search via other criterias such as town, address, etc.

Mabye there are also other solutions which would make it easier to associate the right company.Ffor example if there is more information shown (town, address, etc.) during "mouseover".

This is in general a good feature for all associations you have to search for.

[Helli]

Multible Associations are great. Would be good if there is a chance to sort the associated objects (for exmple in the sidebar) in different views depending on criteria (for example by "Newest" or by property, etc.).

[AGrishaver]

@adimareThanks for this update 🙂 For better or worse, you guys have opened up a pandora's box of requests for associations between different object types, and... Multiple associations thereof.

Scenario 1:

My company works with a Company, and this Company offers multiple products or services. So we want to associate these products or services with this company.

Scenario 2:

We work with a client (or a "Contact" of type "Client") who uses the products or services of a given Company. So we want to associate these products or services (and, by extension, the Company) with any given Client.

I imagine the above scenarios could be accomplished IF one could create or import Custom [product and/or service] Objects AND associate multiple Custom Objects with Contacts and/or Companies.

Might there be a way to use HS' existing Product object to accomplish these goals? For example, associate a company (that isn't MY company) with a product, and then associate that product with a Contact? Doesn't appear that you can do that now, but after 4/18...?

In the related post you linked to, @jSwope mentions:

On April 18th, 2022, HubSpot customers will be able to:

[lots of other stuff, and...]

Enterprise only:

• Define custom object association schema through the UI (previously required an API call). 
• Create and use association labels with custom objects, in addition to standard objects.

Regarding above, it's not clear to me whether you will support MULTIPLE associations between custom objects and other objects (e.g. Companies, Contacts).

Important caveat: NOT a Hubspot expert. AM a Hubspot novice.

Thoughts? Advice? Hatemail? Bueller?

Thank you, and I'm sorry...

[AdamAllcock]

@adimare we still don't have primary targets in workflows from Company to Deal. Ie if I trigger on the company level, I only want to copy a property from a company to any deal that has the company as its primary company. Currently I can only target all deals, or a label, NOT only primary company/deals.

[adimare]

Hey @AGrishaver , thanks for your comment! Always love a good Ferris Bueller reference. Some thoughts:
1. As you said, we have the Products object whose Line items can be associated with deals, which can then be associated to the other objects like companies. If you're concerned about the client's products getting mixed with your own, then maybe a custom object that covers the other company's products would be better. I recommend talking this over with your Customer Success Manager since they're the experts for strategy like this.
2. For your custom object idea, I can confirm that custom objects can be associated to multiple companies, contacts, deals, tickets, and you can import and associate custom objects to other objects. This has been possible for a while with contacts, deals, and tickets, and is now possible for companies if you're already ungated to the beta. April 18th is just the day that all Enterprise accounts will gain access to that.

For your specific use case, I'm also not an expert or the best person to solve for you. As I mentioned above, if you're interested in figuring out the best way to navigate your scenarios I recommend reaching out to your Customer Success Team/Manager! If you're not sure who that team or person is, you can ask support: https://help.hubspot.com/ 

Also if you have other questions about the beta, that new post would be the best place to ask since this one is a bit outdated now. https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Releases-and-Updates/Heads-Up-CRM-Associations-Improvements-Coming-... 

[adimare]

Hi @AdamAllcock - we hear your feedback and the product team is assessing and working on this. I don't have a definite timeline for you but will let you know. I recommend following along on the new post since that's where the most up to date information will live: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Releases-and-Updates/Heads-Up-CRM-Associations-Improvements-Coming-... 

[Jenny26]

I'm excited to see this roll out. We're creating our custom associations. I noticed, though, that association labels are not a column choice in the views. This would be very helpful -especially as we have some companies with 20+ contacts. Our reps could use a way to quickly find their primary or billing or  IT, ( or whatever label) contact when looking in table view.

[AdamAllcock]

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Community-Blog/HubSpot-Associations-New-and-Improved/bc-p/6... Looks like this was fixed - would have been good to have gotten a notification or update in here!

[MBustos4]

Hello!

We have all our contacts' associated labels in our database, AirTable (things like new client, referred by a friend, referred by an ambassador, etc). Is it possible to integrate this function into Hubspot's association labels so they stay updated? That way we don't have to import the labels, because then new clients/contacts won't be automatically updated.

[JustCall_Tech]

How to get the latest tickets associated with the contact or any object using hubspot api v3 or latest version of hubspot association api. The api is returniung the tickets in ascending order only and not giving any options to sort the tickets based on created date.