Better tools for managing & updating associated company on new contacts (avoid duplicates)
For sales, marketing and service teams.
The Problem - creating duplicates when adding new contacts because of multiple email domains.
Whenever we add new contacts to Hubspot, we end up creating duplicate companies. Many companies (especially in higher education) have multiple domains. For instance, if I add 10 contacts from the University of Washington, 5 might have UW.edu domains, 3 might have u.washington.edu domains, and 2 might have washington.edu domains. Don't ask me why they do this, but it happens all the time. So, I end up creating three company records for the University of Washington. Another example is an international company where contacts have .ca and .com email addresses.
This problem is especially frustrating when you are integrated to Salesforce and cannot "merge" companies together or use deduping because Hubspot doesn't allow it when you're integrated to SF.
The Fix(es) - Add a new option in Company management and better tools in Company views and lists.
Idea #1) There is a setting in Hubspot to turn on or off the "Create and Associate Companies with Contacts" feature. For one, this ought to be two distinct settings 1) Associate Companies with Contacts and 2) Create Companies with Contacts. That way when a new contact is added with a weird domain for an existing company, a duplicate company is not created, but rather that contact could be added to an exception list so that users can add the secondary domain to the company record and then add the contact.
Idea #2) Another idea that would make this much easier is being able to bulk associate contacts to companies and have a checkbox to automatically add secondary domains to the company record when you do. To solve the problem above I unchecked the Create and associate companies to contacts box, but that just creates a ton of new contacts without companies that have to be associated one at a time by opening the contact record and assigning a company.
100% agree. Lots of wasted time managing duplicate companies generated by this feature (but it is still an essential feature for automatic contact association when it does actually match domains)