Associating Contacts and Companies in HubSpot

You can automatically assign contacts to companies or make the associations manually. Here's an overview.

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Transcript

(00:04)
Let's talk about setting up contacts and companies for a moment and the relationship between them. In HubSpot, you can have contacts that have a company association. For instance, here's a contact, and then this is the company that this person is associated with. We can also have companies that have contact associations. In this case, this company does not have a contact associated, but if they did, they would show up in this box. Now, if the Werx Brands set up your account and you are a B2B selling company, we have probably already taken care of a primary setting for you. You're going to settings and go down to objects and companies, and you'll see there's this automation that says create and associate companies with contacts. If you're B2B and there wasn't some other reason not to, our default is to click that on and it will ask you if yours is not on, do you want to retroactively create company records? We would say normally, yes. It's going to go and look for the domain addresses of their emails. So if my email address is andrea.Hill@strategyerx.com, it's going to try to associate me with a company name of StrategyWerx.

(01:29)
Now that can be complicated because, for instance, my email address is strategywerx.com but our company name is Hill Management Group. Hill-management.com is not going to automatically match to StrategyWerx, in which case I would have to manually associate my contact name with my company name in that example. Another example might be that if you're dealing with smaller businesses, the company may have a company name like Bob's Contracting, but the email address may be bobscontracting@gmail.com. Hubspot is not going to be able to associate that gmail.com email address with a company because obviously that person doesn't work for Gmail. Let's just look at some of your options for making sure the associations are set up. Now let's look at how we would do that. Let's go to this contact and this person's email address is at the domain daffyduck.com. It has been associated, this contact, with the company daffyduck.com. But say that daffyduck.com is not actually where he works. Let's say he actually works at StrategyWerx. We would search to see if that company is there. We're going to say yes, we want to associate him with strategywerx.com and hit "next."

(02:55)
Then it's going to ask, "Do you want to replace this as Daffy Duck's primary company? We can say yes, or we could simply save and it would become a secondary company. Now Daffy Duck is associated with two companies. If you've got people with gmail.com, aol.com, email addresses, or if you've got a situation where somebody's email address is associated with, say, a subsidiary or a brand and you want to associate that person with the larger corporation, you would go in here and manually add. Otherwise, HubSpot is going to try to connect your contacts to companies based on email address, unless that setting is not turned on in the Settinggs > Objects, as I showed you earlier. We can also do those associations in the opposite order. Right now, we're in companies, not contacts. Let's go down and just pick a company name. Let's say we wanted to associate Daffy Duck with this company. Well, we go into contacts and we can see there are no contacts associated. Now, we'd hit Add and we're going to search and Daffy Duck is in here, so we're going to add Daffy. Daffy Duck is now associated with this company as well.

Speaker 1 (04:10)
And if we go back to Daffy Duck's contact record, we're now going to see there are three companies that Daffy Duck is associated with. If you go to add a contact, so now we're back in the company record, not the contact record, over here on the contacts that are associated with it. Let's say we want to add a contact, Minny Mouse, Minny is not in there. Well, now we can add by doing a "create new." We hit Create. Now we've got a contact record of Minny Mouse. Look, it's automatically associated this contact with minnymouse.com, but because we added it through the company association, the company 1971 is here also.

(05:10)
That's just a little overview for how contact and company records are associated. Again, the big question is, if you go into settings and then go down to objects > companies, is this automation to create and associate companies with contacts turned on? If you want contacts associated with companies, this needs to be turned on. It's always looking to make that association for you, as it just did with Minny Mouse. If the Werx teams set up your HubSpot for you and you are a B2B organization, we would have set this up by default unless we had discussed it and there was a good reason not to in the first place.

(05:56)
Hope that helps you with your contact and company associations.