How to Associate Related HubSpot Contacts, Companies, Deals, Tickets, or Custom Objects
Your sales and marketing teams rely on accurately associated records in HubSpot for context in sales conversations and account-based marketing applications. When these associations are missing, prioritizing opportunities is difficult, and your staff fails to engage effectively with important stakeholders.
With Insycle, you can automatically detect and associate HubSpot contacts, companies, deals, and custom objects in bulk, creating relationships between different objects or objects of the same type. This will maintain order in your CRM and give your teams a complete picture of every account.
If the records you want to associate are already in HubSpot, use the Associate app. To associate new records from a CSV while importing, use the Magical Import module.
Associate Contacts to Companies Using the Associate App
To associate existing HubSpot records, use the Associate app. Here, you can associate contacts, companies, deals, and custom objects as needed, including child and parent associations.
Process Summary
- Filter records down to those you want to associate.
- Set rules for making the associations.
- Optionally, copy a value between the associated records.
- Preview and apply the changes to HubSpot.
Step-by-Step Instructions
Navigate to RevOps Acceleration > Associate.
Select the HubSpot database and the object in the top menu. Then explore the templates for an existing solution that may be close to what you need.
Each row in Step 1 is for a field you want to look at to determine whether to include or exclude a record from this task. With this filter, you're telling Insycle what records you would like to associate.
In the below example, contacts that do not have an Associated Company ID but do have a Company Name will be included in the task.
When you click Search, Insycle will list records in the Record Viewer at the bottom of the page. If you change the filter, you need to click the Search button again to refresh the viewer.
With HubSpot, there are two options for creating associations between record types:
- Use a field that should have matching values on each record. For instance, you might select "Company" for contact records, and "Company Name" for company records.
- Use intermediate relationships to fill in missing associations. For example, if you already have relationships between contacts and deals, and also between contacts and companies, you can use these relationships to create associations between deals and companies.
Using Field Values to Match Records and Create Associations
Under Step 2, set up the rules that tell Incycle what records to use, fields to look at, and what criteria the values must meet in order to consider them a match for creating the relationship:
- Action tells Insycle what to do to the HubSpot records that surfaced in Step 1. Add, Remove, or Replace associations. The Replace action removes existing associations and labels and creates new ones based on your rules.
- Associate specifies the type of record you want to create the relationship with. You can associate objects of different types, such as contacts to companies, or objects of the same type, such as deals to deals. In the example above, contacts will be associated with companies.
- Use the HubSpot association Labels to categorize the association relationship. You can add, remove, or set multiple labels in one action.
- Click the Companies Filter button to narrow the company records down to those that would be a good fit for this relationship.
In the Company Filter popup, you could, for example, add the "Company Name" field and set the Condition "exists." This tells Insycle to only consider companies for association if the Company Name field has a value in the database.
Click Search to apply the filter and close the popup. Note that the company filter will not update the results in the Record Viewer, only in your final Review steps. - Click the Selection button to define rules for picking the company if there are multiple matches found.
- Select the Contacts Field you want to try and match with the company record.
- Select the Companies Field with the value that should match the contact field. In the example above, the Company Name field will be used for both the contact and company. The two matching fields are often the same for both record types.
- The Comparison Rule tells Insycle whether the values between the contact and company records must be an Exact Match or Similar Match. In most cases, you'd select Exact Match, but you can learn more about these Comparison Rules in the Pro Tip below.
- In the Ignored field, you can specify parts of a field value to ignore, such as specific text, whitespace, or characters. In the dropdown, check the box for the values you'd like to ignore. In the example above, the Ignore rule tells Insycle to ignore a list of Common Terms that may appear in the Company Name field, such as "LLC," "Inc." or "Co." This is often a necessary field for matching companies. To view or alter the list of Common Terms, click the Terms button at the bottom of the step.
- The Match Parts field tells Insycle whether to match the entire field or just part of it—such as the first or last few words, or first and last characters.
- If no matching company record is found, an association will not be created. In these cases, you can choose to automatically create a new company record based on what is in the Contact record. Check the Create new Companies when no matching is found box to enable. There are a couple of things to note when using this setting:
- This feature only works when associating contacts to companies, not companies to contacts.
- When using the "Exact Match" Comparison Rule, the "Create new..." setting could potentially create duplicates, so you should be thoughtful with the Matching Field and Comparison Rule that you use.
- The Ignored "Common Terms" can be edited using the Terms button.
- Check the Count unmatched Contacts records as Failed box to flag unmatched contacts as "Failed" on the Result popup and in the CSV report. When left unchecked, unmatched records are counted as "Unmodified."
Using Intermediate Relationships to Create Associations
Under Step 2, click the Related tab and configure the rules:
- The Action tells Insycle what to do to the records surfaced in Step 1. You can Add, Remove, or use the Replace action to remove existing associations and create new ones.
- The Association is the relationship you want to create, the one that is missing on the source record. In the below example, we want to create a relationship between deals and companies.
- On the Related From dropdown, select the association that already exists on the source records, and already has the same relationship you want to add to the source records. In this example, the deal records are already associated with contact records, and those contacts are already linked to companies.
- On the Related To dropdown, select the relationship from the associated record to copy to the source record. In this example, we'll copy the contact's associated company to the deal.
Use the HubSpot association Labels to categorize the relationships or filter the related records. A Label option must be selected for each rule. If you don't want any labels applied, use the Unlabeled option.
- Use the Association Labels to categorize the relationship. You can add, remove, or replace one or more labels based on the Action you've selected. In the below example, the new relationship between a deal and company will be labeled as "Primary."
- The Related From Labels act as a filter where only the existing associated records with the matching labels will be used/looked at. In the example, only contact records with a "Decision Maker" label will be used.
- The Related To Labels act as a filter where only relationships with the selected label will be copied to the source record. In this example, only companies with "Primary," or "Branch" labels will be added to deals.
Learn more about Using Existing HubSpot Associations to Fill in Missing Relationships.
If there is valuable information in either of the records you are creating the relationships with, you can automatically copy values between them to avoid errors and save time.
Under Step 3, select the field from the source record type (in the below example, contacts), and the relevant field on the target records (companies). You can choose to copy values from the source record to the target, or target record to the source. In the example, the domain will always be copied from the company to the contact.
The Copy Rule gives you three options:
- Only when [the record you're linking to] field is empty
- Only when [the record you're linking from] field is not empty
- Always copy
The preview CSV will include these fields and specify if the value was copied for each record.
Preview Changes in a CSV Report
Now with the filters and association actions in place, you can preview the changes you will make to your HubSpot data. That way, you can check to ensure the relationships are being created as expected before those changes are made in your live database.
Under Step 4, click the Review button, then select Preview in the popup.
On the Notify tab, add any additional recipients who should receive the CSV (and make sure to hit Enter after each address). You can add colleagues and additional context here.
On the When tab, click the Run Now tab and select which records to apply the change to (in most cases this will be All, but if you have a large number of records, you may just want to do a chunk for a test), then click the Run Now button.
Open the CSV file from your email in a spreadsheet application and review the columns.
When using fields to make associations, the CSV shows how Insycle tried to match each record that matched your filter from Step 1 with the record type you selected in Step 2.
Each row in the CSV includes the Result of the association and a Message with details, the initial record info, the associated record info, and, if configured, the result of the copy operation.
When using existing relationships to make associations, each row in the CSV includes:
- The Result of the action and a Message with details. The below example shows "Added" and "Succeeded," which means an association was made.
- Source record Type (in this example, deals), with the ID, Deal name, and deeplink to the HubSpot record.
- Related Type (contact records), with the ID, email, and deeplink.
- Associated Type of the records to be associated (companies), with the ID, company name, and deeplink.
If you set a copy operation up in Step 3, the CSV will also include info about the copy results.
If the results don't look the way you expected, go back to your filters in Step 1 or functions in Step 2 and try making some adjustments, then preview again.
Apply Changes to HubSpot
If everything in your CSV preview looks correct, return to Insycle and move forward with applying the changes to the live HubSpot data.
Under Step 4, click the Review button again. This time select Update mode.
On the When tab, you should use Run Now the first time you apply these changes to the CRM.
After you've seen the results in HubSpot and you are satisfied with how the operation runs, you can save all of the configurations as a template and set up automation so this association operation runs on a set schedule. Then, you can bundle templates into Insycle Recipes and integrate them into HubSpot Workflows.
Return to the Template menu at the top of the page and click Copy to save your configurations as a new version of whatever template you started with. Then click the pencil to edit your new template name.
Under Step 4, click the Review button, and select Update mode.
On the Notify tab, select the send option appropriate for your automation: Always send, Send when errors, or Do not email.
Add any additional recipients who should receive the CSV (and make sure to hit Enter after each address). You can also provide additional context in the message subject or body.
On the When tab, select Automate and configure the frequency you'd like the template to run. When finished, click Schedule.
Create a template for each segment and association configuration, and then create a Recipe to automatically run them together.
In Step 2, the Comparison Rule defines what kind of likeness to look for when deciding if field values should be considered a match for association.
It's a good idea to start with Exact Match for straightforward matches and then use Similar Match to broaden the search and look for edge cases.
Exact Match looks for values that match exactly, with no differences from one record to the next. Any unique identifying fields should use Exact Match. This is usually your best bet when looking for associations.
Similar Match looks for values that may be close but with a one-character difference (like a typo, extra character, or missing character) and broadens the search. This search behaves like when Google shows results for a slightly different term or says, “Did you mean...”
For example, if a Company Name of “Acme” is found, it could include records with the Company Name values “Akme," "acm," or "Acma” as matches.
Similar Match uses looser criteria that cast a wider net for what can be considered matches. Make sure to carefully review the results to ensure the relationships being created are what you're expecting.
If using ID fields to match, note that they will only work with Exact Match, not Similar Match.
You can specify more than one matching field when making associations in the Associate app.
For example, maybe you want to compare a contact's Website Domain against a Company's Website, along with any listed in the Additional Domains field.
To do this, select the Advanced tab under Step 2. There, you'll be able to add Related Match Fields to catch more associations.
If you have an Associate template set up that is running operations on a large number of records, this can cause unnecessary work for the system and make your automated processes quite slow.
Use the filter under Step 1 to focus only on a relevant segment of records.
Why Filters Are Important
Say you had an automated template set to associate contacts to companies. If the template doesn't specify to ignore contacts that are already associated, it will look at all contacts and redundantly try to re-associate them.
A filter such as "Primary Associated Company ID" "doesn't exist," ensures that Insycle will only look to associate those records that do not already have an association in place. Otherwise, Insycle will scan your entire database, including contacts that already have associations. This will slow your processes down significantly.
Another approach would be to add a filter to associate only contacts that have been updated since the last time the automated template ran. For a template that runs once a week, you could look only at records that have been modified in the last six days.
Instead of—or in addition to—a schedule-based approach, you could use the HubSpot Workflows integration to trigger a Recipe to associate right when the contact is modified.
Associate Contacts to Companies Using the Magical Import Module
If you have a CSV file containing data to be imported as new records, use the Magical Import module to associate people and companies to existing records in your database when you import.
To learn more about the importing process, review the Import new records or update and append to existing from CSV article.
Process Summary
- Upload the CSV file.
- Map the CSV columns to the HubSpot fields and specify how to import the values.
- Select the unique matching criteria.
- Set rules to make associations between CSV and the HubSpot records.
- Optionally, specify formatting changes to make to data during import.
- Import the data with the specified associations to HubSpot.
Step-by-Step Instructions
Select the CSV File for Import
Select the Magical Import module from the left navigation, then select the database and the record type in the top menu.
Click the Choose button and select the CSV file that you would like to import. Uploading a file into Insycle does not import it to the HubSpot CRM right away, instead, you can prepare the data in a variety of ways before actually importing it to HubSpot.
Map CSV Columns to HubSpot Fields
After uploading your CSV data, Insycle analyzes your file and compares the columns in the file to fields in your HubSpot database.
A column is included for each field in the CSV, with the CSV Column header appearing as the top row. Insycle automatically detects the matching HubSpot CRM fields and maps them for you. The second row shows the mapped CRM field names.
If your CSV contains fields that are not matched to fields in HubSpot, a red warning icon will show.
These unmapped fields need to be mapped manually by clicking the dropdown and finding the appropriate HubSpot field. If they remain unmapped, the column will not be imported. If you choose to leave these unmapped, you can remove them by hovering over the column name and clicking the “X”.
Specify How to Import Values for Each Column
With all relevant fields mapped, tell Insycle how to use the data on a field-by-field basis by selecting the Import Mode, in the third row of the table.
Four Import Mode Options
- Update – Update HubSpot records with all non-empty field data contained in the CSV.
- Fill – Import CSV values only when the corresponding field in your HubSpot CRM is empty.
- Overwrite – Insycle will replace any existing data in HubSpot with the data in the CSV—even if the CSV field is empty.
- Append – Import values from the CSV and append (add them to) the existing data already in HubSpot. A typical example of how “Append” is used would be in a “Notes” field, or to add to existing dropdown data without including historical selections in your CSV.
You can also preview and edit the import data directly in Insycle by clicking the pencil icon next to any field when you hover over it.
If a record has errors, the red exclamation point notification will be shown on the left side of the record. When you hover over the red exclamation mark, an explanation of the error will be displayed.
Records that have errors in them will not be imported.
Insycle uses Matching Criteria to compare the CSV with your CRM data and identify existing records for the same entity. The criteria must be "unique identifiers" that would only belong to a single item, such as email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, or ID numbers.
For example, a different individual in the database should not have Maria Smith's email address, phone number, or ID number listed on their contact record. If a contact record shows a match in any of those fields, we recognize that it is Maria Smith's contact record.
Under Step 2 on the Import tab, select the Matching Criteria from the dropdown.
You can set multiple matching rules that are evaluated in order from top to bottom. This allows you to find matches based on various criteria, all in one step.
Note that when using an email field, Insycle will automatically cross-reference any additional email fields in the records for a match. If using a domain field, Insycle will check additional domain fields.
Select the Record Modes to tell Insycle how the imported data should be handled during the import process.
- Update existing and create net new – If unable to find a corresponding record, a new record will be created in HubSpot.
- Only update existing – If a corresponding record is found, it will be updated with the data from your CSV import. Records that are not matched with an existing HubSpot record will not be imported.
- Only create net new – Only records that can not be matched with an existing record in your database will be imported. Records that already exist in your HubSpot database will not be updated.
You can make changes to the CSV data in Insycle before it is uploaded to HubSpot. You could apply formatting to a field, cleanse data, organize, and perform other actions before import. These are the same functions found in the Transform Data module, which you can learn more about here.
On the Functions tab of Step 3, select the Column Name from the CSV file.
Select a Function for each column, telling Insycle how the data should be formatted when it's imported.
In the above example, the settings will:
- Capitalize the last names and company names.
- Standardize country names to the ISO alpha-3 format
- Format phone numbers to the E.164 international standard.
Explore the list of options in the Function dropdown to find formatting options for any field in your CSV.
Click the Apply button to apply any changes made. These changes are applied to your CSV data in Insycle before importing.
Under Step 4, click the Associate tab.
Configure the rules that will create the relationship between the two record types:
1. Select the Action to take. You can Add, Remove, or Replace associations.
2. Click the Associate field and select the type of object you want to create the relationship with. You can associate objects of different types, such as contacts to companies, or objects of the same type, such as deals to deals.
3. Hubspot users will see a Labels field, which is used to name the relationship.
4. In the CSV Column field, select the field from your CSV to identify matches. If you were associating contacts to companies, for example, you would likely choose the “Company” or “Company Name” field from your CSV import.
5. On the Match Field, select the field in HubSpot that should match your CSV value. For example, if you are using the “Company” field from the CSV, you'd want to match that to the “Company” or “Company Name” field in HubSpot.
6. Additionally, you have the option to create a new record in HubSpot when there is no match automatically found by Insycle by checking the Create when no matching is found box.
By default, Insycle will attempt to import all of your CSV data into your database. If there are only a few records you want to apply the association to, return to the table under Step 1 and check the boxes beside the select records.
⚠️ Note that changes are applied to your HubSpot CRM immediately. There is no preview step. To import, click the Import X Contacts button under Step 5.
After the import runs, the Import Result breaks down the import information—how many records you tried to import and how many succeeded, failed, were updated, deleted, or unmodified. Click the Run ID to open a CSV record of the import.
Insycle will generate a CSV report of these changes and email it to you. If you open the CSV file, you can look at the Result column to see how each row of your import was handled.
The Result column may show:
- Created - A new record was created in your CRM
- Updated - An existing record was found and updated with data from the CSV
- Failed - If there is an issue, the Message field will give you details so you can troubleshoot
You can also see the (Before) and (After Update) values side-by-side for each field in your import.
After you've seen the results in HubSpot and you are satisfied with how the operation runs, you can save all of the configurations as a template, to reproduce the same formatting operation in the future.
Insycle uses the Matching Criteria in Step 2 to compare your CSV to your CRM data. Matching Criteria fields must be "unique identifiers." These are data points that could only belong to a single contact—such as email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, or ID numbers.
Additionally, when using an email field, Insycle will automatically cross-reference any additional email fields in the records for a match. If using a domain field, Insycle will check additional domain fields.
When you configure your Matching Criteria rules, the data under Step 1 will refresh, and you'll be able to see which records are already in your CRM. The records that Insycle found will become blue links that will open the record in your CRM.
Important Note
You can select more than one field in each Matching Criteria rule; however, ALL of the fields must match, not just one or some of them. If you include five fields and four of them match, but one doesn't, Insycle will not consider the rule a match.
In this scenario, if you Import using either of the "create net new" record modes, Insycle will create a new record for any CSV rows that don't match all five criteria.
If you use the Only Update Existing mode, there will most likely be few records that match all your criteria, and much of your CSV data will not be imported because Insycle will not be able to find the correct record to update.
Typically, it is best to use a single field for your first Matching Criteria to improve the likelihood of finding existing records in your CRM. Then you can add additional rules to match multiple fields.
If a row in your CSV is not being matched to a CRM record and you know that it should be, there are several potential causes:
-
The Matching Criteria you chose does not match between the CSV and CRM
Have a look at the data in your CRM using the Grid Edit module, adding columns to the layout so you can explore the fields and values. Then, compare this against the columns and values in your CSV to find a reliable but unique field that matches the two sources.
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You are using too many fields in Matching Criteria rule
You can select more than one field in each Matching Criteria rule; however, ALL of the fields must match, not just one or some of them. If you include five fields and four of them match, but one doesn't, Insycle will not consider the rule a match.
Typically, it is best to use a single field for your first Matching Criteria to improve the likelihood of finding existing records in your CRM. Then you can add additional rules to match multiple fields.
-
Your Matching Criteria is too broad
Insycle uses Matching Criteria to compare your CSV to your CRM data. If you're using a field that is not truly unique as Matching Criteria, it's likely that Insycle won't be able to identify one single record as a match. For instance, there could be many people with the first name, "John" in your CRM. This is why uniqueness is key.
When selecting your Matching Criteria, make sure it is truly a "unique identifier." These are data points that would only belong to a single record—such as email address, phone number, street address, or ID number. For companies, it could also be company name, or company domain.
-
There is a syncing issue
To refresh the data in Insycle, navigate to Settings > Sync Status, and next to the account name, click the Sync changes from last day button (lightning bolt icon). Alternatively, you could log out of Insycle and then log back in.
For help re-syncing a specific field, contact support.
Tips for Creating Associations in HubSpot
- There are two ways to create associations between HubSpot records:
- Use a field with a similar value in both records. For example, "Email Domain" on the contact, and "Website Domain" on the company. Then, you can pick those fields to match the records and establish the association.
- Copy associations from existing relationships. For example, if you already have relationships between contacts and deals, and also between contacts and companies, you can use these relationships to create associations between deals and companies.
- You can add, remove, or replace associations with multiple labels in bulk, with one action.
- You can make associations in both directions: for example, contacts to companies, or companies to contacts.
- Though making associations will work in both directions, consider that contacts to companies is the standard direction, and some features (such as the "If Company is Not Found Create New Company" feature) are only designed to work when contacts are being associated to companies.
- For straightforward relationships with obvious matching fields, the direction of the relationship doesn't matter. But in some cases, such as creating associations with custom objects or child and parent companies, the direction may be important.
HubSpot Specific Considerations
Insycle supports associating the following HubSpot object types:
- Contacts
- Companies
- Courses
- Deals
- Line Items
- Listings
- Orders
- Tickets
- Custom Objects
You can create associations between:
- Standard or custom objects of different types (such as the cars custom object with deals)
- Contacts, companies, and deal objects of the same type (contacts to contacts)
- One object and many objects (for example, one company to multiple deals). Learn more about making multiple associations
In HubSpot, you can designate an association as the "Primary" association. This is visible on the record's profile page. The "Primary" tag is a special label that will always appear at the top of association lists and be more visible within the HubSpot UI.
With Insycle, you can add or remove the "Primary" label based on matching rules you configure in Step 2.
Learn more about using the HubSpot Primary label in Insycle.
You can use Insycle to add or remove multiple associations between any objects, including custom objects and objects of the same type (such as parent/child companies or contact-to-contact relationships). For example, you can associate multiple deals with the same company.
You can also set HubSpot Labels to differentiate relationships of the same object types. For example, if one company has two contact associations, one contact can be labeled as "C Suite," and the other as "Decision Maker." You can customize your association labels for each object type from HubSpot.
Learn more about managing HubSpot labels with Insycle.
With Insycle, there are a couple of ways to remove associations and all labels for an association in one step.
On the Simple tab of Step 2, select the Remove action and all relevant labels, including unlabeled ones, in the Labels dropdown.
The Existing tab lets you use existing labels to control which records to add or remove labels on. You can also remove associations from here.
Learn more about using associations and labels in HubSpot.
When working with HubSpot, for every Insycle operation that updates or creates a record, the Run ID will be updated in the custom property, Insycle Run ID.
If the Insycle Run ID doesn't already exist in your HubSpot database, add it as a custom property with the label "Insycle Run ID" to each object type as needed.
This object label is the only requirement for the integration to work properly. It's not dependent on the internal name or underlying API field name.
When using an Insycle Recipe that includes templates for more than one object type, such as companies and contacts, the same Run ID will appear in both HubSpot records.
Advanced How-Tos
Without proper child-parent company associations in place, you lack vital context and may miss opportunities in account-based marketing and sales.
With Insycle, you can automatically detect and create relationships between child companies and parent companies in bulk.
You can associate parent and child records that are already in your CRM with the Associate app, or to associate new records from a CSV, use the Magical Import module.
To learn more, see Associate or Link Parent-Child Companies, Create Accounts Hierarchy and Relationships.
If no matching record is found, you can choose to automatically create a new record based on what is in the source record. The option is located in a different place in each module.
Associate App
Under Step 2 of the Associate app, check the Create new [record] when no matching is found box to enable, then select the field to use for naming the new record.
Magical Import Module
Under Step 4 of the Magical Import module, check the Create when no matching is found checkbox to enable.
When using the Associate app, you can opt to be alerted when records aren’t matched. This may be helpful if you want to investigate and address any records where a relationship has not been created.
Under Step 2 check the Count unmatched records as Failed box.
Then in the Step 4 popup on the Notify tab, you can select the email delivery option “Always send” or “Send when errors.”
When checked, any record where there is no match to create the association will be counted as “Failed.” This will be reflected by a “with Failures” suffix on the report email subject line…
…and a "Failed" Result and "No matching record found (use 'Grid Edit' to troubleshoot)" Message in the CSV report.
When you save this associate configuration as a template and set up automation, the report emails will let you know when a relationship has not been created for a record so you can address it as needed.
Troubleshooting
A "Failed" Result with the Message "Multiple target matches (x)..." or "Multiple source matches..." occurs when multiple records meet your matching specifications. For example, if you were linking contacts to companies, and Insycle found ten company records with the name "Microsoft," it wouldn't know which Microsoft to establish the relationship with.
There are a few options for resolving this issue:
- If there shouldn't be multiples of these records you should first go through the process of merging duplicates before trying to create these relationships.
- If using the Associate app, and there are supposed to be similar but distinct records, you can add another matching field in Step 2 to make the criteria more specific. A record would have to match both field values to be considered appropriate for making the relationship.
- You can also use the Filter in Step 2 of the Associate app to narrow the records to be associated.
In the filter popup, you could, for example, add the "Company name" field and set the Condition, "contains" "HQ." This tells Insycle to only consider companies for association if the Company Name value includes the term "HQ." - In cases where there are multiple target records that could match, you can add Selection rules for picking the appropriate record.
You can create rules in the selection pop-up to choose the most recently created record that has an owner assigned.
An "Unmodified" Result with the Message "Unmodified, no matching record found (use 'Grid Edit' to troubleshoot)" result occurs when there aren’t any records that meet your matching specifications.
You can examine the data in the unmatched records and troubleshoot using the Grid Edit module. Look at different fields and values to identify why your associate setup didn’t work for the record. Then decide what match options could work or if some cleanup is needed.
Learn more about reviewing your data using the Grid Edit module.
When using the Associate app, you have the option under Step 2 to Count unmatched records as Failed. When checked, any record where there is no match to create the association will be counted as “Failed.” This will be reflected by a "Failed" Result with the Message "No matching record found (use 'Grid Edit' to troubleshoot)" message in the CSV report.
You can examine the data in the unmatched records and troubleshoot using the Grid Edit module. Look at different fields and values to identify why your associate setup didn’t work for the record. Then decide what match options could work or if some cleanup is needed.
Learn more about reviewing your data using the Grid Edit module.
When using existing relationships to make associations, a "Failed" Result with the Message, "Not related to [record type] through [record type] association" indicates the record associated to your selected source record type does not have the association you are looking for.
For example, if you are setting up the process to associate deals to companies by looking at the contact records, if a contact doesn’t have a company associated with it, there is nothing to copy to the deals.
In the Associate app, if you click the Review button under Step 4 and are met with an "Association Validation Error" message, it's most likely that you forgot to set the Labeling for one or more of your association rules.
Under Step 2, each part of the association rule must have one or more Label options selected. If you don't want any labels applied, use the Unlabeled option.
Remember, the Association Labels categorize the relationship, the Related From Labels act as a filter on the related record, and the Related To Labels act as a filter on the relationships to be copied to the source record. For more detail, see Step 2 under the Associate Contacts to Companies Using the Associate App section above.
Bulk associations require that you have a field that you can use to match the two records. For instance, you might select "Company" for contact records, and "Company Name" for company records. You then use these two fields to associate the two records.
But what do you do if you have no obvious matching field between the two record types that you would like to associate?
This is a fairly common scenario. For example, maybe you would like to associate contacts not only with the company that they work for but with the parent company as well. In this scenario, it is not very likely that you capture the parent company on the Contact record, which means that you may have no field to use to match the association. As a result, you'll need to create a custom field for contacts and companies, such as "Custom Parent Company." Ideally, if child companies are already associated with parent companies, you'll be able to pull this data from your company records and populate both custom fields using your CRM's automation features.
Then, you can use the Custom Parent Company field for both contacts and companies to make the match.
The key is finding a data point that would allow you to match the associations, even if it is only available for one record type. Then you can create the custom matching fields that allow you to make the associations.
It can take a while for Insycle to find and match records if the fields being used to identify the relationship have very long values. The longer the values the longer it takes Insycle to process the data and generate the results. This might come up when using links with long ID numbers, LinkedIn bios, or other URLs with long strings (e.g., https://www.linkedin.com/in/svadin%C3%ADr-n%C4%9Bmec-1234b31a3/).
If the end of the values are all unique you can try and speed this up by using the Match Parts parameter under Step 2, which will limit the comparison to the last several characters.
Or use the Ignored > Text (Substrings) parameter, and click the Terms button.
On the Ignored Text tab of the popup, add the common portion of the URL or text string.
Frequently Asked Questions
You can use any field in your database to create relationships between records, you just need to figure out which field in each record type will have the same value. For instance, you might select "Company" for contact records, and "Company Name" for company records. Or you could use "Email Domain" on the contact, and "Website Domain" on the company.
Commonly used fields for linking include company names, company domains, and company URLs.
Yes. You can associate in either direction.
Though making relationships will work in both directions, consider that contacts to companies is the standard direction, and some features (such as the "If Company is Not Found Create New Company" feature) are only designed to work when contacts are being associated to companies.
Or in some cases, such as creating relationships with custom objects or child and parent companies, the direction may be important.
Yes, Insycle can help manage parent-child associations. For more information, see the Bulk Associate Child to Parent Companies in HubSpot article.
Yes. If no matching record is found, you can choose to automatically create a new record based on what is in the source record. Under Step 2, check the Create new [object type] when no matching is found box to enable, then select the field to use for naming the new record.
If you checked the Create new [object type] when no matching is found box in Step 2, the created records can be identified by a custom property value in HubSpot.
When Insycle creates a new record during the association process, the Original Source Data 2 property value will be "Insycle Data Management."
Currently, it is not possible to access, update, or associate HubSpot activities in Insycle.
Yes. With Insycle's Associate app, you can create advanced association templates and run them from within HubSpot Workflows.
You’ll need to configure association templates in Insycle, bundle them into a Recipe, and insert the Recipe into your HubSpot Workflow.
Learn how in the Associate Records in HubSpot Workflows article.
Additional Resources
Related Help Articles
- HubSpot Multiple Associations and Labels
- Using Existing HubSpot Associations to Fill in Missing Relationships
- Bulk Associate Child to Parent Companies in HubSpot
- Associate HubSpot Deals with Line Items and Automatically Copy Values
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