[Heads Up] CRM Associations Improvements Coming April 18, 2022

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Businesses and relationships are complex. In order to grow better, your CRM software should allow you to reflect every ounce of nuance in the connections that make up your business.  That’s why we prioritized some exciting updates to associations in HubSpot as part of our major upgrade to the CRM. 

Since September 2021, thousands of customers (over 400,000 at time of this writing) have been using the new and improved associations in a public beta. Now we’re ready to roll out these changes to everyone.

Mark your calendars: association enhancements are launching April 18, 2022.

On April 18th, 2022, HubSpot customers will be able to:

• All editions across all hubs: 
  • Associate more than one company record to a contact, deal, or ticket  (e.g., Michael Scott is a decision maker at the company Dunder Mifflin and also advisor to another company, Serenity by Jan). 
• Professional and Enterprise:
  • Create custom association labels between different standard objects (e.g., create a label between contact and companies called “Advisor”).
  • Label associations between records (e.g., Michael Scott is “Decision Maker” at Dunder Mifflin).
  • Use association labels in lists, workflows and reports.
• Enterprise only:
  • Define custom object association schema through the UI (previously required an API call). 
  • Create and use association labels with custom objects, in addition to standard objects.

No matter what edition of HubSpot you’re using, this feature rollout will give you more control over your CRM so you’re better able to grow your business with HubSpot.

We’ve created a consolidated list of everything that will change on April 18th and encourage you to take a few minutes to skim through so you’re prepared for the changes. Importantly, these changes are purely additive: none of your existing data will be impacted.

CRM data, CRM associations, and data modeling

• You'll be able to:
  • Associate more than one company to contacts, deals, and tickets. [All editions] 
  • Label associations between object pairs, including custom objects. [All editions]   

• What you need to know:
  • No data in your CRM will change immediately or automatically when these features are launched.
  • Because you can now associate multiple companies to one contact, by default the first company associated will be marked as the “Primary,” which you can change from the record page, via API, or through import. 
  • The associated company record marked “Primary” will be used by default in filters for lists, reports, workflows, and personalization tokens.
  • Timeline events and engagements will sync by default to the primary company’s associated record in a one-to-many relationship (i.e., one contact associated with multiple companies).
  • If you've turned on the options to sync company lifecycle stages with contacts or deals, the sync will only update the primary company's lifecycle stage.

Importing data

• You'll be able to:
• Import multiple company associations and set “Primary” label. [All editions] 
• Import with custom labels.  [Professional, Enterprise]

• What you need to know:
• Import can no longer be used to overwrite existing company associations. We recommend instead that you use import to set the primary association on the new company, and set all downstream tools to leverage that association.
• In the spreadsheet you’re importing, create a column titled Association Labels and indicate the association (e.g., “Primary”), using a semicolon to separate multiple labels if applicable (e.g., “Advisor;Partner”).
• Here's a great demo from HubSpot Academy Professor Kyle Jepson!

Automation/Workflows

• You'll be able to:
  • Let’s say you are triggering a workflow based on an associated records’ attributes (e.g., company has a contact with first name “Dwight”). You’ll be able to specify whether the workflow looks at all associated records with Dwight as first name or just those records associated with a specific label (e.g., “Employee”).
  • Send email (company-based workflows only) (e.g., only email contacts labeled as “Decision Maker” at a company).
  • Set, copy, or clear a property value (e.g., run a deal-based workflow to update only the “Partner” company associated with a deal, when the deal is marked Closed Won).
  • If/then branch (all workflows except Contact-based) (e.g., create a branch that checks if companies in the workflow have a contact with first name “Dwight”). You’ll be able to specify whether the branch looks at all associated records with Dwight as first name or just those records associated with a specific label (e.g., “Employee”).
  • Update workflow triggers to specify a label type. [Professional, Enterprise] 
  • Apply label filtering in the following contact, company, deal or ticket-based workflow actions. [Professional, Enterprise] 
• What you need to know:
  • All existing workflows will continue working as they did previously. 
  • To take advantage of new association types (like multiple companies associated to contacts and deals), you’ll need to change the workflow actions from “Primary” company to “All Companies.”
  • Label filtering also exists in If/Then branches in company, deal, or ticket-based workflows.

Reporting

• You’ll be able to:
  • Create a contact/company report that shows the average number of contacts labeled “Employee,” split up by company industry.
  • Use association labels in the custom report builder to segment or filter data.  [Professional, Enterprise] 

CRM

• You’ll be able to:
  • Add multiple company associations to contacts, deals, and tickets (applicable to all users with"record edit" permissions). [All editions] 
  • Apply labels when associating records (e.g., Contact is "Partner" at associated company). [Professional, Enterprise]

• What you need to know:
  • Users will notice a “Primary” tag on associated company records in a one-to-many relationship (multiple companies associated with individual contacts, deals, tickets).
  • Remember, the “Primary” associated record is the record that will be referenced in lists, reports and workflows. See CRM Data section above. 
  • The primary company is called out exclusively on contacts index page, and in the “Associated Companies” column on the contacts, deals, and tickets index pages.

Settings

• You’ll be able to:
  • Define custom association labels to apply and use in HubSpot tools like workflows, lists, and reporting. [Professional, Enterprise]
  • Define associations between custom objects and other objects through the UI, which could previously only be done via an API call. [Enterprise only] 

• What you need to know: 
  • To define your custom association labels, go to Settings > Objects. Detailed instructions for setting up labels can be found here. 

APIs/ Custom integrations

• What you need to know:
  • Associations API v4 supports this new functionality (documentation here).
  • Existing customers using API v1 or v3: should continue working exactly as it does now.
  • Custom integrations and Ecosystem integrations must be upgraded to v4 to use the new association types. (Note: They will not create or read multiple associations automatically, so they will need to be updated manually.)
  • See documentation on new one-to-many association ID types.

What's next?

Can’t wait to get started? If you're ready to see what these improved associations can do for your business, feel free to opt in for early access at any point before April 18, 2022. Here's how to opt in: 

• Users with Super Admin permissions can go to any object settings page and click the beta modal on the bottom-right-hand side of the screen. 
• For full instructions to opt in and use the new association features, refer to this knowledge base article.

If you have any questions about how you can take full advantage of these new features, feel free to reach out to your customer success rep or contact support.