Contact to Company Associations?

[AdamBecker98]

Hey everyone,

Looking for input on whether this project is worth tackling now or revisiting later: Cleaning up and organizing our Contact to Company Associations.

Situation: We have a separate CRM that pushes company data to HubSpot via API. These land as single-line text properties on individual contact records (IE company name, company address, etc.). Meanwhile, we have not really made use of the contact to company associations yet: the pushed company data and the actual associated company object are totally disconnected. Sometimes they match, sometimes they don’t.

The dilemma: we would like to clean this up, but automating or any bulk cleanup through imports has been challenging. It looks like a lot of manual work matching and cleaning is inevitable.

My question is: How important is this in general? We don’t necessarily have a use case for this right now - we don’t have a reporting roadmap or email campaign plans by company or anything like that. I am mostly operating from the assumption that proper company –contact associations unlock better reporting and functionality, that we’ll likely want later.

Would love any thoughts or context. Worth the effort now, or better to wait for a clear use case? Thanks!

[Shweta95]

Hi there,

I understand the dilemma. Even without a current use case, cleaning up contact-to-company associations is usually worth the effort, especially if you’re planning to grow or scale later.

Why it’s worth tackling:

• Data consistency: Right now, your contact records hold company data in isolation, which can quickly lead to outdated or mismatched info.
  
  
• Future-proofing: Clean associations make it easier to build accurate reports, run account-based campaigns, or trigger company-level workflows down the line.
  
  
• Unlocking HubSpot features: Lifecycle syncing, scoring, and segmentation work much better with correct company links.

That said, if there's truly no reporting or campaign need shortly, and cleanup is massively manual, it's reasonable to wait, just know you'll likely have to revisit it later.

If the manual work is the blocker, tools like LeadAngel can help automate contact-to-company matching using custom rules and syncs, especially useful if you're also using Salesforce.

Hope that helps!

[SamCBarth_LAIRE]

Hi! @AdamBecker98   HubSpot has workflow steps that will create associations automatically based on matching property values between Contacts and Companies

You can also use importing or bulk editing to clean or clear out some of these values - but I think setting up clear rules for associating and then building the system around that is best like domains for example

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @AdamBecker98,

Happy to help here. Generally, I would say that - if you don't have a use case and you don't see any on the horizon - you could probably continue as you have, for now. Having a use case would mean that you can define clear requirements and tackle this in a focused way.

Using the company object can indeed be useful in reporting, contact filtering and segmentation, or scoring, for example. Once you have it, you'll probably notice a few areas where it's useful. If you do have the capacity know, you could explore uses cases and discuss them with other stakeholders.

If you have the bandwidth now, there is also a learning curve to these things and starting sooner means that you don't have to rush things should some use cases come up. 

If you do go about cleaning up, I'd strongly recommend cleaning up at the source, not in HubSpot. If the CRM is the leading system, I'd set the sync with HubSpot up so that it mirrors that information.

Best regards!

[AdamBecker98]

Awesome- thanks for the help Karsten!