HubSpot Ideas

DBowers3

Associate one contact to multiple companies

Think business consultant or sales broker - We'd like to be able to have one contact associated with multiple companies in Sales CRM.

 

379 Replies
TLüssi
Member

Dear hubspot 

 

could you tell us when this feature will be rolled out? One of my customers needs exactly this functionality and this could be the missing point to get into hs. 

 

Thank you

Tom

kpaynter
Member

I'm on the beta group using this feature. It's close. The HubSpot team is listening.

mikebrown
Contributor

Any update on this?  I'm desperate to get this functionality working.  We have multiple business consultants that contact to our customers, so we need to associate them with these Businesses.

jschroeffel
Contributor | Platinum Partner

Anyone know if I can get into the beta or who to ask here?

erwinpratama
Member

Wow this is a good ideas. With one contact, we can share it to many companies.

Regards : erwin pratama

AShingary
Member

I would also like to associate contacts with other contacts, ie: real estate agents with clients on the same deal. 

FDelaporte
Member

This feature is getting urgent for our company. Thanks for the people working on it !

LizO
Top Contributor | Elite Partner

I'm so happy this is in beta! 

New ask would be adding multiple companies to a deal record.  In our case, we manufacturer a material used in construction.  For one deal our sales team may be in contact with the end user, architect, general contractor and multiple subcontractors competing for a bid.  At the end of the day, we sell to a subcontractor but want the deal associated with the end user once delivered. We can add the employees of all the companies as contacts but have to keep removing and associating different company records as the deal progresses through the pipeline.  Adding all companies then toggling to the primary would eliminate some of the issues we have with time line entries and work flows.  

 

UPDATE: 

It appears beta has added this feature (on 9.14.21).  You can now associate multiple companies with a deal.  Thank you for listening & delivering! 

Rachel_KL
Participant

@jeffvincent  Is this beta still open? I'd love to participate. Thanks!

tkese
Member

Hi, this is a question to jeffvincent or someone from the HubSpot product team.

We have been part of this Beta for a while and until recently, everything was working according to this documentation: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/associate-multiple-companies-with-a-contact 

But recently, there was a change in Lists - suddenly the associtaions can work for all companies associated with a contact, not only Primnary company. More specifically - new filter appeared in our contact Lists calles "Contact asociated to: Company" and it is possible to select "Any company". It appears to be working in a way that the lists include all emails connected to a company, not only Primary company. This is great news and a crucial funcionality for us.

What I would like to know is the following:

1) Can we count with the fact that this functionality is gonna stay?

2) What about other functions than Lists (I mean Workflows, Cross-object reports, Personalization tokens) that worked until now only with Primary company - are they gonna work with "any company" as well? Will there be an option to automatically associate any activities on the contact’s timeline (e.g., logged emails, calls) with all associated companies, not only the Primary one?

These information are crucial for our future with HubSpot, so I'm trying to find any way how to stay more up to date with the changes and plan with this Beta. Whefe can I find these answers? I didnt get any more answers through HubSpot support - they sent link to this thread.

- Is there any other documentation to the Beta than the one article I shared above?

- Is there any other channel how to communicate about the Beta than this thread (where you react only once in a few months)?

Thanks a lot,

Tibor

mortenstaal
Participant | Platinum Partner

I second this, @tkese.

 

Thank you very writing what my thoughts are as well.

YiRui_Chua
HubSpot Employee

Hi team, raising this for a customer here.

I understand we are really at the early stage of private beta right now for this feature.

Moving forward, and hopefully in the near future, hoping that we can use API to do flexible associations too.

E.g. https://legacydocs.hubspot.com/docs/methods/crm-associations/batch-associate-objects

Thank you!

mortenstaal
Participant | Platinum Partner

Hi all, 

My client has access to the private beta for multiple companies to one contact associations and are trying to support this through their API-integration.

Is this at all possible in the current state of the product development?

They are referring to this documentation:
https://legacydocs.hubspot.com/docs/methods/crm-associations/batch-associate-objects

It works when running one association at a time, but fails when running multiple associations at a time.

Is this just a limitation at the moment or are there any workarounds that can solve this?

Best regards,
Morten

Kranholm
Member
Cool ! We have been waiting for this feature.
 
1. Can we import the associations in bulk from a CSV?
 
And already I'm dreaming about how to have multiple sister companies (that share the same domain)..
 
2. Any chance that could be part of the future flexible associations?
 
Thanks! 
LizO
Top Contributor | Elite Partner

@Kranholm

You can already do #2.  We sell to healthcare so put the Health System in 1st then all the locations where they have hospitals. We use the related companies parent/child relationship to link all hospitals (children) to the health system (parent).  Yes, you can associate multiple child (sibling) account to a contact in beta.  

 

Adding multiple company records that share the same URL takes a little more work but can be done.  If you try to import a bunch of companies with the same URL HubSpot will just merge them into one record.  You have to manually add the company records (clicking past an error message saying you are trying to make a duplicate record).  I do this with only URL and name.  Then I use a list to gather the Company ID (assigned by HubSpot) and put that on a CSV with all my other info to import.  

 

Also, the first Company record to be added to the CRM with a URL is where ALL contacts with that e-mail ending will be auto associated.  So if child company C gets added first and your team starts e-mailing with contacts at child company A on the e-mail integration (not hand entering in the CRM) then when they e-mail, the activity will log to Child company C and their contact will also associate with company C.  you can always change the association manualy and should ASAP so timelines show activity correctly.  That is why we try to make the oldest/first company record the parent (corporate).   

 

Hope this helps. 

 

maragopera
Participant

Hi. Any news on this topic since last april ? Do you know when it will be released ?

philip-cassidy
Member

Very excited to be able to leverage this! I am curious if you will be able to accomodate a scenario where a contact has different roles within 2 or more different organizations. Will we be able to show contact is Owner of Company A and CTO of Company B for example, without having to create custom fields?

bdesilva
Contributor

Would love to be part of this beta. Are you going to provide a property to define the relationship with the company? For example, I have a Client ABC, with employee contacts. Can do now. but I also have a Software Vendor contact who is the "Sales Rep" for ABC. He would have a contact relationship with ABC of "Sales Rep" and "Employee" with his employer (software vendor). And what if he's also the Project Manager on a Deal. It would be important to see in the Contacts section of a deal what their role /relationship is.

katherineladue
Contributor | Diamond Partner

Hi @jeffvincent , I hope this is the right place to ask you a question, if not please let me know! 

 

My client is getting the multiple companies on one contact beta applied in their account, and in the meantime I'm wondering.. How does this functionality work with imports? Can you import contacts and companies together and associate a contact to multiple companies in one file, would they need to be separated out into multiple different imports, or is it even possible to associate a contact with multiple companies in an import? 

 

Let me know, thank you!

ITepoot
Member

Is there a way to get into the Beta for this feature? It's pretty vital and I'm a little shocked it's only now being worked on given how popular HubSpot has become. I'm a consumer packaged goods company that works with a big distributor -- one that likely 90% of your 'grocery store brands' work with. And their structure is that there is an account rep for each supermarket chain that *only* works with that chain yet is a contact for that distributor. And this rep is the main gatekeeper for that retail chain snce the distributor is full service.

 

So when trying to manage that retail chain customer, it would make a lot of sense for us to have that 'account rep' associated with both the distributor and the grocery chains that we work with as accounts. Given that in our industry, not only this distributor but almost all work like this -- as do most super-large distributors -- it's not a novel feature. And this also applies to brokers, agents, managers, talent reps etc. in other industries I've worked in.

 

This might be a casualty of sometimes software not being developed by the people who would logically themselves use the software (i.e. sales reps selling consumer goods or working with agents and brokers) and so obvious, no-brainer features like this get missed and the threads sometimes end up with the developer asking for clarification as to why it's needed.

 

P.S., the solution of creating a child company doesn't work either of course because the retail chain doesn't belong to the distributor.