It should be possible to define a label when associating a object. Possibly through a button that would appear next to "Preview" when you hover above the association card. This label would be displayed in the card when listing the associations (as the "Child company" today).
For example in a deal I would associate multiple contacts then click on each association and add a label to the association such as "Primary Contact", "Decision Maker", "Delivery contact", "Partner"...
As an additional configuration setting the admin could set these labels as string or enumeration for each association type
As a further refinement the admin could set some enumeration items to be unique so that setting it on one association removes it from others.
This simple label would solve many of the issues I have seen in the forums such as the primary contact example or the personna that is not the same from one deal to another when working with large companies.
For companies you could use labels such as "Competitor", "Incumbent" or "Supplier" then build targeted marketing lists to focus on known weaknesses of competing products or use filtered reports to gather and analyse market information.
@ybn this would solve a LOT of reporting and organizational issues for me too! They recently rolled out a beta for associating multiple companies to a single contact, which DOES include exactly the labels you described. I hope they just add that labeling function to the other record types, for me having labels for contacts associated to deals (ie. payor, influencer, etc.) would be huge.
Here are two things that would be nice to add to Associations Labels currently in beta:
1- Associations label between records of the same object (i.e. companies to companies) 2- Allow association label to custom objects (i.e Contact <------Owner-----> Car)
