In my last CRM, i was able to create a relationship between two contacts, such as a couple in the same household or same address. I want to see that this client is the wife of this client, or this client is the father of that client, etc.
If it's easier for you to make associations outside of HubSpot, you might be able to hack together a solution in Zapier. An external data source - or even something like a new row in a Google doc - might help handle the automation of updating records, if there's someone/something responsible for providing the associated values you're looking for.
Brad Mampe, Salesforce Analyst, Fidelity I'm probably wrong. I may not be right about that.
I came across your post and was wondering if you had considered using the "Company" Object as a way to tie them together.
Since I don't know your business I will make some assumptions, including that you sell something (service/product) and you want to do some kind of outreach to contacts.
While your situation may be more B2C (based on how you described what you are trying to do), I have come across this with a previous client trying to make a similar association of "Household".
So Company = Household; Contact = Family Member.
Because you can associate Contacts with a Company in HubSpot, there are built-in association points using this thought process. Each contact can have:
their own deals (purchases)
their own contact properties
their own engagement record/timeline with your company
Hopefully you make use of Personas to know your target audience, but you could take it further and use "Job Title" as their "Family Role" so you know the contact's association to each other.
Then you can use lists & views to find contacts with whom you are looking to do business.
Obviously there would be some manual work to do the association, since it is not as likley for a Household to have their own domain/website URL, but I hope this gets you closer to what you are looking to achieve without moving data outside of HubSpot.
**If it makes sense to know this for your business. You could also use Parent/Child Companies for Adult Family Members that move out, so you can keep that initial relationship tie to the original company.
I just wanted to update this thread and share that it is now possible to associate multiple companies with a contact, you can find more information here.
[Public Beta] Associate Records of the Same Object Type
Oct 18, 2023
What is it?
Same object associations give customers the ability to associate a CRM record to another record of the same object type e.g. a contact to a contact or a deal to a deal. These new associations are available for contacts, companies, deals, tickets and custom objects and can be leveraged across core HubSpot tools. Watch a short video on how this works.
Why does it matter?
Customers want HubSpot to reflect the reality of their business; this often includes a web of contacts or a collection of related companies. Without the ability to connect contacts to contacts, companies to companies and other objects to their same type, customers have been missing key relationships in HubSpot.
How does it work?
Users can now create associations between records of the same type for contacts, companies, deals, tickets and custom objects. On each record, you’ll see a new section in the right sidebar which reflects the type of record you’re on e.g. you’ll see a contacts section while on a contact record.
Customers with at least one Pro or Enterprise subscription can also create either a single label which is the same in both directions e.g. two contacts have the label colleague or a pair of labels representing two sides of a specific relationship e.g. student and teacher. When applying labels, you’re able to preview the application of the labels to ensure it’s correct before creating a new associations.
Same object associations can be leveraged in the following features:
Calculated properties
Custom Report Builder
Import
Index Pages
Lists
Records
Workflows
Who gets it?
All hubs and tiers can create associations between records of the same object type (with custom objects being available to enterprise tiers only). Labels are only available to Pro+ customers as well as in custom report builder and workflow support.
You can find this beta here:
Have a great day everyone!
Karsten Köhler HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer
@RKantner That is true. You'd have to make sacrifices to use Company as the family.
The good news, there is always another option. HubSpot introduced custom objects since my original solution last year, and you can now create your own "Family" Object as long as you have Enterprise. You can check out the details about using custom objects here.
Just be sure to add the custom "Family" Object to your data mapping guide so everyone knows how to make the associations in your system.
I came across your post and was wondering if you had considered using the "Company" Object as a way to tie them together.
Since I don't know your business I will make some assumptions, including that you sell something (service/product) and you want to do some kind of outreach to contacts.
While your situation may be more B2C (based on how you described what you are trying to do), I have come across this with a previous client trying to make a similar association of "Household".
So Company = Household; Contact = Family Member.
Because you can associate Contacts with a Company in HubSpot, there are built-in association points using this thought process. Each contact can have:
their own deals (purchases)
their own contact properties
their own engagement record/timeline with your company
Hopefully you make use of Personas to know your target audience, but you could take it further and use "Job Title" as their "Family Role" so you know the contact's association to each other.
Then you can use lists & views to find contacts with whom you are looking to do business.
Obviously there would be some manual work to do the association, since it is not as likley for a Household to have their own domain/website URL, but I hope this gets you closer to what you are looking to achieve without moving data outside of HubSpot.
**If it makes sense to know this for your business. You could also use Parent/Child Companies for Adult Family Members that move out, so you can keep that initial relationship tie to the original company.
I discovered a problem while trying this.... a Contact can only be associated with 1 Company at a time. So a choice must be made: associate the Contact with their Household Company, OR, their real work-place Company.... but not both.
I just wanted to update this thread and share that it is now possible to associate multiple companies with a contact, you can find more information here.
Here is what I did and I hope this helps until such time as HubSpot makes the Household feature available to group contacts who are in the same family.
IMPORTANT: I am on the "Starter" level membership for Sales and Marketing hubs so this should work for anyone at tihs level or above. I am not sure it will work on the Free level of membership. Please try and let me know.
I used Companies to group contacts in a household
In company properties, create "Household" as a option in the drop down list for "Industry"
In company properties, create "Household" as a option in the drop down list for "Type"
When creating a household "Company" I put this as the description: "This is the household "company" to link this family together in HubSpot - waiting for the household feature to be available."
The first two steps of adding the properties should help generate lists to at least see all the household "companies."
It is important to note that at my "starter level," I am able to have more than one company linked to a contact. So now in the test case I used, I can see the contact and the actual company where they work. From within the same contact record, in the right pane, I hit "add compnay" and made the the household "Smith Household." Now they are both there and when I go to the Smith Household record I can see all the family members who "work" there.
Hope this helps - super simple workaround for now.
And thank you for your contributions (specially @IMaxwell )
While this workaround is important to my company, we need a lot of different contact relationships. Our business is completely based on relationships, family and others such us introducers, friends of the customers, colleagues etc. Furthermore, one contact my have a friendship with another and the latter have another friend, but, of course, this does not mean that the first and the last are related, so creating friendship relationship doesnt seem so easy.
Well I just hope hubspot include some kind of relationship among contacts, maybe not a full fledged realtionship with automations, but a least keeping track of them.
If you have any ideas, I would really apreciate it.
This solution works to associate the two contacts however, there is no way to create actions around this association. I cannot email the two contacts using a template through the association.
Hi @MBernstein92 What type of actions are you looking to do?
You can absolutely email, trigger a workflow, add to list....using this structure. You just have to remember, whatever you are doing, you are doing to the contact at an individual level, not to "both contacts at the same time".
Because the association is a customization of built-in functionality (a fancier way of saying workaround) you'll have to build some of the infrastructure to match your customization so that the application takes your associations into account.
So if you're trying to email "the LastName family head of household" you'll have to make sure they're associated with the LastName Company, then use the custom fields you created or fields you repurposed (like Job Title/Persona) to determine their association level (Head Of Household) and only pull those contacts into the list. Then you can treat those contacts like any others and pull in personalization tokens, etc.
This is a great idea! I can use the X household or X Family as the Company name and associate the contacts to that. This will help when multiple contacts in the same house are inquiring about the same proposal, etc.
Be sure to map it out and make sure anyone working with the data objects (Contacts, Companies, Deals) understands the relationships. It will help keep your data cleaner and more usable.
we desperatly need this solution I don't understand why this function is not available not everyone is a company so if you can associate a company your should be able to linkd contacts. Very sad that this hs been talked about now for 2 years +++ and hubspot still not updated.
I talked to support and its not a feature that currently exists but i really want it. I know other CRM's have this, I have seen it in Insightly and others so seems like a really obvious thing to add especially if you are doing b2c sales and cannot relate through a company
This would be a great feature. The reason I started searching these posts is that I deal with a lot of homeowners and here and there I have multiple customers from one household that I'm in contact with. Could a group be added called Household, just as there is one called Companies?
Hi, @pascallap. Relationship fields are not listed among the data types of HubSpot properties. While there are some built-in relationships that exist natively within the tool (like contact-company or company-deal associations), these are not editable, nor is creating custom relationships possible.
Unless you have an external integration creating associations and syncing those to HubSpot (like the native Salesforce integration), this won't be something you could achieve in a practical way. While you could update data on individual contacts containing the URL of other HubSpot contacts, you'd be responsible for manually providing and updating values.
Brad Mampe, Salesforce Analyst, Fidelity I'm probably wrong. I may not be right about that.
