HubSpot Ideas

catan

Control timeline activity associations to associated objects (contacts/ companies/ tickets/ deals)

Currently, according to this KB article, there are certain set rules for activity associations: 

There are a few exceptions to the above. For example, an exception is that emails sent and calls made from any object record will also be associated to the relevant contacts that were being emailed or called.

 

These rules are not very intuitive for many users. For example, see this thread https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CRM/Associating-contact-activity-to-specific-deals/m-p/308086#M1171...

 

It would be awesome if we could have a toggle that allows users to be able to toggle automatic association of all activities for the associated contact/ company, or specific associated deals/ tickets.

65 Replies
laurabren
Contributor

HubSpot team - it's clear that your customers all use objects (both standard and custom) and their related associations to one another all in unique and varying ways. The ability to at least easily automate these associations, if not to customize directly in the settings, is absolutely crucial for an enterprise solution. To default the use of company associations, for example, when you have long moved beyond B2B-only customers, is an indicator that you're expanding to enterprise-level customers before the product is ready to meet their needs.

 

I'm disappointed to continue finding examples like this throughout the platform -- we're finding more and more need for workflows & custom code actions to close these product gaps, which creates an entirely new problem of having to manage and maintain all of them. Custom objects, associations, and engagements/activities need a LOT of TLC to catch up, and many of your customers are beginning to run short on patience.

TMyers9
Member
Agree with this take wholeheartedly. Thank you laurabren.
ABuchthal
Participant

An incredibly eloquent way of putting it, couldn't agree more. 

JohnMotilla
Member

Any updates on this?

AGran
Participant

Hey,

I have tried to escalate that issue via customer success and commercially with no result.

I then whined loud on linkedin, which finally got some real attention and some email ping pong with the product manager.

In a nutshell:
They say they have placed that logic all over the code and cannot add an option to tweak that easily. For me hard to understand, but well.

The issue is on the list, but not to be expected anytime soon .

 

By chance I saw the other day that the hubspot API returned a messageID for an email. If that is becoming a feature (it is undocumented as far as I know and no reply from PM about it as well), we could build a API module to fix this whole mess.

 

regards

Alex

 

DarlaM
Participant

Hello, I agree this needs to be controlled. My use case is that I use a custom object for Partners and I want to be able to automatically have the emails and activity appear here that are associated to contacts associated to the Partner. Currently we don't have any visibility on our Partner object of activity without manually associating all of them.

laurabren
Contributor

One issue I wanted to call out regarding this information in the cited Knowledge Base article:

 

There are a few exceptions to the above. For example, an exception is that emails sent and calls made from any object record will also be associated to the relevant contacts that were being emailed or called.

This is not accurate if users are on the mobile app. Sales users actually aren't able to send an email from a deal at all on the (iOS) mobile app -- the option is simply not there. If they send an email to a contact who has an associated deal, the sales user cannot even edit the defaulted assocations from the email (as they can in the web app) to include the deal.

BMilaszkiewicz
Contributor

Meeting logged to all Deals associated with a Contact When a Meeting is booked with a Contact, it shows up on every Deal record associated with that Contact regardless of relevance - this is a huge limitation with Hubspot. For a professional services company, we have meetings with Contacts associated with many Deals and meetings with no relation to the Deal itself, but all are logged on the Deal record. As a result, bad data is captured in our CRM. Currently the only workaround is to manually disassociate each Meeting from the Deal, which is very cumbersome and time consuming. This makes it very difficult for leadership to trust the data in our system and we are better off not using the meeting log functionality at all. With the Hubspot extension, we are able to log a email to a specific deal - this should work for Calendar invites / meetings as well.

JLundquist38
Member

Adding my voice to the chorus of voices!

 

Each and every automatic association should have custimization. Leave all connections on as the standard and enable users to adjust what is automatically associated to what as best fits their business!

 

For my use having Emails to contacts automatically associated to the deal is suboptimal and just adds clutter!

MKnoedgen
Contributor

This toggle is exactly what we need! It's completely pointless to associate an email to a deal if you're talking something completely different with that person. Also it gets confusing if you're working on multiple deals at the same time with one and the same contact. Please give us this toggle so we can set the default state to "no association" for deals.

TMyers9
Member

Agreed, the auto assiciation feature **bleep**. While yu can dis-associate manually, often many don't realize this or are trying to get on to the next task and skip this step. Frustrating. Does anyone know if Hubspot actually reads any of this?

MKnoedgen
Contributor

Yes they do read this and things get implemented. However they clearly focus on upvotings when deciding on new features.

AGran
Participant
I have been in touch with senior product management regarding this a couple
of months ago. She said they are working on it and had even a few
screen/feature mocks at hand.
JLundquist38
Member

This was my resolution. -- Activities -- Email Log & Track Tab -- Apply Default Log setting for all users -- Toggle as needed.

 

Cheers.

 

JLundquist38_0-1689085063238.png

 

TBurchett
Member

@JLundquist38, I'm a little confused here. Will you explain how this change impacted your team and where?

JLundquist38
Member

Sure thing. We were experiencing emails being automatically logged to all potential associations if the email extension/plug in was installed.

 

One email to a person/contact associated to a company would end up in the activity feed of the company along with every associated deal and ticket. Very cluttery and essentially made the activity feed useless.

 

By going to...Settings > Activities > Email Logging & Tracking and diving into the options I detailed before, I was able to make the email logging "opt-in" rather than automatic. I also made the default associations limited to the only the person/contact being emailed. All other HubSpot objects would have to be selected by the user, thusly eliminating our clutter problem.

 

Hope this helps!

TBurchett
Member

Huh okay interesting. 

 

Is "default associations limited to the only the contact being emailed" the setting right below where it says "existing contacts"? If a different setting elsewhere, wouldn't that setting alone fix the clutter problem?

 

We have everyone in our org use the external email provider for communication and Hubspot for tracking. Thus this opt in/out setting wouldn't change any of our users settings, as everyone would (or should) continue the tracking.

Roeland_RS
Participant

"it will be automatically associated with the company’s five most recent associated open deals"

 

It's a good thing I only mentally facepalmed when I  read this or I would have broken my nose. 

 

We are about to finish implementing Hubspot and start using it and I tried to find out how activity associations work when I read this. Need to be able to decide yourself what to automatically associate and what needs manually association - preferably through workflows so you can set filters. Including for Custom Objects. 


Really the logic here escapes me. 

SHinojosa3
Contributor

Posting here to stay updated on this topic. We need to have the ability to set our own default on whether timeline activities are added to deal records.

LindaMunetrix
Participant

Yes.  This would be extremely helpful when attempting to update a record or associate previous activity with a new record.