HubSpot Ideas

DReyes815

Bulk remove association

Hello! I would love to have the option to bulk remove associations. 

 

For example, let's say that some contacts were accidentally bulk associated to the Company A but I wanted them to be in Company B. What I can do is bulk associate the contacts to Company B but I'd have to individually remove the associations to Company A. 

 

It would be great to either automate this or have a way to do this in bulk to streamline my workflow.

20 Replies
RBozeman
Participant

Hi @DReyes815,

 

I know that you can do this using the API, but that may not be intuitive and require a developer help to do so. 

 

Is this a one-time fix or is this something that you find yourself consistently doing?

 

Ryan

SMacQuaid
Member

I agree, this would be very helpful.

 

I have contacts that change companies consistently and I would love an easier way to bulk edit or delete old company association.  If I upload a list of 1900 contacts each month, and each month there are 500 contacts that have changed companies, it would be nice to be able to filter and bulk edit the primary company of those contacts. I would love to be able to use a workflow to automate this process.

(Ex. a workflow triggered by recently updated association labels which would change/update the primary company of a contact and remove that contact from past companies affiliation list.)

 

P.S. Insycle seems interesting, I will have to look into that! I still think it would be helpful to be able to do this without an integration though. 

BReynolds1
Member

This just happend to me. I imported 4000 new contacts but made the wrong company associations. I imported in the correct company associations, but then each contact now has 2 companies associated, where the Primary Company is wrong. There is no way to roll back the wrong associations AND no way to make the secondary companies the primary.

 

Good thing that I caught this the next day. I didn't want to involve our programmer to do the API, so here's what I did:

(You can only do this if you caught things early and have a way to reimport all your contact info.)

1) In Hubspot Import page, find the wrong association file that you uploaded. This will give you all the contact IDs that have the wrong associations. If not, you must have a list of all the contact IDs that have the wrong associations.

2) Create a spreadsheet with only the contact IDs in question. In the next col, use this formula to create dummy email addresses" =A2&"@dummy.com". Then double-click to fill the rest of the rows. For example, contact ID=12345 will have the email address 12345@dummy.com

3) Copy the entire spreadsheet and paste it with value. Now you have a spreadsheet with 2 cols, the contact IDs and dummy email addresses

4) Upload this back into Hubspot. This will overwrite all the contacts' email addresses with these dummy ones.

5) In Hubspot->Contacts, filter all the emails that have "dummy.com", and mass delete them.

6) Now you can start fresh and reimport your data.

 

Of course, this is a workaround and is not an ideal situation. Hubspot should really have a way to 1) remove wrong company association and 2) allow us to mass-alter the primary company with secondary company.

Not bad for an old geezer who learned to program back in '86.

BRainey
Member

Agreed. We have tickets autocreated when a docusigned agreement is completed. Every ticket then has DocuSign as the primary company and contact. This prevents us from doing a lot of automation until we manually remove DocuSign.

Courtney_Clark
Participant

Agreed. Having to manually remove the association, especially for many records, if quite tedious. I have 10 association labels so I'm having to remove one to replace with another, but before I'm able to do that, I have to remove the 67 associations manually. There has to be another way. Developers... please help with this. 

cl021
Member

Similar idea here, upvote this as well: HubSpot Community - Allow bulk editing or removal of associations via import or the native HubSpot i...

This solution would save us a lot of time and manual work. Currently, when someone in our database leaves their organization, we have to manually disassociate them. We get 100+ of these per month and it's very tedious and time-consuming.

 

It would be helpful if one of the following options existed:

  • Select all contacts in a list and have an action that disassociates all from their organization
  • An action in a workflow that could disassociate contacts from their organization.

Thank you!

Schifft
Member

Another key feature that should be integrated into workflows ASAP.

MrBean
Top Contributor

yes!! When addind associations I personally love the checkbox interface where you can add multiple objects as once. Would be nice to have this for association removal (cut down on admin work/time)

Jonno_Price
Guide | Platinum Partner

Being able to manage associations and disassociation via import and/or workflow, without having to purchase 3rd party apps would be great. 

jjones41
Contributor

I had a similar need and wrote a code to accomplish it. If your HubSpot edition allows custom code in workflows, you could use bulk associations to create the associations to Company B and then use a workflow to remove the associations to Company A. The code assumes you want to remove all associations to Company A. In my case, I wanted to remove all but 3, so I removed them all with the code and then manually added back the three I needed.

You can find the code and direction on how to use it here. So long as you have or can create a private key, you'll be able to do this no problem. It's very simple and straightforward. Hope it helps.

CPowell10
Member

Adding that this would be a great feature to have and to be able to cut off associations to deals by close date as well. We have certain contacts that are associated with multiple deals and sometimes the setting to log activity from "All Time" was selected at the time the newer deals were created so all of the newer activity from a contact populates in a prior closed deal and leaves that timeline cluttered with communications that aren't relevant.

Tnt
Participant

This is probably the most annoying part when actually trying to maintain a decent structure in HubSpot... so hopefully they can create something than enables us to bulk-delete associations. Highly annoying.

 

@jjones41 I'll look into your code and thank you so much for sharing! I'll buy you a beer one day... as long as the code isn't vicious:)

DStaat
Participant

Hey @DReyes815,

Have you tried using Associ8? It can automatically remove associations via workflow.

DStaat_1-1703094209813.png

 

 

 



I'll leave some documentation for the feature below if you want to see it in action:

- Remove Associations Automatically Using Labels 

Let me know if you have any questions!

Best,

-David Staat

LizzyH1
Member

With over 100 upvotes in the past 1.5 years, it amazes me that this hasn't been implemented. For us, our imports seem to have resulted in multiple contacts having a "primary contact" label for the same company and we want to use this label to ensure that only one contact is being emailed at a company. Identifying companies with 2+ primary contacts and removing this label is tedious and time-consuming but it seems it can't be done in a workflow. What a shame.

TErickson_OW
Participant

Would really like to see this move up on the Roadmap. I find myself needing this as well today. 

SKulkarni
Member

I simply want to remove the email associations for a particular contact. there are thousands of mails associated with this contact and I can not keep removing the association one by one. Any suggestions?

THank you in advance. 

SKulkarni_1-1709289999781.png

 

 

mph_nyc
Member

This seems like a pretty obvious one... use case: I put people on a list called "left the company" -- then a workflow sets them as non-marketing, clears lifecycle stage, etc. -- last step would be to remove the company association! 

KShoop
Member

How is this not already a thing??? You're telling me a third part can do it but HubSpot themselves can't?

LPowers
Participant

Unfortunately, our original settings included automatically associating contacts with companies and now we are reaching our maximum association limit between emails/ companies. Being a Business to Consumer model, we do not have a need to use the company feature as it was intended and need a quick fix to prevent wasteful charges. Being able to disassociate contacts from companies in bulk would allow us to do this.

TKeith
Member

With Hubspots design creating the associations automaticly as they do is wonderful. Unfortunately since Hubspot has a limitation on how these connect, we need a tool like above to remove past associations no longer required. Trying to manually go into back dated emails and selecting individual associations to remove someone is simply not practical. Defeinitely need a tool like suggested on this thread.