A member of your sales team found a potential upsell opportunity with an existing client. But he is unaware that another team member is already negotiating a separate deal with the subsidiary for the same parent company. He reaches out to the contact, thinking he’s about to hit gold.
But that’s not what happens.
Instead of a sales success, this duplication of efforts results in internal competition, a confused customer, and ultimately, a lost upsell opportunity—all because of a lack of visibility in your CRM.
Missing associations can cause issues like this, but you can prevent them.
Connecting child and parent companies within your database provides context and structure that allows you to align your sales, support, and marketing efforts. Plus, these associations prevent missed opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, and enhanced customer service.
However, creating child-parent company associations in HubSpot requires a time-consuming manual process. The additional effort by your team also doesn’t come cheap. In fact, Gartner has predicted that organizations can lower operational costs by 30% by using hyper-automation technologies to minimize manual effort—and it’s not hard to see why. Doing so would allow your teams to focus on executing successful ABM campaigns and closing deals, not cleaning up databases.
In this post, we’ll talk about all of the ways that missing associations can hurt your business, show you how to associate companies manually in HubSpot, and walk you through a way to do it faster. If you’re dealing with a messy CRM, read on.
The Business Impact of Missing Child-Parent Associations
Ignoring missing child-parent company associations for too long could hurt your bottom line. Here's a look at the implications of not associating these records:
- No single customer view: Missing child-parent company associations will cause your sales team to struggle to understand the full customer profile. For example, sales reps may miss out on identifying opportunities to cross-sell or upsell related products or services to the parent company or its subsidiaries.
- Inefficient sales and support team operations: Inaccurate or missing associations between parent and child companies will make it difficult for sales and support to do what they do best—connect the dots and offer recommendations and solutions to customers.
- Hamstrung account-based marketing (ABM) strategies: Understanding the stakeholders within an organization—including its child companies—is critical to ABM. Missing associations will prevent salespeople from building relationships with the right people because they won't have a full view of the account's needs, deals, and interactions with the organization.
- Revenue loss: Not seeing connections between child and parent companies means lost upsell and cross-sell opportunities and risks creating a bad customer experience. In turn, this will lead to revenue and profit loss.
- Damaged customer relationships: ABM campaigns rely heavily on building solid client relationships. You can't achieve this when your sales, marketing, and support teams are disoriented. Presenting a client with a solution that doesn’t meet their needs—or that they are already using—undermines your credibility. This may lead to customers leaving for a competitor.
- Broken automations and workflows: Any automations or workflows in your CRM will break if you don't have accurate child-parent company associations. For example, missing associations will cause the disruption of automated tasks when you integrate your CRM with other apps—and worse, it may be impossible to alter the records. You'll have to go in, fix the problem, and re-integrate the application.
How to Associate Child Companies to Parent Companies in HubSpot
As you can see, the problems that can arise from missing associations between child and parent companies aren't worth the risk. Let's walk through the steps for creating HubSpot child-parent associations manually:
Step 1: Go to the Company Record
Log into your HubSpot account and go to Services > Companies.
Step 2: Select the Child Company
Search for the child company you'd like to associate with a parent company. A box will open. Select the Add button in the Parent Companies area of the box.
Step 3: Add the Parent Company
Next, type in the name of the parent company and select it from the list below the search bar. If one doesn't exist, select the "Create new" tab to add a new parent company record.
Select "Next” and then "Save," and you're done.
Unfortunately, HubSpot's native capabilities can only make automatic associations in certain scenarios, and these scenarios aren’t useful for making child-parent associations for the following reasons:
- You cannot create associations within HubSpot Workflows.
- There's no way to automatically associate child-parent companies in the same way that you would associate contacts to companies.
These limitations mean that maintaining accurate associations requires ongoing attention and manual effort, making it likely you’ll fall behind on maintaining the associations over time. And the process leaves something to be desired, even if you do manage to stay on top of it: Organizing company hierarchies with associations is both time-consuming and error-prone.
How Insycle Enhances Child-Parent Association Management in HubSpot
Want to handle child-parent associations in bulk, and automatically? Insycle is here to help.
Flexible Bulk Associations
Manually associating a large batch of child records to parent companies in HubSpot is a tedious process that is susceptible to mistakes.
Insycle eliminates these issues with its bulk HubSpot child-parent association feature. Not only does it allow you to associate child and parent company records in HubSpot, but you can associate multiple records simultaneously using any field in the CRM as a matching criterion.
This will save your teams time and reduce human error, ensuring your sales, marketing, and support teams have the correct context for each account.
For instance, if your marketing team is preparing a targeted campaign, they can quickly associate all contacts from subsidiary companies to their parent companies, ensuring coherent and unified messaging.
Automated Associations in Workflows
HubSpot doesn't allow you to create child-parent associations in Workflows. But with Insycle Recipes, your teams can automatically create child-parent associations in HubSpot Workflows. Recipes are a collection of templates that execute a sequence of actions in a specific order.
Automating associations within Workflows ensures records are correctly associated from the moment they enter the CRM, before your first communications go out to the customer, enhancing data integrity and operational efficiency.
Replacing Errant Associations in Bulk
Insycle allows users to automate replacing errant associations in bulk, correcting inaccuracies across the database faster. This ensures your CRM data remains accurate and reliable, supporting effective sales and marketing strategies.
It can also help with updating associations that have changed over time.
For instance, after a merger, a company must update the associations for several subsidiaries that have changed parent companies. Using Insycle, the CRM administrator can quickly update these associations in bulk, ensuring the CRM reflects the new corporate structure accurately.
Streamline HubSpot Child-Parent Company Associations With Insycle
The ability to automate child-parent associations in HubSpot is a huge advantage. It's a convenience that saves your teams time and effort and reduces human error. It also maintains a clear and complete view of your contacts.
Insycle offers a powerful automated solution beyond HubSpot's native capabilities. It manages complex HubSpot child-parent hierarchies, ensuring your CRM always reflects the true structure of business relationships.
While Insycle excels at automating child-parent company associations, its capabilities don't end there. It can also analyze, clean, and standardize your CRM data across various use cases, such as removing duplicate records, updating records in bulk, and cleaning data to ensure accuracy and uniformity.
If you're looking to speed up data management processes in HubSpot, then we invite you to learn more about how Insycle can help revolutionize your Hubspot CRM data management.
