Bad associations can be crippling for account-based marketing (ABM) teams, but fixing them is incredibly difficult.
First, you must identify the bad associations in your database—associations between records that are inaccurate and should not exist. That is not always straightforward. Then, you have to remove all the bad associations you’ve identified. Finally, you need to create new associations for those records. It’s a multi-step process that becomes increasingly difficult if you have to deal with advanced situations like child/parent associations or multiple association labels.
While fixing associations can be very frustrating, it’s absolutely critical. Errantly associated contacts create confusion among your teams. They cause customers to receive the wrong information from your company, resulting in diminished brand reputation in their eyes. Bad associations disrupt every step of the customer journey.
These inaccurate associations can end up in your database for several reasons. A team member may make a mistake when manually associating records. An outside integration might create contact or company records which are then wrongly associated. Data may become outdated. For example, email marketing databases decay by 22.5% each year. Perhaps a contact’s record is still associated with a company they have left. Or contact records are associated with duplicate company records that are then not enrolled in marketing and sales processes. HubSpot’s automatic association feature can also create duplicate company records when the contact’s email domain does not match the website URL.
Regardless of how your HubSpot CRM associations became jumbled, you need to fix them. And wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that in one simple step, rather than three? But before you do that, let’s look at how incorrectly associated records can impact your business. Then we’ll show you a way to fix them efficiently.
Incorrectly associated records profoundly impact any organization.
They prevent your sales teams from finding the right context for sales conversations. Some sales and marketing communications may contain outright incorrect information, potentially endangering the entire opportunity.
Stakeholders will be left out of ABM campaigns when they are associated with the wrong company. Across your organization, your team will lose time digging through multiple records to double-check context before sending communications. You may have problems scoring leads and prioritizing opportunities, especially when the stakeholders associated with the account factor into those scores.
Customers will feel these issues seeping into the customer experience at every step in the process, impacting their feelings about your company and the likelihood of future business with their account. And there is no avoiding problems with associations without a maintenance plan. Over time, the quality of your associations will consistently erode.
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Bad associations are likely being created in your database from many sources:
And while these association issues from a range of sources are enough to make you want to tear your hair out, more advanced HubSpot association features further complicate the situation.
For example, installing a child-parent company association hierarchy adds another layer that complicates the process. You need to identify incorrectly associated child companies, remove those associations, and recreate the correct child-to-parent association.
HubSpot’s association labels make things more difficult as well, especially if you use multiple labels. For instance, you might label an association for a company as both “Branch” and “Retail” to help you better categorize associated records.
Whether your implementation uses advanced association features or not, eventually you’ll need a plan for addressing association issues and cleaning up what you have in HubSpot CRM.
But that’s often easier said than done.
Simply knowing that you have errant associations that need to be fixed isn’t enough to be confident that you can fix them.
You need more information.
Without the answers to these questions, you can’t know how much effort will be required to fix the problem. But even once you’ve dug in and obtained the answers, rectifying the situation is still a long process.
First, you have to identify the bad associations in your database. But how do you do that? If you’re lucky, you can pinpoint some ways to identify bad associations using data, such as an email domain not matching the company website. However, for many bad associations, there will be no consistent or obvious way to identify them in bulk. To find them, your team may need to conduct a painstaking manual review. But this is unrealistic when you’re dealing with a CRM with tens of thousands of associations.
But let’s say you’ve already identified the associations and are ready to remove them. You can’t just remove associations alone. You first have to remove the association labels, including primary associations, which are also considered a label. Once the labels are removed, then you can remove the unlabeled associations. These multiple passes are time-consuming and prone to errors when performing them on your database segments.
HubSpot does not offer a feature that allows you to remove or replace bad associations in bulk. As a result, many companies end up handling this process manually. Alternatively, if you subscribe to HubSpot’s Operations Hub, you can custom-code solutions there. Using HubSpot's API, you could also develop software to handle this in bulk. But both are large investments and are unlikely to identify 100% of your bad associations. You’d still need to supplement these options with a manual process.
But what if you could wipe the slate clean by removing associations, then re-associating from scratch?
Insycle makes fixing bad associations easy, allowing you to wipe existing associations, including those with multiple labels, and replace them in one single step, using the “Replace” action in Insycle.
For example, to remove existing associations, you can select to remove both the primary and the unlabeled association together in one step.
The Replace feature allows you to clean up the old associations in bulk and automatically. It removes existing associations and re-creates the associations on the target records.
Let’s say you have many records associated with Adidas that should really be associated with their subsidiary company, Reebok. Using the Replace feature, you could remove the bad associations and reassociate those records in one step.
First, you can filter your data to only the records you want to update. In this example, we would filter down to records associated with Nike but have an email domain of Reebok.com.
Filter HubSpot CRM down to records that are associated with Nike but have an email domain for its subsidiary company, Reebok.
If you want a complete reset of associations, you can remove this filter to wipe-and-replace associations for their entire database.
Then, you can use the Replace feature to remove both primary and unlabeled associations from those records while matching the email domain of the contact to the company domain.
Use the Replace feature to remove primary and unlabeled associations, then create new ones in one step.
Without the Replace feature, the typical process is three steps. First, you’d remove existing primary and labeled associations, then remove unlabeled associations, before finally creating new, accurate associations.
Bad HubSpot associations create confusion among your teams, reduce the effectiveness of ABM campaigns, and hurt the customer’s experience at every step of the customer journey.
But identifying and fixing bad associations is difficult and time-consuming.
Insycle makes it easy to identify bad associations using rules, remove the existing associations, and re-associate to the correct records in one simple step using the Replace feature.
But Insycle is more than just an association management tool.
It's a complete HubSpot data management solution helping you identify issues in your database, collaborate with team members, and fix data issues in bulk. Then, you can use Insycle to automate your most critical data management processes.
Without Insycle, the cost of bad data is a major blind spot for marketing and sales leaders and a roadblock for execution by their teams.
Want to fix your bad associations and improve your association management strategies in HubSpot? Learn more about how Insycle allows for deep, custom association management for ABM teams.