How do We Get Around the Limitation of only having one Primary Company associated with Contacts?

[TKaney]

Hello Community,

<<<LIST BUILDING & WORKFLOW RELATED>>>

We are looking into a Copper / CRM, HubSpot, and Internal Processes mistmatch in trying to send emails based on dynamic critera for ACTIVE LIST BUILDING. Those emails then need to display specific company personalization token data. We recently had an issue with sending that resolved in an unexpected way.

Context:

As a company we use Copper CRM. In it we might have one person as a main Contact / Primary Contact for several Companies. That Contact uses the same email address for all associated Companies. (My assumption is this is the catalyst for the issue). Each of those Companies hold specific custom fields and data that we use for email communications. We have a set of HubSpot emails that recap their performance on our advertising platform on which they have profile listing pages for the Companies' businesses. That data get pushed into HubSpot in temporary fields from Copper via Zapier. When we send, we have Active Lists built based on certain criteria. Then we display the data as personalization tokens for each company in each of their emails sent.

Issue:

We were recently alerted to a strange / undesired result by a customer. They forwarded us an email that had 0s in all of their data on performance. Those were data fields that were input in the email as Personalization Tokens. We checked and those were all input correctly. We checked that Company in Copper and those fields were correct also - there were 0s across the board. However, we noticed that Contact was associated with 4 (four) companies. We then checked our list building criteria. It confirmed that when it checked, the Contact associated had a Company that met that criteria, so it added them to the email list to send to. However, the company that got the email was the wrong Company! It sent the email instead to the Primary Company listed under the Contact's profile AND it used that Company's token data instead of the known, triggering associated Company's data.

Reminder / note: this Contact is the primary contact for several companies (additicion treatment centers) with us and uses the same Contact email address for each. 

Question:

Is there anyone else that has run into this issue and, if so, how did they resolve it? What factors do we need to take into account? What are we missing? Do we need to have unique Companies and Emails for each in order to accomplish these sends as desired? Why would HubSpot allow for Contacts to be associated with multiple companies IF you cannot send dynamic token data to each in an email communication using each specific associated company data. What are we doing wrong here?

Thanks!

[RBozeman]

Hi @TKaney,

The  best way to do this would be association labels, Then, you can label the associations appropriately to help you identify other companies that they should be the primary contact for. You'll probably have to update any automation to utilize the new labels to avoid scenarios like the one you mentioned here, where people are receiving errant emails. Overall it should be a little more complex but not too bad. 

Also wanted to mention that Insycle (full disclosure, I work for them) allows you to update associations with labels in bulk, which might be helpful to you here. Here is our help center documentation on this. You can bulk update existing associations based on rules, or even inject them into Workflows so that the associations happen automatically after new records enter HubSpot. 

[jolle · Accepted solution]

Hey @TKaney, thanks for reaching out and for the awesome context!

It sounds like this would be a great use case for association labels (here is the Knowledge Base article from HubSpot). This feature is available for Professional HubSpot subscriptions, so I believe you should have access looking at your post tag!

Association labels let you define these specific relationships and then segment/filter/report on records based on that relationship vs all/any associated contact/company. You will likely need to manually set these up for each relationship, but that will be a solid exercise in confirming that you have all records set up accurately.

Hope this helps!!