HubSpot Ideas

NicoleSengers

Set Association Labels On Records via a Workflow

I would love to be able to add in the new association labels using a workflow - rather than needing to do this manually.

this would enable businesses who have contact A who makes a booking and Contacts B, C, D etc who attend a course or an event flagged as attendees. so a business knows which are valuable contacts.

 

It would also be helpful to be able to use a workflow to send different communications to clients based on their association tag.

HubSpot Updates
October 17, 2024 02:36 PM

Hi folks! 

 

If you submitted a request to join the Association Actions beta, your request has been approved (as of yesterday)! We've spent the last few months scaling our systems to ensure they can keep up with all the usage and as a result had to pause on beta additions for a bit. We'll continue to add portals who request beta access and move towards rolling this functionality out to all customers (who have at least one Pro+ hub) towards the end of the year.

 

Best,

 

Maggie

August 16, 2024 07:12 AM

Hi Everyone,

 

I want to provide an update on a few things:

  1. Thank you for all of the feature requests. We're reviewing them and will be determining what we can support later this year. I'm seeing trends in the following requests: triggering workflows based on the application of an association label, applying an association label as part of the create & associate flow and copying associations from one record to another. Please keep the feedback coming-it's helpful for us to ensure we're prioritizing the right thing.
  2. We have currently paused on adding new customers to the beta. There has been a ton of enthusiasm for these features and we're making updates to our systems to ensure that everything will continue to scale as efficiently as possible. We will resume adding additional customers within the next few weeks. No further action needed if you've already submitted a request.

Have a great weekend!

 

-Maggie

 

 

June 21, 2024 06:57 AM

@LukasK we've heard this feedback a few times and I unfortunately don't have a great answer for you at this point. It sounds like you want to create a new record, associate it to the enrolled record and then label that new association. That 100% makes sense and we'll continue looking into how to make this work but I unfortunately don't have a great solution right this minute (but everyone else please chime in if you have an inventive idea).

June 21, 2024 06:54 AM

Hi @ABeney! I would play around with the enrollment criteria. You could create a list of contacts who were incorrectly tagged and then only run the workflow on that list of contacts. That should make it so that the label is only removed from the right contacts. We'll keep listening on if we need to add further refinements for the label actions. Thanks!

In Beta
June 18, 2024 08:53 AM

Hi All!

I'm excited to announce that we have entered a public beta for the following actions:

You can opt in by going to your Product Updates section of HubSpot and looking for "New Workflow Actions for Associations." Check out this Knowledge Base article if you want to learn more. As you test out the actions, please keep the feedback coming! We'll likely expand the functionality later in the year.

 

Best,

 

Maggie

June 04, 2024 11:31 AM

Hi @MGrowth2

There's currently a beta open where you can remove and update association labels. We are planning to add in the ability to apply new labels within the next few weeks. You can request access directly in HubSpot by clicking on "product updates" and searching for the private beta referenced in the screenshot below. I will review it within a few days.

 

Best,

 

Maggie

Screenshot 2024-06-04 at 2.24.29 PM.png

Screenshot 2024-05-16 at 10.16.44 AM.png

 

In Beta
May 16, 2024 07:20 AM

Hello! 

I'm excited to announce that we've rolled out two new association based actions into a beta. In the first phase you will be able to remove or update existing labels (demo video) . Adding labels is coming next! Please look for the beta below in the product updates section of your HubSpot portal.   

Screenshot 2024-05-16 at 10.16.44 AM.png

May 07, 2024 06:39 AM

Hi All!

 

I've seen a lot of beta requests come through over the last few days. I promise to post here as soon as we're ready at which point you'll be able to request access via the product updates section of HubSpot. As a note, the first, early adopter phase of the beta will specifically include the ability to remove or update association labels (we'll be adding the ability to apply association labels and create new associations in a second phase). More to come soon.

 

Best,

 

Maggie

April 29, 2024 01:11 PM

Hi All!

There was a question about the notification no longer showing up about the new workflow actions. I promise we haven't given up! I just tweaked the name of the release and that may have hidden it from product updates. All of which is to say we're on track for a private beta in May and I promise to alert you once that beta is ready for you to opt into.

Thanks for all the enthusiasm!

-Maggie from HubSpot's product team

In Planning
March 11, 2024 06:31 AM

Hi all! 

I know that everyone on this thread is eagerly awaiting a beta. We're actively working on this functionality and if you want more information of what will likely be included in our first release, I'd recommend checking out the "In Development" notification that went out last week. You can find this by navigating to Product Updates in your HubSpot portal and looking for "New Workflow Actions to Automate Association Processes."

 

We'll provide another update when we get ready to open up a broad beta.

-Maggie (HubSpot product manager)

In Planning
January 25, 2024 06:51 AM

Hello!

I'm Maggie from HubSpot's product team. I'm excited to announce that we're actively working on the ability to manage association labels via workflow. We're hoping to have something in beta for you all to test out within the next few months. 

 

I also want to share this Knowledge Base article which outlines the ways that you can already use association labels in workflows (for things like enrollment) as it seems like there are a few questions in that space.

 

Thank you for all of your thoughtful feedback and examples! It helps us make sure that we're building the right thing 😊.

August 30, 2023 01:07 PM

Hi everyone, I don't have much in the ways of an update on this feature as we are still working through some major blockers. There is a limitation in how we find records to be associated, making it difficult to complete our set of features. We are still working hard on this problem and will have more updates along the way.

 

@04262 that feature is now live to all so it's no longer in the Beta page.

July 20, 2023 01:12 PM

@RyGuy the changes we're working through are towards the next set of features I'm referencing, for example, the Set Association Label action. Therefore there wouldn't be much if anything changed to the existing beta functionality. Definitely feel free to message me with details if you'd like.

 

@jaybaum I just met with our Associations team and discussed that hard limit. No hard decisions were made but we would like to fix that as well and could see traction in the coming months. I would recommend opening an idea on our forum so we can track progress, otherwise we'll hopefully have good news down the line

July 20, 2023 10:12 AM

@Steiger and others,

 

As it so happens, today was going to be the day I gave an update as we've made some major breakthroughs recently that we wanted to share with everyone.

 

The new Data Panel beta feature is currently going through the final weeks of "beta testing" and will soon be available to all customers. We had a rather tricky setback this past month that took our entire team time to sort out but as of this week we've sorted out all the kinks and are back to working on the followup functionality needed for a "Set Association Label" action. While I can't give an estimate (for fear of hitting another setback and dissapointing people), I can say we have a much more clear line of sight to our goal and have many engineers actively working on the solution.

 

The good news is that this next milestone will include more than just the Association Label action. We are going to have the ability to support more field types and provide finer granularity on the types of records/data that can be pulled into a Workflow.

June 20, 2023 06:39 AM

@RyGuy Thanks for pointing people in the right direction.

 

As for lack of functionality, I'm 100% with you, it leaves us wanting more as well. We're working on scaling issues at the moment to bring what we think is the full power of the feature: pull one (or more) values from any object, event, integrator object, without restrictions (within reason in terms of scale). If you have feedback or recommendations, please let us know.

May 26, 2023 06:32 AM

Sorry about the public beta link not working anymore, everyone. It looks like we had an issue with the way those betas work that prevented us from exposing the new feature in this manner.

 

For now, please use this form to gain access: https://forms.gle/d44dN9GqW1Zyqer36

In Planning
May 04, 2023 06:49 AM

Hi everyone,

 

Here's a short update from the team. Now that the [Public Beta] Data Panel with associated record data in workflows is open to the public, we've begun working on the "Set Association Labels" action that everyone in this thread has been patiently waiting for. After we complete our exploratory phase for the project, the team will be able to give a rough estimate on when we'd expect to have this ready for our beta testers. Stay tuned for more information.

March 23, 2023 06:37 AM

@jaybaum sorry, that type of work is not related to the Workflows tool so we're not able to work on that directly. However, I will pass along that piece of feedback to the relevant team and see what can be done about that.

March 21, 2023 05:45 AM

@NPW Yes, we're planning on adding support for almost every field. The Internal Email Notification is currently being worked on and should be ready in a few weeks.

 

Sorry to dissapoint about the pace of the setting of association labels, we'll continue to work hard on that and give an update once it's ready.

March 20, 2023 06:31 AM

Hi everyone,

 

As we work hard on the Data panel with associated data private beta, I wanted to give another update as there has been some confusion surrounding our current work. While we have not started on the work to automatically apply association labels using the Workflows tool, we are prepping for it. The beta I linked to in my last message refers to a feature that is NOT to apply association labels using our tool. Instead, it allows the use of associated data in fields across the app, much like the "personalization tokens" that can be inserted into many text fields. Read below for more information:

 

March 01, 2023 07:16 AM

Great news everyone, please follow along in this other thread to join the private beta of the Data panel feature:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Workflow-actions-that-can-update-properties-across-different/idc-p/713251

February 22, 2023 07:33 AM

Hi everyone,

 

A quick update based off our last update from January. We had issues come up that delayed us by a few weeks but should now be back on track. To remind everyone, the beta we're working on is a preliminary feature that will allow users to use a lot more HubSpot/external data across many Workflow fields. This is going to be one of our larger project releases in a while and once the (hopefully short) beta period on that is done, we'll then be able to start on the beta for the Associations work everyone in this thread is interested in.

 

So to reiterate, the beta that's going to go live soon is not directly for Associations work, but is indirectly related and required for us to start that work.

 

Making promises on when it'll be ready can only end poorly so instead we can give an update on the work and what our current blockers are:

 

- The initial beta to allow users to use data from many different sources went through the first round of testing and while we found a few major bugs, we've since patched most of them. Once we do a second round of testing, we'll start the private beta (and will invite anyone in this thread to join)

- The work needed for what everyone in this thread is looking for, a way to automate association/association labels, requires the previous feature to go live. Once that's live and stable, the new data sources availability would make it possible for our teams to build out a feature that could use this data for the purposes of manipulating associations

 

Once the first bullet point is done (and only then) we'll be able to move on the Association work.

 

As always, we'll try to update this thread and any related threads as we make progress!

January 19, 2023 06:12 AM

January update:

 

Hi everyone,

 

The team has been hard at work for the past few weeks as we finish up work on the beta for our Data access feature (needed for us to start work on the Associations action within Workflows). Know that we're monitoring this thread on a weekly basis (or even daily) so as soon as that beta is ready to open, I'll post a link for those that want to join. We've had positive feedback from our preliminary alpha testing so we expect the beta to go by quickly, meaning even if you don't join this beta you'll have access to the new Data feature shortly after. 

 

Depending on the amount of feedback we get during this phase we'll start to form (finally) a timeline for the Association feature everyone in this thread has been asking for.

 

Thanks for all the support and stay tuned.

December 14, 2022 06:00 AM

Hi everyone,

 

I wanted to give an end of year update as we've been getting lots of requests for this feature. As we stand, our original estimate is still on track. The related features we needed to finish before starting on this associations request are due to be completed mid January. Once that goes into Beta, we'll work in parallel to both incorporate public feedback, as well build out functionality related to associations within Workflows. 

 

We'll likely post a link to the January Beta in this thread so unless we have delays, expect great news early 2023

September 26, 2022 06:15 AM

Hi @emmaboyd we're still actively working on the tangential projects that will make this one possible. We don't have a good timeline but expect to have those other projects done by the end of the year, after which we would be entirely ready to tackle this project.

August 05, 2022 05:40 AM

We (the team that builds the Workflows editor tool) have a need for this feature as well so we are building all the necessary "building block" foundational features we need to make the association action a reality. We will update this thread once we get a timeline as we still have discovery work to do before we can commit to building it. The exciting news is that the CRM's association capabilities are also growing, making this action even more valuable to build.

Being Reviewed
August 02, 2022 12:43 PM

351 Replies
JAppleton
Member

Hi - Using the update association label function you can also add associations: 

JAppleton_0-1717602738435.png

Seeing as all contacts now have the contact with primary association already added, this should be possible for all contacts

Kierstin
Contributor | Diamond Partner

All of the above! I'm creating new records on a custom object via a workflow, and checking the box to associate the company from the deal to the new custom object record, but it does not keep the association label. I added the beta for setting it, but there are 4 labels, so there's no way to set it when I can't see what it was at the deal level. 😞 Hoping we can figure out a way with custom coded workflows. 

I've had a need for pretty much everything mentioned above. 

MGrowth2
Member
Spoiler
Hi, @MaggieB. You mentioned that "creating an association" would be added soon, in the next few weeks. Could you specify a date or even month when that would occur? How would we, as users, be notified? 
jditmer0
Contributor

Yes please. Needed bad

YLoesdau
Participant

I need this "add association" function so bad, wow

jditmer0
Contributor

I am participating in the beta and don't know how to give feedback on it. Fist, thanks for working on a beta! Second, the beta does not allow you to update association labels for contacts/companies that do not already have an existing label. It can only update labels if there has already been a label assigned.

MaggieB
HubSpot Product Team

Hi All!

I'm excited to announce that we have entered a public beta for the following actions:

You can opt in by going to your Product Updates section of HubSpot and looking for "New Workflow Actions for Associations." Check out this Knowledge Base article if you want to learn more. As you test out the actions, please keep the feedback coming! We'll likely expand the functionality later in the year.

 

Best,

 

Maggie

brycekunkel
Contributor

This is great! The very first one I created was the ability to automatically associated contacts with their company based on matching domain names (I have this setting intentionally turned off because it creates companies unnecessarily).

SFoltz88
Participant

@MaggieB 

Some notes/complaints right away.

Associating requires matching values in properties on both records (although based on the dropdown, it looks like the intention is to expand this?)

The issue that I take is that this tool seems to only be capable of using text fields on both ends of the association attempt to search for matching values. The problem with this is that if I want to match a unique value, then using the text fields drastically reduces my options and increases the complexity that I have to work with. For instance, an value that is sure to be unique would be a Record ID. With this beta version, I cannot use that field. I would have to copy the record ID of all records into a separate text field.

 

Another problem is that I cannot use dropdown select fields, either. Currently we are using a third party app, Associ8. This app allows us to use any type of property field to search for and/or find values of to attempt the association. We have created dropdowns for some staff in some departments for ease of activation in associations so that labels can be applied and information can be copied or synced easily. The hope was to switch away from using Associ8, which is slow and buggy, and begin using the native capabilities of HubSpot once they were implemented.

 

Will there, at some point, be added the capability to use property types other than text fields?

Leadstreet-M
Participant | Diamond Partner

Ow nice!!
Again a step forward! 🎉😎

Thank you for the update, @MaggieB 

SemRC
Participant

Hi @MaggieB, thanks for your update. Great to see this beta, I am going to love this!

Just some feedback: It seems like adding or updating association labels via the beta "New Workflow Actions for Associations" is not working for workflows created in the ticket pipeline settings.

Deleting is possible, but the other actions aren't. However, these actions are available in the workflows created in the workflow tool.
Will everything be made available in all types of workflows please?
IanShawUnily
Member

Is this the right place to leave Beta feedback?

 

I've enrolled in the beta, and its great that you can create the associations based on matching property values.

 

What I'd really like to do is create associations based on date ranges.

 

Usecase - I have a custom object where many records can be associated with a company over time. When a new deal is created for that company, I would like to find all records of that custom object that were created within X days of the deal creation, and associate those objects with the deal as well as the company. The custom object would only be associated to a single deal at a time.

 

I think I've found a rather hacky way to do it using matching values, but its not very efficient. Native functionality would be preferred.

GBroeken
Member

It would be really helpful if we could change the line items within a deal. Is there a solution coming for this? Adding the option to select 'line item' in the 'select property to match on' field would solve this issue, correct?

 

GBroeken_0-1718876259951.png

 

elvisfromkore
Member

Hey guys, 

 

Huge thanks on this one! I've implemented in several workflows and it's working beatifully.

 

Some feedback I have on a Enterprise scenario, that I'm totally willing to share more and colaborate, is that we're trying to associate companies to custom objects that holds our product's data, but was not able to. 

 

For example, we have a custom object Apps, which is connected to Companies and Contacts thru the following association: Company > Contact > App User (Custom) > App (custom).

 

We want to display App data on both Company and Contact levels, so our teams don't have to keep navigating up and down thru these 4 objects and 4 other more. These associations are fixed, so once set, they won't need to be ever changed and that would hugely benefit the our usability and speed on geting things done company wide.

 

With that, my way strategy to match Companies and Apps was thru rolling the company ID down to app thru calculated properties, which only contains a reference for the company id, and matching that to Company>Record ID. 

Screenshot 2024-06-20 at 10.49.04 AM.png

Screenshot 2024-06-20 at 10.47.52 AM.png

 

 

The problem I'm having is that I both can't select the Calculated field App>Primary Company ID not the default Company Record ID for association.

If I were able to select these fields for association. BOOOM, magic is done!!!

 

Screenshot 2024-06-20 at 10.50.12 AM.pngScreenshot 2024-06-20 at 10.49.23 AM.pngScreenshot 2024-06-20 at 10.49.44 AM.png

 

Let me know if you have any questions, if that would be something possible for now, and how I would support it!

 

Thanks again!!

LukasK
Member

@MaggieB thanks for the update on the beta! The solution already looks super great!

 

But i am also having a problem were you maybe can support me: I am creating new records via workflows (for example Tickets from Deals for Customer Onboarding purpose) and i would like to assign the respective association label for the newly created ticket object. But given the current implementations of the workflow actions, i can not do this right?

 

The only solution i can think about right now is to create a hidden unique property on the deal (like the record id), copy this over to the newly created ticket and then use the 'Apply association labels to a record ' to match via these hidden properties.

 

Or is there a more straight forward solution?

 

 

ABeney
Participant

@MaggieB I have started testing this but you cant choose specific custom objects to remove/add association labels from. It just applies to all of them which obviously isnt ideal behaviour. For example, we track event attendance using custom objects and set labels for attend/didnt attend for each event. I have a group of people who were incorrectly tagged for one event, but when I go to remove the association label, I cant choose the event for this year, it seems it will apply to any event with that label.

Will this ability be coming in the future to be able to use the custom object properties to filter which ones it applies to? (e.g. name)

MaggieB
HubSpot Product Team

Hi @ABeney! I would play around with the enrollment criteria. You could create a list of contacts who were incorrectly tagged and then only run the workflow on that list of contacts. That should make it so that the label is only removed from the right contacts. We'll keep listening on if we need to add further refinements for the label actions. Thanks!

MaggieB
HubSpot Product Team

@LukasK we've heard this feedback a few times and I unfortunately don't have a great answer for you at this point. It sounds like you want to create a new record, associate it to the enrolled record and then label that new association. That 100% makes sense and we'll continue looking into how to make this work but I unfortunately don't have a great solution right this minute (but everyone else please chime in if you have an inventive idea).

ABeney
Participant

Hi @MaggieB - I have created the list of contacts already but if I enroll them, it will remove the attended label from any other events they are associated with as well, not just the specific one that has been tagged wrong. Any other advice?

JWienkamp
Participant

Hi @MaggieB 

First of all it's so great that his feature is finaly available! 🎉

One limitation I found so far (And not sure if it was already posted): When matching through a property I would love to use the Record ID of the property to search for. We use Tickets to bridge the gap between different deals and in order to connect them with eachother we copy the ID of the source record. In the end the ID is the safest way to get the right match. But unfortunately I can't use the Record ID in "Select a property to match on" (See following screenshot).

JWienkamp_0-1719224414405.png

 

Any reason why that's the case or is it already on the roadmap?

 

Thank you!