HubSpot Ideas

NicoleSengers

Set Association Labels On Records via a Workflow

I would love to be able to add in the new association labels using a workflow - rather than needing to do this manually.

this would enable businesses who have contact A who makes a booking and Contacts B, C, D etc who attend a course or an event flagged as attendees. so a business knows which are valuable contacts.

 

It would also be helpful to be able to use a workflow to send different communications to clients based on their association tag.

HubSpot Updates
In Planning
March 11, 2024 06:31 AM

Hi all! 

I know that everyone on this thread is eagerly awaiting a beta. We're actively working on this functionality and if you want more information of what will likely be included in our first release, I'd recommend checking out the "In Development" notification that went out last week. You can find this by navigating to Product Updates in your HubSpot portal and looking for "New Workflow Actions to Automate Association Processes."

 

We'll provide another update when we get ready to open up a broad beta.

-Maggie (HubSpot product manager)

In Planning
January 25, 2024 06:51 AM

Hello!

I'm Maggie from HubSpot's product team. I'm excited to announce that we're actively working on the ability to manage association labels via workflow. We're hoping to have something in beta for you all to test out within the next few months. 

 

I also want to share this Knowledge Base article which outlines the ways that you can already use association labels in workflows (for things like enrollment) as it seems like there are a few questions in that space.

 

Thank you for all of your thoughtful feedback and examples! It helps us make sure that we're building the right thing 😊.

August 30, 2023 01:07 PM

Hi everyone, I don't have much in the ways of an update on this feature as we are still working through some major blockers. There is a limitation in how we find records to be associated, making it difficult to complete our set of features. We are still working hard on this problem and will have more updates along the way.

 

@04262 that feature is now live to all so it's no longer in the Beta page.

July 20, 2023 01:12 PM

@RyGuy the changes we're working through are towards the next set of features I'm referencing, for example, the Set Association Label action. Therefore there wouldn't be much if anything changed to the existing beta functionality. Definitely feel free to message me with details if you'd like.

 

@jaybaum I just met with our Associations team and discussed that hard limit. No hard decisions were made but we would like to fix that as well and could see traction in the coming months. I would recommend opening an idea on our forum so we can track progress, otherwise we'll hopefully have good news down the line

July 20, 2023 10:12 AM

@Steiger and others,

 

As it so happens, today was going to be the day I gave an update as we've made some major breakthroughs recently that we wanted to share with everyone.

 

The new Data Panel beta feature is currently going through the final weeks of "beta testing" and will soon be available to all customers. We had a rather tricky setback this past month that took our entire team time to sort out but as of this week we've sorted out all the kinks and are back to working on the followup functionality needed for a "Set Association Label" action. While I can't give an estimate (for fear of hitting another setback and dissapointing people), I can say we have a much more clear line of sight to our goal and have many engineers actively working on the solution.

 

The good news is that this next milestone will include more than just the Association Label action. We are going to have the ability to support more field types and provide finer granularity on the types of records/data that can be pulled into a Workflow.

June 20, 2023 06:39 AM

@RyGuy Thanks for pointing people in the right direction.

 

As for lack of functionality, I'm 100% with you, it leaves us wanting more as well. We're working on scaling issues at the moment to bring what we think is the full power of the feature: pull one (or more) values from any object, event, integrator object, without restrictions (within reason in terms of scale). If you have feedback or recommendations, please let us know.

May 26, 2023 06:32 AM

Sorry about the public beta link not working anymore, everyone. It looks like we had an issue with the way those betas work that prevented us from exposing the new feature in this manner.

 

For now, please use this form to gain access: https://forms.gle/d44dN9GqW1Zyqer36

In Planning
May 04, 2023 06:49 AM

Hi everyone,

 

Here's a short update from the team. Now that the [Public Beta] Data Panel with associated record data in workflows is open to the public, we've begun working on the "Set Association Labels" action that everyone in this thread has been patiently waiting for. After we complete our exploratory phase for the project, the team will be able to give a rough estimate on when we'd expect to have this ready for our beta testers. Stay tuned for more information.

March 23, 2023 06:37 AM

@jaybaum sorry, that type of work is not related to the Workflows tool so we're not able to work on that directly. However, I will pass along that piece of feedback to the relevant team and see what can be done about that.

March 21, 2023 05:45 AM

@NPW Yes, we're planning on adding support for almost every field. The Internal Email Notification is currently being worked on and should be ready in a few weeks.

 

Sorry to dissapoint about the pace of the setting of association labels, we'll continue to work hard on that and give an update once it's ready.

March 20, 2023 06:31 AM

Hi everyone,

 

As we work hard on the Data panel with associated data private beta, I wanted to give another update as there has been some confusion surrounding our current work. While we have not started on the work to automatically apply association labels using the Workflows tool, we are prepping for it. The beta I linked to in my last message refers to a feature that is NOT to apply association labels using our tool. Instead, it allows the use of associated data in fields across the app, much like the "personalization tokens" that can be inserted into many text fields. Read below for more information:

 

March 01, 2023 07:16 AM

Great news everyone, please follow along in this other thread to join the private beta of the Data panel feature:

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Workflow-actions-that-can-update-properties-across-different/idc-p/713251

February 22, 2023 07:33 AM

Hi everyone,

 

A quick update based off our last update from January. We had issues come up that delayed us by a few weeks but should now be back on track. To remind everyone, the beta we're working on is a preliminary feature that will allow users to use a lot more HubSpot/external data across many Workflow fields. This is going to be one of our larger project releases in a while and once the (hopefully short) beta period on that is done, we'll then be able to start on the beta for the Associations work everyone in this thread is interested in.

 

So to reiterate, the beta that's going to go live soon is not directly for Associations work, but is indirectly related and required for us to start that work.

 

Making promises on when it'll be ready can only end poorly so instead we can give an update on the work and what our current blockers are:

 

- The initial beta to allow users to use data from many different sources went through the first round of testing and while we found a few major bugs, we've since patched most of them. Once we do a second round of testing, we'll start the private beta (and will invite anyone in this thread to join)

- The work needed for what everyone in this thread is looking for, a way to automate association/association labels, requires the previous feature to go live. Once that's live and stable, the new data sources availability would make it possible for our teams to build out a feature that could use this data for the purposes of manipulating associations

 

Once the first bullet point is done (and only then) we'll be able to move on the Association work.

 

As always, we'll try to update this thread and any related threads as we make progress!

January 19, 2023 06:12 AM

January update:

 

Hi everyone,

 

The team has been hard at work for the past few weeks as we finish up work on the beta for our Data access feature (needed for us to start work on the Associations action within Workflows). Know that we're monitoring this thread on a weekly basis (or even daily) so as soon as that beta is ready to open, I'll post a link for those that want to join. We've had positive feedback from our preliminary alpha testing so we expect the beta to go by quickly, meaning even if you don't join this beta you'll have access to the new Data feature shortly after. 

 

Depending on the amount of feedback we get during this phase we'll start to form (finally) a timeline for the Association feature everyone in this thread has been asking for.

 

Thanks for all the support and stay tuned.

December 14, 2022 06:00 AM

Hi everyone,

 

I wanted to give an end of year update as we've been getting lots of requests for this feature. As we stand, our original estimate is still on track. The related features we needed to finish before starting on this associations request are due to be completed mid January. Once that goes into Beta, we'll work in parallel to both incorporate public feedback, as well build out functionality related to associations within Workflows. 

 

We'll likely post a link to the January Beta in this thread so unless we have delays, expect great news early 2023

September 26, 2022 06:15 AM

Hi @emmaboyd we're still actively working on the tangential projects that will make this one possible. We don't have a good timeline but expect to have those other projects done by the end of the year, after which we would be entirely ready to tackle this project.

August 05, 2022 05:40 AM

We (the team that builds the Workflows editor tool) have a need for this feature as well so we are building all the necessary "building block" foundational features we need to make the association action a reality. We will update this thread once we get a timeline as we still have discovery work to do before we can commit to building it. The exciting news is that the CRM's association capabilities are also growing, making this action even more valuable to build.

Being Reviewed
August 02, 2022 12:43 PM

251 Replies
arielowens
Participant

I would also love to be able to set a label association using a workflow. Or even being able to bulk edit would be helpful. Love the capabilities of this feature just missing bulk edits/workflow options. 

kehokl
Member

YES. I want to be able to bulk edit my inactive contacts to indicate that they are former employees of a company rather than doing this one at a time.

BWhiting
Member

Agreed, would like to be able to do this natively. Would also like to be able to check whether a certain label exists on an object via workflow. We have custom objects and would like to be able to do work based on whether or not that associated custom object on our deal has a certain label. 

Stig
Participant | Diamond Partner

Yes - setting labels via workflows & bulk edit would be useful.

RachelDME
Participant | Diamond Partner

Yes, totally agree.  I would also like to be able to pull associated contacts via personalisation tokens in to emails generated by workflows, eg when a deal closes key customer contacts can be detailed in the email going out to the service team.

lynton_samantha
Member | Elite Partner

This would be especially helpful in the case where we need to copy properties from one object to another. Since the native "copy a property" relies on the association label to make sure you're copying to the correct / intended deal / company / etc. Being able to set the association label in mass, automatically, can really help us connect the dots more quickly for a customer to enable more complete automation.

jpeluso
Participant

It would be so useful to us to be able to edit association labels through automation/batch edit them. Please make this so! 🙏

JFinestone
Member

Agree with all of the above. We mark our deals with Association Labels (Opportunity, Lost Opportunity and Customer). It would be great to run workflows/automation to change those labels as they move into different deal stages.

 

Ex. If a deal we're actively pitching has the association label "Opportunity" > then that deal gets Closed Won, the Association Label should auto update to "Customer". 

JSmyth2
Member

Being able to automatically apply an association label for a deal --> contact would be useful to associate different deals with different pipelines that one contact may be associated with.

 

This would enable workflows within different pipelines to change property values of deals specific to that pipeline as per the association label.

FMaher
Contributor

This would help us a lot with partner contacts associated to deals. We constantly have to exclude partner contacts from workflows - but I need to rely on Sales Consultants to manually apply the label. A workflow to allow me to to apply labels to contacts on deals where the contact is associated with a partner company would help prevent the inevitable one or two emails that are incorrectly sent to partners.

HubGem
Participant | Diamond Partner

We have many customers who need this feature! Association labels would be brilliant if they could be auto assigned, without it it becomes manual and at risk of someone forgetting which makes excluding certain labels from workflow communications too risky. Please add this feature!

ThomasPrint
Member

Setting labels via workflows & bulk edit would be useful for me as wel.

Anyone else have an idea to use company-based workflows to send automated emails to contacts that only meet specific requirements (such as a label, or in my case I only want the email to be sent to the contact with the most deals.)

Amevian
Participant

Yep. This.

rstober
Participant

Would be incredibly helpful for us as well. We plan on keeping some association labels universal, so it would be nice to use a workflow to keep them in sync. For example, we plan to use "decision maker" label on the company, deal, and ticket association labels. It would be amazing to use workflows to keep them in sync. 

Leadstreet-M
Participant | Diamond Partner

Great feature, but the association labels need (more) automation! 🙂 

We would also love to set a default association label. This would already cover some of the usecases.

Thanks!

laurabren
Contributor

+1 to all of the above! Our particular use case: creating a deal via a contact workflow (e.g. contact fills out a form) and automatically setting the association label at the same time. 

EJSimonsen
Member

Agree with many above. We have several Contacts associated with a given Deal, most of which are different companies and 3rd parties.   It would be great to run workflows/automation to change properties or the association label.

   

Ex. If a Deal moves to Closed Won, only the Contact with the association label "Client" will automatically change its Lifecyle to Customer. 

EMG
Member

Yes, It woul be great and so useful

Delsom
Participant

Yes, I feel this is super necessary for the association label to make sense in any way for automated tasks.

 

We have workflows that automatically create onboarding tickets for customer success when a sale is closed. We really want these tickets to have the association label "onboarding" so we can use workflows to only change these onboarding tickets and not any other tickets the companies might have. 

 

I find it kind of weird that we can make workflows that only target objects with specific associations but not set those associations with workflows. 

brianserocke
Contributor | Platinum Partner

We're running into this issue as well and would appreciate this functionality. Our client wants to separate communication to certain associated contacts by association label but cannot afford to manually set the labels due to the volume of deals created and associated with multiple contacts.