Hundreds of leads are filling your CRM monthly. The marketing team is doing excellent work with its lead-generation efforts.
But there's a problem.
Your sales team struggles to schedule demos, let alone close deals. They're wasting precious hours reaching out to the wrong people in organizations and sending emails to leads who are already customers.
The root cause: disconnected contacts and companies in your CRM.
Record association links related records to each other, for example, connecting help tickets and deals to company accounts. In the above scenario, you'd need to connect the names of individuals to the companies they work for.
Contact-to-company is the most common and necessary associated relationship in CRMs. Without it, sales and marketing teams will struggle to personalize account-based marketing (ABM) programs that can turn leads into customers. And missing associations even hurt revenue—44% of organizations stated they lost over 10% in annual revenue because of poor-quality CRM data.
One solution is to use the HubSpot contact-to-company association feature that allows users to connect records on the fly. So the next time sales reps communicate with multiple contacts at a company, they can link the contact records to the organization record without skipping a beat.
The HubSpot contact associations feature can keep your CRM data functional. Let’s explore how it works.
The Business Impact of Missing Contact-to-Company Associations
Missing contact-to-company associations may seem like a small problem, but they can impact your revenue significantly.
Here's an overview of how unassociated contacts and companies can hurt your bottom line:
- No single source of truth: Missing associations create fragmented customer views. For example, if a lead is not tied to a company record, your sales teams won't know if that lead is already in the middle of a deal.
- Missed opportunities to convert leads and build relationships: Your marketing team will miss opportunities for engagement and personalization if you have 70 unassociated records with "VP of Product Design" job titles floating in your database. Without those associations, these leads will be excluded from a targeted marketing campaign.
- Broken automation and workflows: Breaks hinder the ability to nurture leads and customers at scale.
- Poor customer experience: Disjointed information and interactions hurt the customer experience and give the impression of unprofessionalism.
- Problems with forecasting sales, routing leads, and closing deals: Duplicates inflate forecasts, cause leads to get routed to different reps, and ultimately hurt your ability to close deals.
Fortunately, it's never too late to fix these issues. Let's review the steps you can take to resolve these problems.
How To Associate Contacts to Companies in HubSpot
You can fix unassociated contacts and companies in HubSpot in several steps:
Step 1: Go to Your Records
First, log into your HubSpot account, then do the following to access each type of record. Go to Contacts and select Contacts to find contact records.
Then select the name of the record to which you want to add an association.
Step 2: Add an Association
Look in the right sidebar and click the + Add button next to the contact’'s association card. This is where you will add the contact's associations.
If you don't see the object's association card, you can customize the right sidebar to include it if you have a Professional or Enterprise plan.
To create and associate a new record, go to your right panel and do the following:
- Select the Create new tab.
- Input the details for your new record, such as the email, name, or phone number. Then you can set an association label.
- Next, select Create a new record. If you’re planning to create and associate more records, select Create and add another.
If you want to associate existing records, go to the right panel and select the record that you would like to associate from the dropdown.
Now, you'll see the associated records in the right sidebar, Overview tab, and the column located on the object home page.
Automatic Association: How Does It Work?
Automatic association is a feature in HubSpot that removes the need to associate records manually.
The CRM uses the contact email address field to associate the record with a company. Then, it automatically creates associations between the contact and company records.
HubSpot’s automatic associations will catch a lot of associations, but not all. So, it'll require some manual association management to keep your database clean.
How Insycle Gives You Complete Control Over Bulk Contact-to-Company Associations in HubSpot
You need flexibility to associate records in the best way for your business—and to do so at scale. But HubSpot alone won't allow you to achieve this. That’s due to a few reasons.
- HubSpot requires manual association of records, which is time-consuming.
- Its automatic associations are limited to specific data fields, leading to missed connections.
- Its lack of complete associations can impair customer experience and deal closure.
- Its workflows don't support the automatic creation of associations.
However, Insycle offers advanced association features to address these limitations.
Let's take a closer look at how Insycle empowers your marketing, support, success, and sales teams with more control over bulk contact-to-company associations.
Use Bulk Association in Flexible Ways
Wasting months of your team's time manually fixing record associations hurts your bottom line. Unfortunately, HubSpot's limitations hinder your ability to automate this process.
With Insycle, you can associate contacts and companies using unique identifiers, such as email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and ID numbers. This allows you to find more unassociated records than you would using standard features.
For instance, you can match records based on a contact's email address domain and link it to a company's website domain to create associations.
Then there's the option to do an exact match or "fuzzy" match, which finds matching fields that don't match exactly. For example, a record for Catherine Dunn that's misspelled as Katherine Dunn will be identified and associated with the same individual.
You can even ignore the domain component or search for top-level domains (TLDs) or second-level domains (SLDs) to match email domains, such as @microsoft.com and @microsoft.co.uk.
Other ways Insycle advances your HubSpot contact-to-company associations include:
- The ability to match records using related fields, such as creating associations based on the website/domain field and the additional domains field.
- Incorporating a mix of fields for better accuracy, like domain and country.
- Importing associations from CSV files from other systems and specifying which fields to use to create the associations.
- Creating new associations automatically based on existing associations in HubSpot, using Insycle's filter to match contact, company, and deal records to show the triangular relationship between a contact and deal, which is essential for your sales team.
- Filtering records using association labels to get granular with the associations you create. For instance, using the branch label to focus on deals associated with franchise companies while excluding headquarters or other corporate entities.
Create Associations in HubSpot Workflows Automatically
Already have Workflows set up in HubSpot?
Insycle can accurately link contact, company, deal, and custom object records within existing HubSpot Workflows.
For instance, you can build an association workflow template where new contact records are automatically associated with a company record as soon as they submit a form and before your sales team reaches out.
Here are other ways you can use Insycle to enhance your HubSpot Workflows:
- Use pre-built templates or create custom templates for various associations in the Bulk Operations module to associate records by domain, company name, or associated company ID.
- Employ templates to match contacts to companies by email domains, ignoring TLD differences, or use the company name field while excluding common corporate suffixes.
- Associate contacts with deals based on company IDs and link child companies to parent companies in bulk.
- Combine multiple association templates into an Insycle Recipe, which can run on a schedule for systematic and organized associations. A Recipe is a collection of Insycle templates that execute in the order you set.
Replace Errant Associations in Bulk
Inaccurate records lead to sales teams wasting time contacting the wrong people. Plus, it hurts the marketing teams' ABM campaigns by leaving out key contacts that can push deals forward.
Unfortunately, this happens more often than you might think, thanks to manual data entry errors, CSV imports containing incorrect data, and integrations that wrongfully associate contacts automatically.
Insycle eliminates this problem by wiping and replacing all existing associations, including records with several labels. This allows you to remove the primary and unlabeled associations in one go, and then replace them with the correct associations.
If you don't want to do a complete reset, you can filter data so only the records you want updated are included. For example, using the email domain filter, you can filter down records associated with a company's subsidiary.
Then, only the records associated with the parent company containing the subsidiary's email domain are updated.
With filtering options, this bulk action grants your sales and marketing teams maximum control over removing errant associations.
Find and Create Missing Associations Based on Existing Links Between Records
Missing associations in your database remove the single source of truth for your sales team. They'll have to do extra legwork to identify which contacts are associated with which accounts and deals. For instance, they may find a contact is already associated with a deal, but since it isn't associated with the company recorded in the deal, the sales team reaches out to them thinking they're a new lead.
This makes the customer experience in your organization subpar.
Thankfully, there's a way to fix missing associations in bulk using Insycle's ability to create associations based on your database's existing associations. This locates overlooked connections and ensures your records are updated and complete.
For instance, to ensure contacts are accurately connected to company deals, you can use Insycle to associate contacts to deals when their listed company is associated with a deal.
But what if you don't know which records are missing associations?
Insycle's powerful association detection will find all your free-floating records that should be associated with other records. It does this by associating records using any field in your database—not just contact names and email addresses. And it continues working in the background to find more associations as new ones are added to your database, keeping your HubSpot CRM current.
Turn Your HubSpot CRM Into a Database of Truth for Your Teams
HubSpot is an excellent CRM tool for businesses, but it has limitations that can create challenges down the road. Companies that adopt Insycle can fill in the gaps in their HubSpot CRM, improving sales and marketing efficiency.
Insycle is the missing link that improves records in your HubSpot database. It does this by:
- finding and creating associations between records;
- filling in missing information;
- removing duplicate records;
- cleaning up your data by formatting names, companies, job titles, phone numbers, and emails; and
- lead routing.
So whether you want to declutter your CRM, automate complex workflows, or ensure data accuracy, Insycle's versatile platform can do it. Don't miss the opportunity to transform your HubSpot operations. See for yourself by signing up for a free trial to explore Insycle's robust data management features.
