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).

 

 

Atualizações da 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.

Status atualizado para: 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!

Status atualizado para: 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.

Status atualizado para: 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 Comentários
MichelleFink
Colaborador(a)

I agree that if this is being worked on it may need to be a bit more robust and allow multiple "primary contacts". Preferably custom named primary contacts as someone already mentioned here. Accounting/Finance Contact(s), Client Relationship Contact, Administrative Contact, etc.

ArtursG
Membro

Yes, I see this as an absolute necessity, rather than a nice to have option, as far as chatting with some colleagues who use other CRM systems, quite a few have this option, so would make sense for Hubspot to implement this asap 🙂 

shatton
Participante

Each of our clients has a dedicated "Primary contact" And "Billing contact" we do this manually and over time we'll find 2 contacts marked "Primary contact" and we have to do digging to see what is going on. We get confused, our customers get frustrated about how we are "not listening". It's really messy.

 

We need a picker list.

Mike_Eastwood
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Ouro

Hi @shatton 

 

Years ago we asked the same question as you "why can't we use a picker list?".

 

We couldn't get a sensible answer so we coded our own HubSpot Integration.

 

Have a look at our Primary Contact HubSpot Integration.

 

Feel free to message me if you have any questions.

 

Mike

AVChrista
Colaborador(a) | Parceiro Elite

This is a great idea and would be helpful for Deals as well. We often have multiple contacts associated to a deal and once a deal is closed, typically one person "carries the torch" for the project and it would be great to be able to easily identify them.

Mike_Eastwood
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Ouro

Hi @AVChrista 

 

We've had a few people ask for Primary Contact and Account Contact on a Deal so that's our next planned feature.

 

If you'd like to know when it's ready please send me a message with your contact details.

 

Mike

shatton
Participante

@Mike_Eastwood I tried signing up for your tool and got this upon submission with my credit card info, I got an error ... any ideas?

 

error page.jpg

Mike_Eastwood
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Ouro

Hi @shatton 

 

There was a glitch in the Sign Up Process (our mistake not yours).

 

We've fixed the issue and I emailed you a link so you can pick up where you left off.

 

Thank you for letting me know.

Mike

SMartin
Membro

any updates?  marking a contact as primary seems to be a basic crm functionality.  Right now only work around is to make your own manual list to add contacts too but that does not help internal team knowledge when looking at company level.

SMartin
Membro

@Mike_Eastwood  can you add me to your list of people to share when the primary contact and deal contact is launched? Thanks!

CrunchedAdmin
Membro

This is needed. We have companies with mutliple contacts and when looking at the company overview page, it would be really nice to see quickly which one is the main contact.

 

Idea would be possibly set the contacts image to a star? Not sure if that would work for everyone but for us, the images are pretty useless. So use that space for something more important. And to take it a step further, create other quick images that represent the buyer role or other property of choice.

Lankester
Membro

FWIW, this is how I have done it as a workaround until the feature is actually implemented:

  • Make fields called Primary Contact First Name and Primary Contact Last Name and Primary Contact Email in the Company record properties
  • Make a dropdown field in the Contact record properties for "Is this the primary contact?" yes/no.

Make a workflow:

  1. Primary contact at this company is any of Yes
  2. Copy contact property First name to company property Primary contact name
  3. Copy contact property Last name to company property Primary contact last name
  4. Copy contact property Email to company property Primary contact email

If you're looking at a Contact, turn that yes/no to "yes" and it copies over.

 

A bit kludgey ... but there you go!

Mike_Eastwood
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Ouro

Hi team

 

We now have our Primary Contact HubSpot Integration working inside Deals so you can now assign the Primary Contact in a Deal, or a Company.

 

We're using the Beta ourselves and expect to launch the new feature next week.

 

More soon

Mike

 

SMartin
Membro

I am confused -so let me get this straight...years into a significant crm gap- it is still in 'planning' from an official product dev standpoint? NO hubspot change on this?  There is now a solution being posted out here somewhere BUT it seems it a paid add on integration offered by another company with a monthly subscription fee. JUST to get Hubspot to allow a primary contact on the deal and company level.   Bizarre, such a minor feature that is such a basic CRM need I do not get why a third party application should need to fix product dev gaps in a case like this.  That is not an integration that makes good sense from a support perspective on either side and sounds just messy.  sheesh, was so excited for aminute.  

shatton
Participante

@SMartin You have it exactly right! Bizaar indeed. It's because Hubspot at its core is a B2C CRM and hasn't optimized as a B2B CRM. But I really wish it would sooner than later. It's not like Hubspot cannot afford to hire 3 new developers and start throwing them at all the brain dead b2b optimized issues/ideas like this one.

SMartin
Membro

@shatton Agreed!

@Mike_Eastwood sorry no foul meant, I am glad  you made this for folks to fill this gap!   I was confused becuase at first i thought this was a product update.  I am new to my company so not  likely to win the battle to add subscriptions for what arguably should be basic product functionality yet.  Will keep this in my pocket.  I saw the free version but would easily go over the 200 and am hesitatnt to integrate third party tools or cause issues/ learning curve at my new company.  Will ponder this add on and research the implications further.  Thanks!

Mike_Eastwood
Conselheiro(a) de destaque | Parceiro Ouro

@SMartin , @shatton I agree.

 

I was shocked when we couldn't assign a Primary Contact which is why we built the integration for one of our clients.

 

At the risk of talking you out of our integration: have you seen the Account Based Marketing (ABM) features available in Marketing Pro or Sales pro? This would allow you to set up a Primary Contact, Billing Contact – whatever you need.

 

When I pointed out HubSpot's ABM features to one client they still preferred our Primary Contact Integration over the ABM features [proud smile] because it was easier to use.

 

Because we've added Primary Contacts for Deals we were looking at increasing the Free Tier "views".

 

Cheers

Mike

 

p.s. @SMartin no foul noticed, certainly no offence taken now you point it out.

 

 

aylalawlor
Membro

This would be huge for our company!

Currently I am trying to send out an email campaign to the main contact of each company that subscribes monthly.  With several hundred companies in that category, this will take me hours without another solution

MichaelC
Orientador(a) | Parceiro

I need this for API connections. Today we are able to get a batch of contacts if wanted but there is no way to know who is the primary contact in an array. 

 

A good technical solution would be for the product team to: ( @Dylan )

1. Create a contact / company property

2. Property name - similar to: "Primary contact for {{object}}" - array of object id´s. 

3. If one contact / company gets a new associated object - the system goes to that object ID - checks for associations - to other contacts / companies

4. Updates all associations except the now chosen one so that they do not contain the chosen object id. 

 

Optional:

A) Make a setting in contact settings to ask each portal if they allow more than one primary contact (bool). 
If true - stage 3 + 4 can be ignore above. 

If setting is changed by portal admin - then go to property history and look for the contact who was made primary last. (this is a messy point but still an idea). 

colinwalsh
Participante

+1 from us along with the ability to prioritize contacts in the right hand pane (by dragging and dropping the order they appear in).