I'm very excited to have the beta of creating associations and labeling them between records. But it feels incomplete without the ability to associate records via workflows. My use case is something I've been trying to implement with workarounds since my company started using huspot.
Use Case: We're a solar panel manfacturer. We sell to distributors, that sell to solar installers, that sell to homeowners. We generate plenty of homeowner leads that we would like to send to our customer installer companies.
I want to set a workflow that will assoicate the lead's contact record to the installer company record under the assciation label I made for this purpose, then send a new lead notification to the campany' designated lead-getting employee associated contact , all based on the location of the lead.
I want to be able to look at the lead contact record and see which of our installer companies we sent it to. Or look at an installer company and see all the leads we've sent to them. Or create a deal that is between the lead and the installer company for every lead we send to the company.
There's just no way to manually associate these records as we get thousands of these leads a quarter, this seems like such a blind spot for B2B users.
@Stanly honestly nothing usable or scalable. It was taken out of my hands for a while and they did some janky stuff like creating a contact record dropdown property of several of the most loyal installer companies but it doesn't in anyway associate to the actual record of those companies. The field would trigger a notification to a hand entered email address via "send internal markeitng email" workflow function for each option in the dropdown, all totally unreportable and unscalable. And still needs a lead manager to manually pick the installer out of the dropdown.
I'm looking further into deal creation and notifications to a certain association triggered by the deal but so far it keeps coming back to this issue.
This has stymied my automation attemps many times already. If we're to use HubSpot as an operations hub and single source of truth for our project management, we need to have the ability to automatically associate different objects with one another based on known values. Use cases for us include:
- Associating vendor contacts with projects based on project details.
- Associating client feedback in Tickets with specific custom object records ("projects") based on a shared project ID.
- Associating revenue deals with projects based on project details.
Association labels are awesome but need to use workflows to dictate which association label should be assigned, otherwise this process is manual OR have to use the API!
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.
@RachelDME Yes! That would be very helpful when contacting a client to pass a lead's information to them. So far I've set up a workflow that will put a lead's info into a deal description, then email the client contact with the deal description personalization token as a workaround for this. But it would be very nice to be able to do that with more percise tokens in other instances.
I'd also like to be able to enroll contacts into workflows by their association labels only or use them in the branch logic functions.
I'm hopeful they will be building up associations from here. I had to find this one missing peice in an app add-on for now and I have a workable solution, but it would love to make it more streamlined and flexible.
Absolutely need this. I have started automating various actions including sending marketing emails as acknowledgements/notices about tickets. I need to be able to associate these marketing emails with the ticket via the same workflow, otherwise the ticket appears incomplete. Certanily nobody is going to do it manually, and in anycase, it can't be done manually either!
Yes we defintiely need associations by workflows as well. The use case is that we deals associate to Tickets. The Sales team is associating Tickets to Companies, but then we want this Company associated to the Ticket to be also associated to the Deal.
+1 for access to object assocations from workflows. We can set properties of an object from a workflow, but not associations.
I see that creating a record from a workflow allows associations to be set for enrolling objects (see below), but we would like to be able to set associations for already existing objects.
@rjonesSolaria Not sure if this would work for you, but my workaround is to use an Associ8 action on a Company/Deal Workflow to associate Companies and Deals to Contacts targeting an Email or Email-<Association Label> property on Company/Deal that matches a Contacts Email.
Something about the way this action is laid out was very confusing to me at first. Here's another example that may make it a bit clearer if it's not already.
This action searches for a contact that has the same email as what's stored in the Email - Compliance Supv Company property. This property would need to be filled in manually, or, in my case, populated with a workflow based on a form submission.
@Stanly Thanks! We also have been using associ8 but it was a little bit limited for my above stated purpose. We had to implement another app called Insycle, that lets us do much finer record matching, data formating, and other useful functions. It's able to associate contact records to a deal based on other assoicated object records like company records and association labels, which isn't an option in associ8.
My current process/workaround for our lead to partner assignment and tracking is this:
Our lead manager manually associates lead contact records to our installer company records under the association lable "lead," then move the lead's lifecycle stage to "Sales Qualified."
*Caveat* - I know this is not an option for all the folks here. Luckily at the moment this is just a few clicks in the lead contact's record, our lead manager is working there anyway to qualify the lead.
I think Insycle could automate this step in the way we needed it if our process didn't need real eyes on the leads coming in to qualify them. Even based on matching locations like I wanted to implement in my original use case.
An automation is triggered by the above actions that creates a deal - the deal is only associated to this lead contact record and the associated company record - we still need to associate the additional contact record of the lead receiving employee at the company. That's where Inscyle runs in the automation - the Insycle "recipe" associates the "lead receiver" to the deal under that label based on some matching criteria that you can only use in Insycle's options.
After the deal is created, the appropriate contact at our partner company and our own sales manager are notified via another workflow. Like I stated above in a different comment, the option to use personalization tokens based on association label is another need. My workaround is that I copied the lead's info as a text block into one deal field when the deal is created and use the deal description field personalization token in the notifications.
I hope that helps somebody. Inscyle is a paid app but the cost is based on the number of records you have in your hubspot account, so for us it only costs $36 a month, totally worth it for my team.
Tacking on that we need to be able to automatically associate a program manager from Company A with Company B's support tickets, so that both Company A and Company B can view each others requests under their respective Customer Portals. Doing this Manually right now is... less than desirable.
Tenho o mesmo problema, minha plataforma envia e-mails para o Hubspot o que faz com que crie assciações sempre para o mesmo cliente, eu precisava desassociar esse cliente por um fluxo, mas atualmente não é possivel.
Tacking onto this in hopes of getting this thread in front of the eyes of the Hubspot dev team. Would love to be able to use the pre-existing hubspot filters and use them to automatically associate contacts in a workflow. Like if certain property values match between a contact and a company then make an association.
