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).

 

 

Mises à jour HubSpot
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.

Statut mis à jour : 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!

Statut mis à jour : 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.

Statut mis à jour : 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 Commentaires
HubSpotMaster
Conseiller clé | Partenaire solutions Diamond

Any updates here @Dylan ?

 

@Mike_Eastwood Sent you a note, awesome to see you and your company have made a way to do this. 

Alex-Decisions
Membre

Any update on this???

arthurhalevy
Participant

This is a very needed feature. The lack of this functionality forces the user to basically use static lists for just about any email merge. If I wish to send an email only to comapany owners/ managers, all associated contacts (including the janitor, if he or she was ever emailed) will receive the confidential info. Not very smart.

Alex-Decisions
Membre

Arthur, something we discussed with our team yesterday was using the "Buyer Role" tags as a Primary Contact. This would also allow you to have more than one primary contact if wanted, which is a good thing.

robertagp
Membre

Any update on this? Linking the primary contact to a company would be of great help. Thanks

RachelJ
Contributeur

If the Buyer role could be at deal level too, this would save us a lot of hassle, we frequently deal with large companies where the buyers are different for our software and currently the process of ensuring that works smoothly is very manual.

Thanks,

Rachel

rmitchell1
Contributeur

Was just thinking about this... I know this is in planning, and buyer's roles are now a thing, but I guess you could make a custom contact property called "primary contact," with only yes and no as options.  By default, via workflow, everyone is no.  When switching a contact to yes, you can have a workflow check if that company already has a primary contact. If so, a notice goes out saying the primary contact has been changed. That could be a good work around.

 

shatton
Participant

@rmitchell1 We do something very similar to this, but even still every now and then we'll get a small handful of companies in our client base with 2 primary contacts. It's a faulty workaround that requires too much manual overwatch. I think the best workaround might be a target account buyer role. But this of course would require putting all your current clients into a target account ... which we don't quite do that way as we sell ONE thing ... a relationship at a fixed monthly fee... so there is not much more to target after someone is a client.

 

Bottom-line. Hubspot should really fix this.

aylalawlor
Membre

@rmitchell1 depending on what you are using the main contact for, there is another workaround that can be used if you need to send emails to main contacts for multiple accounts.

On each company profile we have a property "Main contact" which I set to the the email address of the main contact.  If I want to send an email to mutliple companies main contacts, I can filter out a list of the companies that includes the main contact property, then export to a spreadsheet, and then reimport the spreadsheet so that I get a contact list of just the emails in Hubspot, then I can select them and enroll in a sequence.  I haven't tested this yet, but it should work

shatton
Participant

@aylalawlor Certainly a good idea for those manual send outs. But with the automated send outs ... The closest thing I came to is a True/False (or YES/NO) property and a periodic double check to see if I can catch multiple primary contacts.

MMONNIER
Membre

Good afternoon!

 

Do you have any feedback about how to identify a primary contact for a specific company please?

Is it still in progress?

Could we know when this functionality would be available?

 

Thanks a lot,

pbmartin
Contributeur

Agreed. We need to see the primary Contact from the Deal's review team so we can provide more frequent communication during an RFP.

danax
Membre

On the right side of the company, there is a place for associated contacts and associated companies.  Adding another section here called "primary contact" where a person could search and add a contact or contacts to easily find your main contact person(s) for the company would be ideal...  Especially for big companies where you deal with a lot of people.

 

To expand on this - with most large companies, there is a specific separate contact that deals with billing - and often this is also the case for marketing.  These would be other valuble sections to provide on the right of the company to have a section that allows you to quickly locate "billing/payment contacts" and "marketing contacts."

Mike_Eastwood
Conseiller clé | Partenaire solutions Gold

Hi @danax 

 

We had a client with the exactly the same challenge (we're a HubSpot Agency based in New Zealand).

 

So, we built a Custom HubSpot Integration to set the Primary Contact and Accounts Contact.

 

I'd love to hear what you think.

 

Mike

JPedler
Participant

In addition to Primary contact, it would be nice if you could identify primary point of contact for different functions.  As HubSpot grows to include Marketing, Sales and Service it would be great if we could identify a primary point of contact to facilitate the hand off from one to the other.  For example Sales closes a deal and next step is to hand this customer off to Services so that they can begin Kickoff or Implementation - would be nice to identify on the Deal who 'their' (being Services) POC is so they can pick it up and reach out to the appropriate contact - would also help with Workflows to automate Services tickets/tasks.

SBillings
Membre

+1 to this!

YConnecteam
Membre

+1

In general we work in such a way that  a company may have mutliple type of key contacts:
Primary busienss contact
A champion on the product operating side
Potentially secondary chamions etc.
Would be great to be able to generate for a company a prperty of type contact (just like you do with hubspot users) that lets you associate the contact to the company.
That way we can easily customize things to our need which is usually so great about Hubspot 🙂

Thanks!

ACallcott
Participant

This is really valuable, not just from an ABM perspective, but also from a marketing perspective. We have multiple contacts associated to companies (from owners through to finance controllers or marketing people), so it's imperative for us to be able to segment who receives certain communications. Similarly, while we might start a deal by speaking to an employee, we require final sign-off and approval from owners or heads of the business, and we don't want to send documents to every single contact associated to a company.

 

This feels like a simple solution to implement, so can we have a timeline on delivery at all?

angela-dofriday
Membre

This is an issue for us too - we've created a custom field so we can have a mailing list of client primary (and secondary) contacts and it helps if the account manager is away and the primary person / people need to be contacted. However, the custom field doesn't interact with Hubspot in any useful way so that when we come to email a client with lots of contacts, they don't come up in the options of people to email - only the most recent people seem to show, who tend not to be the primary contact/s... To make matters even worse, when you start typing a name in to search, it pulls up people NOT associated with the company first, which is very weird, and frustrating.

 

Look forward to Hubspot introducing a fix sometime soon...

Ashleymccu
Participant

Is there an update?

The buyer role is great, but it's contact property, and I need it displayed at the company level. It would be great if there was a primary contact property in hubspot on company pages.