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
alysams
Member

We would greatly benefit from a feature like this. We work with schools and camps majority of the time and theres tons of contacts for each account. Would be very helpful to mark who is the primary.

Dylan
HubSpot Product Team

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.

denisewright627
Member

I noticed this has been ongoing for quite some time. Is there a status update on creating a primary contact for a company yet?

cyril_chapon
Participant

@Dylan ,

 

I don't know if community can contribute to the reflexion around Features.

 

IMHO; the best of all wouldn't be to be able to "tag" a Deal <==> Contact association in Hubspot; but more like tag MULTIPLES associations with custom tags. "Main contact" is just one use-case among others; but I think the intrinsic use-case is more like "I want to characterize what a Deal <==> Contact association MEANS".

 

This is hard to achieve, but a solution could be to create a "Contact" column property type (just like Hubspot did for "User" column type. Thus, we would have the classical collection "Contacts" on a single Deal; along with some custom properties of "Contact" type right on the deal.

 

Another solution could be to be able to add custom properties on the Association itself. Just like this :
Contact(name, email, etc.) <== ContactDealAssociation(isMain ?, associatedAt, etc.)  ==> Deal (name, stage, etc.)

lucasfmsarmento
Participant

Please, make this happen, this is a total must for automation heavy operations...

 

Since it is in the 'in planning' stage, do we have a timeline on this release?

 

has anyone found useful workarounds?

 

let me know!

 

thanks!

rmitchell1
Contributor

I cannot stress the importance of not making this idea just about the primary contact for a company. There are a plethora of reasons to associate a contact to a property. Here are some examples:

 

1. primary accounts and billing contact

2. HR contact(s)

3. financial contact (s)

4. associated center of influence (person that brought you the lead)

5. Benefits manager(s)

 

It also makes sense for this functionality to allow us to link additional objects to other objects. For example, let's say you sell a product. With the new product properties, if we could link companies to product properties, we could then directly associate the manufacturer or supplier to that product that was sold. Imagine an insurance agency. They sell an insurance policy issued by an insurance carrier. If we can link companies to products, we can then associate that insurance carrier's company to the product property. That link would create endless reporting capabilities across pipelines. Please don't limit this functionality to something small and meaningless. I beg you! 

 

 

JoshHSoftBank
Participant

Any updates on this? Like already said... this is standard and required.

bob_sabra
Member | Partner

It's very strange to me that Hubspot is missing such a core concept of lead management which has a huge impact on so many levels i.e. proposas automations, ABM, contracts automation, pulling primary contact per deal data etc...

A deal always has a champion/primary contact, as part of the DMU. We need a way to identify that contact with the right relation to the deal. From a structural perspective and logical perspective, that is the right way to work on a deal. 

Eleanore
Member

This would be super useful on deal cards as well. The deal is with a company, but the bus-dev convo is with one contact, and the tech convo will be with another contact (i.e. the actual user of our product), so being able to target correspondence quickly would be great.

judyholden
Member

I totally agree.  Many of the companies we have in our database have multiple contacts but I only interact with 2 or 3.  I would like to be able to see them on the screen and not have to open a new tab every time I need to search for contacts name/email.  

benjaming
Member

Hi Everyone ! 
Any news on that project ? We desperately need to have this functionality to work on our CRM !
Our company is in the B2C travel industry and our deals usually implicate several people of the same group/family, however we need to clearly identify the main contact for each deal in order to measure correctly our statistics of sales & revenue. 
Thank you in advance for your feedback

RachelJ
Contributor

Hey there,

This would be particularly helpful at deal level as it's the individual invoices which cause problems for us.

I'd love to test this in BETA when it's available, I'm thrilled it's in development, it will save us a lot of time and reduce errors.

Many thanks,

Rachel

Mike_Eastwood
Key Advisor | Gold Partner

Hi @RachelJ 

 

We've prioritised the "Primary Contact for Deals" feature because of the number of requests we've had.

 

I confess we put the Primary Contact HubSpot Integration on the back burner because ABM (Account based Marketing) was released by HubSpot. I was worried the ABM Tool would make our integration obsolete.

 

However, thanks to some encouraging feedback and some new feature requests, we're back into the project.

 

If you'd like an update – or have any feature requests – please use this form.


Thank you

Mike

mikebrown
Contributor

Having a primary contact for deals would be nice, but I think you will find that we are all (apart from Rachel J) asking for Primary Contact for a Company. 

Lankester
Member

Any update on this? I have made a custom company field with a workflow that responds to a checkbox against a contact name, to make that person populate the custom field. Clunky, but works. Much prefer to have this built in. Any update on whether this is going into beta or not?

timcrook101
Member

Totaly agree - being able to see who the main contact directly from a company record would be hugely useful.

Mike_Eastwood
Key Advisor | Gold Partner

Hi @timcrook101 

 

If you're using Marketing Pro (or Enterprise) or Sales Pro (or Enterprise) then check out the Account Based Marketing Tools recently launched by HubSpot.

 
You can create a Target Company then you can assign Contacts within the Company a "Buying Role" e.g. Primary Contact, Technical, Accounts, etc. If you watch this HubSpot Academy Video from 1:15 to 2:15 you will see what I mean.

 

Alternatively, if you're on any HubSpot package we've created a Primary Contact HubSpot Integration to help with this challenge.

 

We've even had customers switch to our Primary Contact Integration from the HubSpot ABM Tool.

 

Please let me know what you think?

 

Mike

raffers
Participant

Yes, this will be super useful, we are also resorting to the workaround of manually creating Company Properties and manually adding the name / email.

Stanz
Participant

Hubspot Team, how is this still not implemented?

 

It's been in planning for so long and seems to be such a simple feature. We need to designate a contact as the primary contact person for both companies and for deals ASAP.

 

Please build this feature.

 

 

ArtursG
Member

It would be great if we could add a contact to a custom property - e.g. create a property called - purchasing manager, and then you can select a contact and link it to that property, so that in the company page you have quick access to your main contacts, I would personally need at least 3 contacts per company to be assigned in the sidebar - so just one primary would not be sufficient 🙂