HubSpot Community - Real-World Relationships Between Companies, Contacts, and Locations - Page 3

MethodCall · ‎May 23, 2017

Core Premise
In a theoretically ideal/perfect CRM, the data that the CRM contains would be a perfect mirror of the relationships/events that exist/take place in the real world. That is to say, the CRM's data/structure would be abstracted from the real world as little as possible or, in the case of an idyllic CRM, would not be abstracted at all.

Of course, No CRM is ever going to be perfect for every use case (as every business's use case is going to be at least slightly different) but there is one major abstraction present that, if removed, would enable HubSpot CRM to serve the vast majority of use cases much better than it currently does or, in some cases, serve those use cases at all.

Feature Request

IMHO, HubSpot CRM needs to treat companies, contacts, and locations as three completely independent top-level objects that all have many-to-many relationships.

A company should represent an incorporated entity in the real world. In HubSpot, any company should be able to have any number of child companies and any child company should be able to have any number of parent companies. A company should be able to define any number of contacts as POCs for that company.
A contact should represent a human being in the real world. In HubSpot, any contact should be able to have any number of companies for which he is listed as a point of contact and (independently of who he is a contact for) have any number of companies defined as employing him (every contact doesn't actually work for the company/companies he reps!).
A location should represent a real-world physical place. Any location should exist as a top-level object (as opposed to being an attribute of a company). Any location should be able to define any contact(s) as POCs for that location (and any number of contacts. Any location should also be able to define any number of companies as its owners/controllers.

This would be reasonably trivial to implement from scratch (make ALL the junction tables!) but, I imagine, it will be significantly harder to modify the existing code. That said, the existing structure should map to the new structure perfectly, so it should be entirely possible to migrate existing accounts to the new structure without user input.

My Use Case

Like many other others, my business manufactures products that we wholesale to retailers. Our relationships with these retailers varies from simple (single incorporated entity/single location/single contact) to complex (multiple incorporated entities/multiple locations/multiple contacts) and, right now, there is no practical way to implement my business's sales operations in HubSpot CRM.
(I am aware of the Parent Company/Child Company "workaround". That workaround does not provide the functionality my business needs.)

As an example, my business sells product to an LLC that has four retail locations around Texas. We have a single point of contact (the LLC's owner) that we go through to get product into three of those stores. Each of those three stores also have a store manager that we talk to for setting up in-store events. For the fourth store, we go through the store manager for sales and in-store events. If I was going to try to implement that in HubSpot CRM, my sales people would have to check all five of those companies for communication history every time we want to interact with this one LLC and there's no way for me to make crystal clear what person they should be contacting. That's bonkers and, more importantly, far too messy for day to day use. We just aren't going to do that. My sales guys are fantastic...but that workflow is not reliable enough for me to use it for my business. This isn't even an uncommon use case for my business. Off the top of my head, I have at least ten companies that are set up like this.

Bonus Value-Add

Simpler use cases don't really even need "companies". A lot of small business really only deal in locations and contacts, like a residential landscaping company or an independent residential snow removal service might, this new structure would work fantastically for that use case, as well.

Bonus suggestion
When implementing this new structure, please consider that any of these top-level objects could have their own unique properties. Companies, Contacts, and Locations could ALL have their own websites, phone numbers, etcetera regardless of their relationships.

BLins · ‎May 11, 2021

This thread started in 2018. Is this really not resolved. I have worked for multiple companies in different industries and have always had customers with more than one location. There has got to be a way to do this. Saleforce and Sugar CRM have it nailed.

DHirshleifer · ‎May 27, 2021

HubSpot Support Specialist posting on behalf of a customer who has a significant need for the ability to identify multiple locations for individual companies and have those locations be associated to contacts and deals, as the current offering of child/parent company relationships doesn't meet the basic needs of their use case. The customer specifically said, "a CRM is a data repository and If I cannot enter data (location 2-x) what good is the repository?"

Thank you!

NaturaHQ · ‎May 28, 2021

One of our core consumers are multi-tenant property managers, who oversee multiple facilities, with multiple contracts, but are the primary contact for all.

We struggle to maintain this data relationship with the current structure.

The only viable option seems to be creating a custom object, call it 'Sites', where multiple contacts and/or companies (+contracts) can be associated. This requires an enterprise upgrade. Make it better/easier HubSpot.

BSchultz7 · ‎May 28, 2021

This is our EXACT requirement as well NaturaHQ! We need this capability to make proper use of Hubspot.

MHorn · ‎Jul 2, 2021

HubSpot will never be an enterprise level CRM without this feature. I used Salesforce for many years with other companies and thought HubSpot had most of its functionality. Unfortunately, this is not the case and it is a big problem for us, as we have multiple clients with a number of locations (10+), with different contacts. Without it, we will have to look at moving to Salesforce. This should be high on your list of priorities to fix.

DGriesing · ‎Jul 23, 2021

Status update on this request? In "Planning since May 2020" per the Hubspot post beneath the original comment. Child/Parent does not provide data or function that I need.

MarkoVienna · ‎Aug 5, 2021

Billing addresses sometimes differ from office location addresses. So this would help!

RHobenshield · ‎Sep 21, 2021

@Dylanhas any progress been made on this?

We have a customer with over 100 individual locations who all roll up to one overall buyer but each individual site has a need for training, contact, maintenance, deliveries, onboarding you name it - I don't want my CS team calling someone in New York at 7pm when its 4pm at the HQ. Having only one location available means that I have to create a huge number of individual companies when really - its all the same firm, just different physical addresses.

EmilyKirkland3 · ‎Oct 4, 2021

Also checking in to see if there has been any progress with this? We are relatively new to HubSpot and I am in the process of sorting out all of our client data - including a number of multi-location accounts and this feature would be SO helpful!!

frnkr · ‎Oct 7, 2021

I really hope this is going to be available in Professional tier too and not for Enterprise only. Thanks.

@Dylan any schedule on this and could you share a bit more what kind of feat you are implementing? 🙂

TThornely · ‎Oct 22, 2021

Hi @Dylan ,

I can tell multiple users are anxiously awatiting an update on this feature that has been in planning on Hubspot side for well over a year now? Any insights to the roadmap for a release?

MRebakBA · ‎Nov 16, 2021

Absolutely needed. It seems if they crack this then essentially we would be allowed to create junction objects. Again, another win for Hubspot slowly but surely gaining 'mee too' functionality to the likes of Salesforce. Nice.

MarianMLC · ‎Dec 8, 2021

Same, absolute need for us. Apparently Dylan from Hubspot is now working on other topics so likely won't follow-up on this thread. But would highly appreciate having the PM now in charge giving us an update on that functionnality.

jzeesman · ‎Dec 14, 2021

As someone who is meticulous about making sure our clients' properties and data structures are set up in a way to make things future-proof, as well as flexible to implement new properties/systems as needed, I'm blown away that HubSpot—an otherwise great platform—appears to have not considered this.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love HubSpot and have been a partner for 4-5 years now. To give them the credit they deserve, they've come a long way since I first used the system, and they do listen to their community, but I'm genuinely baffled as to how could this not have come up at all as a major pain point since HubSpot's inception? I agree with OP that having location data detached from the company as its own object would be a much more flexible way to decouple it from the company itself.

Like the others who have posted here, again and again, I've set up databases for clients who have this very issue that, currently, HubSpot really isn't equipped to deal with. Of course, there is the parent-child company workaround, but—again, as many others have stated—doesn't really work. Without a 3rd party integration, being unable to more quickly define parent-child company relations (i.e. importing a CSV file), it becomes tedious, time-consuming, and potentially not worth the effort if a client has thousands of company entries, which is the opposite of what HubSpot aims to do: keep you organized and save you time. Apologies if I got a bit off-topic.

A realistic progress update, no matter how far away it is from being implemented, would be greatly appreciated. As you can see, this is clearly a feature that is important to so many of HubSpot's clients/partners—not just the ones who posted here but also those who turn away from HubSpot because of this—and implementing it would be a monumental step to bringing HubSpot into the upper echelon. There's no need to sugar coat things with unrealistic dates—just look at the AAA gaming industry to see how that turns out—we just want to know more than just, "It's 'In Planning'" and that the severity of this issue is being addressed (even slowly). While I can't imagine how many other things came before this suggestion or otherwise have a higher priority, I think we all just want to be reassured that this feature hasn't been lost as just another "thing on the to-do list."

JenniferErena · ‎Jan 13, 2022

Tossing myself into this idea! Would be fantastic to have locations in stead of multiple separate companies.

Perhaps just a Sites List with an option for site name and addresses that you can assign to a contact. You can list site name as "HQ, Main, Co-location, Franchise" whatever. icing on the cake, other boxes to tic for - primary - default shipping - default billing - default mailing - time zone

MarianMLC · ‎Jan 14, 2022

@All, after investing that point with Hubspot, it appears there is now the possibility of doing just that.

In fact, instead of just adding "locations" as a new object available for everyone (just like contact and company), they now propose to create any sort of custom objects. So you can create any object, with any sort of relationships (with contacts, companies, deals etc.)

I've been experimenting with it, and created an object called "Site". And indeed it works exactly as I wished it would, and I believe as anyone here would. I can associate different contacts, companies and deals to those sites, I have custom fields for them (to gather specific information we need on those locations etc).
Great! But there is a catch, the custom object functionnality is ONLY available for enterprise level customers. So in order to solve what appears like a basic need not being currently adressed by Hubspot, there are currently no other option than paying a hefty price to solve it (I guess it depends how you look at it, but we're still a small business and that's pretty hard on us).

Hubspot is by far the most expensive online tool we're using. I like it, but I'm certainly disapointed in their way of locking out such functionnalities beyond such steep paywalls. 😕

MHorn · ‎Jan 14, 2022

@MarianMLC Thanks for investigating and discovering that it is possible to create site locations in custom objects. I agree: it is a shame that something that should be a basic functionality requires an Enterprise level subscription. We're a small security business with a HS Pro account and have commercial and residential customers with multiple site locations. I've been working around it with the Parent/Child associations on the commercial side (no fix yet for the residential other than mentioning it in the Notes or creating new fields for a second address), but it gets cumbersome. The multi-association capability that HubSpot recently introduced has helped in that I can now associate our main company contact with multiple locations, but it would be nice to have all of the information in the same record. There are many things I love about HubSpot, but the struggle I've had with trying to configure the CRM for the information we need to access isn't one of them.

JenniferErena · ‎Jan 14, 2022

@MarianMLC and @MHorn

@MarianMLC , like I have done several time, I got excited when I saw your post. But the story always ends the same. @jzeesman , there are many things to really like about HubSpot, but my enthusiasm has faded. I, too, am at the end of my patience with @hubspot when it comes to creating what should be basic features for all, but they are ONLY for Enterprise. For every issue I have come across, this has been the answer. With no indication of concern for the PRO users. I wish I could poll all the active community users and understand the ratio or PRO to Enterprise. Why participate in community, investigate, provide feedback and ideas all for nothing? I did ask and was told business that are PRO make up the majority of customers, yet they have a prime directive to go Enterprise. We are NOT going to upgrade to Enterprise. We cannot afford it. We will find another solution.

Parent/Child is fine for Franchises under different management. But who wants 10 locations all built as separate companies? That is ridiculous and a nightmare to manage.

jeffvincent · ‎Mar 3, 2022

Hi all! Thanks as always for submitting ideas and providing additional use case context. Can't tell you how important that is to us building the product.

There's a lot in this request, but several things have shipped since the original post that make me think we should mark this "delivered".

Custom objects - customers on an Enterprise tier can now define their own "Location" object. Or "Plot". Or "Building". Whatever makes sense for your business. We continue to ship functionality to make sure custom objects have the same support across the platform as our standard contact, company, deal, and ticket objects.
Updated associations and association labels - shipped into beta in Q3 2021, this functionality means multiple companies on a contact, deal, and ticket are now supported. It also includes the ability to define "labels", which can be used to describe the relationship for any record pairs (ex: label the relationship between a contact and company as "advisor", or mark the "decision maker" contact on a deal. Read more here.

At this time, we do not plan to support removing the Company object from the CRM. I encourage folks to spin up a new community issue if that functionality (the ability to remove standard objects completely) is needed.

Thanks all,

jeff

Chelrich · ‎Aug 7, 2022

I see that this has been marked as delivered, but the solution does not solve the problem at all. The idea of associations is fine; however, the associations seem to require different domains. Many companies have multiple divisions with different addresses and employees associated with those divisions, and it seems to be impossible to track this in Hubspot, which is mindblowing and, I would think, a dealbreaker for a lot of people.

HubSpot Ideas

Real-World Relationships Between Companies, Contacts, and Locations