The ability to create meaningful associations between HubSpot records isn’t just a luxury—it's a necessity.
Associations serve as the backbone for a 360-degree customer view, allowing businesses to understand their customers from multiple angles. This comprehensive view is crucial for account-based marketing (ABM), sales, and service strategies, where personalized interactions can make or break customer relationships. And ABM is becoming the status quo in B2B companies, where 58% of marketers have integrated their demand gen and ABM operations. And 92% of companies recognize the importance of ABM, according to a DemandBase study.
HubSpot allows you to add associations between records, such as linking a contact to a company, deal, or a service ticket. Additionally, HubSpot allows you to automatically associate contacts to companies by matching the contact’s email domain value to the company's website domain.
However, often, companies require more advanced ways to identify and create associations. They need to associate records automatically, based on predefined conditions or triggers, to ensure that records aren’t left free-floating, without the proper associations. Or, they may have partial associations in place among related records. Maybe a company is associated with a deal, but none of the contacts that are connected to the company are connected to the deal. This adds extra steps to support and sales processes and makes it more likely that important context will be missed in conversations with customers.
Otherwise, their sales and support teams will be working with incomplete context and the customer experience will suffer. Manual methods simply aren’t enough to ensure that all records are correctly associated at all times.
Insycle fills this gap by offering robust solutions for automating every type of association between HubSpot records. Whether you're looking to enhance your ABM strategy, streamline your sales funnel, or optimize customer service, Insycle has got you covered.
In this article, we will cover how Insycle helps you to:
With Insycle, you can create associations flexibly and automatically, using any field as a matching field in HubSpot CRM. Additionally, you’ll be able to match fields in advanced ways, so that you can catch more records with missing associations than you would using standard association features.
You associate records by looking for matching data in specific fields. For example, you can match contact records to company records using the contact’s email domain and the company’s website domain to identify records that should be associated in HubSpot.
Exact matches are often the low-hanging fruit. But what about situations where the fields don't match exactly? Traditional methods struggle with these inexact matches, but with Insycle, you can navigate this complexity with ease.
You also have advanced tools for flexible matching. This includes similar matching (instead of exact), and the ability to ignore certain aspects of fields to find more potential matches. For example, if you were matching website domains, you could instruct insycle to ignore the domain component and only look at the prefix so that you could reliably match domains like Microsoft.com and Microsoft.co.uk.
For global brands that operate in multiple countries, Insycle allows you to use a combination of fields for more accurate associations. For example, you can associate records based on both the domain and the country. This is particularly useful for multinational corporations that have different branches or subsidiaries across the globe. By using both the "Domain" and "Country" fields, you can ensure that the associations are not just accurate but also relevant to the specific geographic market.
Insycle also takes it up another notch by offering the ability to match using related fields. For instance, you can create associations based on the "Website/Domain" field and the "Additional Domains" field. The same logic applies to contact information; you can associate records based on "Phone Number" and "Mobile Phone Number," ensuring that you capture all possible points of contact.
Field-based associations are not just a technical feature; they're a strategic asset. They enable businesses to create more nuanced and targeted associations, which in turn power more effective marketing campaigns, sales strategies, and customer service efforts.
Imagine a scenario where you have a contact associated with a company, and that same company is also associated with a deal. The missing leg in this triangular relationship is the association between the contact and the deal. You need to ensure that this information is always at the fingertips of your sales team, who may interact with several stakeholders within a company in order to close a deal.
While HubSpot allows you to create these associations manually, doing so for a large number of records can be cumbersome and time-consuming. An automated solution to identify and create these associations will save your teams time while ensuring that they are never put in situations where they are engaging with customers without required context. Insycle can automate the process, effectively completing the triangle.
Insycle also takes it a step further by allowing you to use association labels as filters. This enables you to be highly specific about which associations to create. For example, by selecting the “branch” label, you can focus solely on associating deals with franchise companies while excluding their headquarters or other corporate entities. This level of granularity is invaluable for businesses that require precise targeting and segmentation.
Then, this process can be automated to run either on a set schedule, or be automatically triggered within HubSpot Workflows. This eliminates the need for manual intervention and ensures that your records are always up-to-date and interconnected.
Automating these complex associations is a must-have for advanced ABM and sales strategies. By ensuring that deals are correctly associated with both contacts and companies, sales and marketing teams can tailor their outreach and campaigns more effectively.
Additionally, for e-commerce and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, the ability to detect and create associations based on existing associations between other record types is a game-changer. It allows them to automatically attach purchases to both individual contacts and the companies that employ them. This is particularly useful for B2B e-commerce platforms where purchases are often made on behalf of a company, rather than an individual, and are represented by Deals in HubSpot CRM.
While associations between existing records are crucial, there are times when businesses need associations to be identified and set when importing records from other systems. Manually associating each record in such scenarios would be a Herculean task, fraught with the risk of human error. This is where Insycle's CSV import feature comes into play, offering a streamlined and efficient way to manage bulk associations.
When importing new records or updating existing ones from a CSV file using Insycle’s Magical Import module, you can specify which fields should be used for creating associations. This means you're not just limited to default fields like "Email" or "Company Name." You can use any field that makes sense for your specific use case.
This feature is particularly useful for businesses that are migrating data from another CRM to HubSpot or that are integrating multiple data sources. For example, if you're merging customer data from an e-commerce platform and an email marketing tool into HubSpot, you can use Insycle's CSV import feature to ensure that all records are correctly associated in HubSpot while avoiding creating duplicates of existing records. This saves time and ensures data integrity, two factors that are critical for effective CRM management.
In a fast-paced business environment, the ability to execute actions immediately can be a significant advantage. Insycle's HubSpot Workflows automation integration allows for just that. With a few clicks, you can set up workflows that automatically create or update associations in real time immediately after new records are created in HubSpot. This is particularly useful for time-sensitive operations, such as associating a new lead with a sales rep or linking a freshly closed deal with a post-sale service ticket.
While immediate execution in Workflows is powerful, there are scenarios where scheduled automation makes more sense. Perhaps you want to batch process associations at the end of the day, or maybe you prefer to run certain automations on a weekly basis to align with reporting cycles. Insycle offers schedule-based automation options that can be set to run hourly, daily, or monthly.
HubSpot association automation provides businesses with unparalleled flexibility. Workflow- and time-based automation are not just features; they're strategic tools that can significantly impact your business operations. By automating associations, you free up valuable time and resources that can be better spent on customer engagement, data analysis, and other high-impact activities.
In any CRM system, data integrity is paramount. Errant or incorrect associations can lead to a host of problems from skewed analytics to ineffective marketing campaigns and even lost sales opportunities. While HubSpot allows you to manually remove these incorrect associations, doing so can be a tedious and time-consuming process, especially when dealing with a large volume of records.
Insycle offers a robust solution to this problem by automatically replacing errant associations for you. Instead of sifting through records one by one to identify and correct mistakes, you can set up Insycle to do this automatically. The platform identifies incorrect associations based on the criteria you set and replaces them with the correct ones, all without any manual intervention required.
Not only does this save time, but it also significantly reduces the risk of human error.
There are times when you may need to remove existing associations without necessarily replacing them. Perhaps you're restructuring your sales territories, or maybe you're cleaning up your CRM to align with a new marketing strategy. Whatever the reason, manually removing these associations in HubSpot can be a cumbersome task, especially when dealing with a large dataset.
Insycle delivers a hassle-free way to remove unwanted associations without replacing them. With just a few clicks, you can set up Insycle to automatically identify and remove associations based on the criteria you define. This eliminates the need for manual intervention and ensures that your CRM remains clean and streamlined.
Association automation is a powerful tool for streamlining operations and improving efficiency, but it's not foolproof. When you're automating complex tasks like record associations, it's crucial to have a system in place to monitor when things don't go as planned. This allows you to adjust your automation rules or intervene manually to correct errors, ensuring that your CRM data remains accurate and reliable.
Insycle offers a proactive solution to this challenge with its alert email feature. If an automated association fails for any reason, Insycle can immediately send an alert email to notify you of the issue. This real-time notification allows you to quickly identify the problem and take corrective action, minimizing the impact on your operations. You do this by instructing Insycle to count unmatched records as”Failed,” triggering the email alert.
Insycle also offers continuous monitoring of associations with the Customer Data Health Assessment. The assessment allows you to watch for exceptions in specific categories on an ongoing basis.
The ability to receive immediate notifications for failed associations is invaluable for businesses that rely on accurate data for decision-making.
Automation is a powerful tool, but it's always wise to test your configurations before fully committing. Insycle understands this need for caution, which is why it offers a Preview Mode.
Preview Mode allows you to run your association automations in a test environment, showing you exactly what changes will be made before they're actually executed. This gives you the opportunity to fine-tune your settings and ensure everything is configured correctly, minimizing the risk of errors.
Another valuable feature offered by Insycle is the ability to copy data from one associated record to another. For instance, if you have a contact associated with a company, you can easily copy relevant information—like industry type or customer status—from the company record to the contact record, or vice versa.
This feature streamlines data management and ensures consistency across your associated records, making it easier to segment your database and personalize your marketing and sales efforts.
The ability to efficiently manage and utilize your CRM data is more crucial than ever. Associations between records serve as the linchpin for a multitude of operations, from marketing and sales to customer service.
Whether you're looking to create complex triangular associations, automate associations based on field values, or even clean up errantly associated data, Insycle has a solution for you. With additional features like Preview Mode and the ability to copy data between associated records, you gain an unprecedented level of control and flexibility over your CRM data.
But Insycle delivers much more than just association. It’s a complete data management platform, providing insight into your data quality blind spots, giving your teams confidence in your CRM data, and freeing them to focus on more strategic tasks.
We invite you to learn more about how Insycle can help you improve your HubSpot data management and improve operations across your organization.