Best Practices for Managing Company Duplication in HubSpot CRM

[Samila97]

Hey RevOps community,
I'm Samila from the PeoplesHR RevOps team. It's great to be part of this community, and I look forward to engaging and collaborating with you all!

We recently started implementing and monitoring CRM discipline across our Sales and Marketing teams. One of the challenges we're facing is company duplication. This happens because our sellers often reach out to both local branches and global headquarters of the same company (e.g., Company ABC in the Philippines and Company ABC Global). Sometimes these entities share the same domain, and other times they don't.

Does anyone have best practices to handle this, or know of HubSpot functionalities that can help prevent such duplications?

[asmith11]

Hi,

We use association labels to address this. Sometimes parent/child,
sometimes custom ones if needed. It is very manual and the data is rarely
fully accurate because of this, so we just keep up with the ones we're
actively in contact with or marketing to.

In some cases, there might be up to 100 organizations with a parent
company, for which we do not use association labels, but rather a field to
indicate the owner or umbrella company. This is a dropdown select field on
the company level.

We also then have to manually associate contacts to companies and cannot
use the domain matching setting (which is useless for us anyways because it
also creates new companies if there is no domain match). It is a bummer but
just requires extra time to keep the data clean.

Hope this is at least a bit helpful!

[Samila97]

Hi Asmith, 

Thanks for lot for your reply. 

And yes i agree the domain matching setting doesn't work for us as well. We do use the company parenting function which is used by our CS teams to manually do the matching (only for existing customers). But then again as our volumes increase, that also becomes a challenge for us

Once again thank you for your response - good to know that we are using similar practices

[MoizesAraujo · Accepted solution]

Hey Samila, this is a great question. Thanks for sharing it with us.

To answer your question straightforwardly: create and use the Company-to-Company relationship feature and label the relationships according to your needs.

Here’s how it works:

A - Multiple companies with the same domain (your case):
Relationship label: Parent/Child
In this case, you can link one company to another, even if they have different lifecycle stages and owners, without losing track.
Solution: The global company (typically located at the headquarters) will be the "Parent," while all the country-specific companies' websites will be the "Children."

B - Same company with multiple domains:
Relationship label: Multi-Domains
This is quite common: one company uses one domain for emails and another for hosting the website. HubSpot will always create duplicates for these kinds of companies since, technically, they have different domains.
Solution: Use the association label "Multi-Domain" to link as many company records as needed under a single entity.

C - Multiple companies with multiple domains:
Relationship label: Parent/Child
In this case, there may be a holding company responsible for several other companies with different domains, countries, or industries. Since they make corporate decisions together, it’s crucial to track them as a group.
Solution: Use the same Parent/Child label to link these companies. The process is the same as in A: the headquarters becomes the "Parent," and the other companies are the "Children."

Additional suggestions:

• Assign someone as the guardian of this methodology.
• Restrict who can assign ownership of companies to maintain consistency.
• Be aware that scenarios B and C can arise automatically when exchanging emails with a new domain. Prepare to act promptly in such cases.
• Train the team to handle these situations proactively and regularly review for duplicates.
• Create reports that count the Company record IDs associated with the same domain. This will help identify duplication in your instance.
• Ensure the team reviews these reports periodically.

[Samila97]

Hi Moizes,

This is super useful. I think partly we do follow solution C. 
Solution A and B are really helpful. Haven't thought about it before but can defenitely give it a try. 

Appreciate the recommendations - will try this out

[Music_Man]

Although I do not have an answer, I appreciate you inquiring. I am also
seeking information on this matter. Happy New Year!

[Samila97]

Hi Bérangère,

This is super useful. Thank you so much!

[BérangèreL]

Hi @Samila97 and welcome, we are delighted to have you here! 🎉

Thanks for asking the Community!

Here is an article "Deduplicate records in HubSpot" that might be of interest.

Also, I'd love to share these resources that might help you:

- The solution from @Jnix284 on this post "Duplicate companies with different domains"
- The solution from @karstenkoehler on this post "Duplicate companies"
- The solutions from @karstenkoehler and @Lucila-Andimol on this post "How to address large amount of duplicate companies?"
- The solution from @karstenkoehler on this post "Duplicate Companies and Contacts"

I hope this helps and Happy Holidays! ☃️

Best,
Bérangère