HubSpot Ideas

rickm

Primary Contact Company Property

We frequently need to get in touch with the primary contact at one of our customers. In HubSpot, there is no way to identify who this is among the many contacts we have in HS for that organization.

 

Even HubSpot recognizes the importance of this for your own use, as our Account & Billing page includes a required drop-down field for HubSpot primary point of contact.  Ironic, huh?

 

Please add a new Company field type, which would allow us to pick from a list of contacts at that Company. This could either be a dedicated Point of Contact field or perhaps just a more generic field that lets you pick from a list of contacts (I'd probably do the latter).

 

 

HubSpot Updates
November 05, 2021 12:04 PM

hey all, appreciate your questions/comments on this. Replying to a few comments at once:

 

@reycepeda: I agree with you on sort order. We're researching/discussing that internally now, unsure what the next step will be but it's active discussion.

 

@MichaelC: (If I understand your question correctly) you'll need to actively switch to using the new v4 endpoint to take advantage of these association types via API. We're intentionally leaving v3 as-is, to prevent any implementations from breaking with this new functionality.

 

@elise1: awesome! Can't wait for your feedback. I read every comment in this Community thread (along with many others) but can't always reply.

 

@CrunchedAdmin: as in parent/child companies? If so - yes! That's exactly where we want to go in the future. Going to take some time but I'm looking forward to it.

 

@BrianSkov_WUD: a contact has a primary company by default, but a company doesn't have a primary contact. To achieve that, I would make a `primary contact` association label between Contacts and Companies. We left it out because that need is not something we saw as common enough across our customer interviews.

In Beta
October 04, 2021 12:12 PM

Hi folks, support for designating the "primary contact" on a company record is now in public beta. It will involve using the new "association label" functionality released as part of a larger associations update. See all the details here, including how to opt your portal in for the beta.

 

Looking forward to your feedback, I'm confident this functionality will resolve those blockers you've been running into.

Jeff

August 12, 2021 10:38 AM

@reycepeda thanks for sharing that - something we're considering. Will definitely share this feedback with the team!

In Beta
July 26, 2021 12:28 PM

Hi all! Thanks for continuing to share your specific needs here, it's really helpful to have context.

 

Happy to share we have an associations update in private beta (coming to public beta soon) that provides support for "association labels". These can be used to identify the "point of contact" on a Company record. See the "primary contact" label applied to a contact on a company record in the screenshot below.

 

Company record with primary contactCompany record with primary contact

 

We're not quite ready to release this to public beta yet, but expect to get access later this year.

In Planning
April 10, 2020 02:58 PM

Hello HubSpot Community, 

 

Thank you as always for your continued feedback, it helps us build a great product. The ability to identify the primary contact on a company, deal, ticket, or any object is something we have been investigating on the HubSpot Product team. As a result, I'm going to move this idea into the "In Planning" stage. We'll continue to update this post as we make progress.

165 Replies
mhawkinson
Member

This would be super helpful! If there was a primary contact property for a company I could then export out the company and main contact to know who should be contacted. Our account managers try to log all information in the company view so it shows up no matter who they contact but then they have to go into a contact to see if they are the primary or not. This then only logs the interaction in the contact. A drop down primary would be amazing!

cordelia
Member

This would be great if there were a designated field in Hubspot for this and I didn't have to make my own!

MichelleFink
Contributor

This would be a hugeeeee help! I have the same problem as @mhawkinson. We have a custom property on the contact level called "Primary Contact"- yes or no and then "Accounting Contact" yes or no but when our team is looking at a company or deal they have to click into each contact associated with that company to see who to talk to. The workaround I am using right now is creating a filtered list but it is not easy to look for one company within that list. 

 

The solution should be a property on the company level that can select from the associated contacts.  Primary contact and Accounting contact would be ideal.

DonnaR
Participant

Yes! Needed indeed. Please add this feature.

slucas
Contributor

Ditto to all the above.  

We can pin a note to the company record, with a link to the primary contact's HubSpot profile, but that's not aa truly effective way to capture the data, if, for example, it needs to be exported.

kairosonic
Member

Very considerable use-case for us.  For example, being able to insert into an email the Company Token (property) for the Primary, Tech Decision Maker, Sponsor, etc *Role. would allow us to engage with better quality velocity with large orgs.

naomitaxworld
Member

Indeed, in Sales Force we can choose to have 10 features to appears on the main page, i.e. the company page, to read about the contacts.

Which is essential in making inbound and outbound sales alike.

Also very helpful in database management.

 

I am very surprised when the Company page is designed how the Contacts appear does not taken into consideration by HubSpot!

 

dwg-andy
Participant

+1 this as well. I think what may even be more flexible is if we can have a property type that is something like "contacts". This would be a dropdown field or such that would allow us to select from all contacts (of course it would be better if it filtered to ones associated with the company record).  Thus I could then name the field whatever I wanted (type of contact, or anything else) and select a contact from my HubSpot database that would then populate that field.

kagillespie
HubSpot Employee

This is a great idea! To further that original point, it would be great if there were contact/company properties that mapped to one another. So if a contact was made the primary POC, you could figure that out if you were looking at the company or contact record. An example use-case for this that I recently ran into took place in the Workflows tool.

 

I had a customer that was trying to create tasks associated with just companies to remind their sales reps to reach out if they hadn't been contacted in 45 days. Since you cannot enroll companies into workflows, they were enrolling contacts based off of company properties and creating reminder tasks. However because several contacts may be associated to any given company, several tasks were created; one for each contact associated with the target company. We only needed a single task created for the company, so t would make sense to specify a single person as the POC.

 

It would have been so much easier if we had been able to narrow the enrollment criteria of that workflow to only the primary contacts for a company.

 

smarcher18
Contributor

Has anyone in this forum built any kind of automation to identify a 'primary contact' based on certain behavior so that your team(s) do not have to physically identify a primary contact manually?

 

Also would be interesting to here folks elaborate on their solutions, too 🙂

 

@kagillespie, how did you ensure that only one task was created?

DrewEconsys
Member

I'd add that for us we need a Primary Point of Contact at the Deal level, not as much for the Company level. We deal with Government Agencies, so our business can move from one POC to another POC at the same agency depending on the deal.


This would be a really big help 

JakeJones
Participant

Being able to assign a primary contact on a deal would be a HUGE help

DuPertuis
Participant | Elite Partner

This is HUGE. WIth HubSpot's emphasis on Customer Success it's shocking that this isn't easily set. 

smarcher18
Contributor

It would also be interesting if at a glance on the company record, you could see the primary contact for the company.

CannabisBigData
Participant

+1  Definitely want this functionality for our organization as well!  Want to select primary contact & accounting contact which will dynamically link to the contact record

Neil-CoastLM
Participant

Contacts in Deal Record

We have a similar issue. I'm adding a reply so their development team might take notice. When viewing a record in Deals, we can link a contact record to it and see it in the deal record.

 

However, there is no designated column view for this. There is only the default "Primary Contact" view, and this property isn't capturing the contact record that has been linked to the deal record.

 

We would like to get the "Primary Contact" or another property to show the contact that has been linked to the deal record.

I feel like this should happen as soon as a contact record is linked to the deal record.

kloedesrosiers
Participant

I was shocked when I realized this wasn't a Hubspot feature or that there wasn't a true workaround. When we want to send an email campaign to all the point of contacts, we need to build a static list and manually add the contacts (and then update that list every time). Lots of added work.

jsimpson
Member

This would be a great help to our use of HS - the ability to have a primary contact or event within Company Properties have the ability to create a contact property - in this way you could have different primary contacts if you wish i.e. primary sales contact, primary operations contact etc.

lvcole
Participant

This would be very helpful especially for onboarding workflows!

bcook
Participant

Definitely needed! We want to be able to market specifically to the primary contact of each of our companies, so it'd be great to be able to filter for that in certain campaigns. For the time being, we are going to have to create a single line text field for Companies that we'll need to update on each store and will only be useful for a list.