Decoding HubSpot’s New Features: Associations and Business Units

HubSpot is the leading customer relationship management platform that helps businesses simplify complex processes, build lasting relationships with customers, and empower them to reach their goals.

With HubSpot’s CRM in your corner, you’re already one step ahead of your competitors. However, one thing we know about HubSpot, is that they love adding new features and enhancements to make their products a notch up.

They recently announced at INBOUND 2021, the new enterprise-grade features and updates to help businesses better align their data, channels, teams, and easily adapt to every phase of growth.

However, we’ll discuss the two main features – Business Units and Associations.

In this blog post, we’ll decode these two new awesome features and how it helps businesses to grow – bigger, faster, and better.

What are Associations?

Associations make it easier for you to make your CRM mirror the way your business runs. Sometimes, a contact is associated with more than one job role or one organization. They can be sales representatives for one business, and be the marketing director for another one. With the association feature, you’ll have the flexibility to associate multiple companies with a single contact and deal. The major challenge that HubSpot’s customers were facing was associating contacts and companies with multiple records such as deals and tickets. With HubSpot’s association feature, you’ll have the flexibility on how you can identify that on record, create a complete picture of your customer interaction, and improve your ability to market.

What are Business Units?

Business unit is for companies that have multiple divisions or brands serving separate markets or regions and would like to be managed under one parent account. With a business unit, marketers can manage multiple brands to ensure more consistent and targeted experiences for their audiences. Also, it helps to keep marketing teams and their respective assets distinct, as you don’t need different user permissions or email subscription preferences for each brand.

Why Use Associations and Business Units for Your Business Operations?

By using associations and business units in your business operations, you can run cross-sell and up-sell campaigns and create as many associations for better CX. Let’s look at some practical use cases that make the associations and business units a great addition for teams.

Reasons to Use Business Units

With the business unit, you can:

• Easily segment contacts by brand and run up-sell and cross-sell campaigns across your entire customer base.
• Create unique templates and brand assets like logos, making it easier to carry your individual brand identity across all campaign assets.
• Manage subscriptions across the business unit. With the business unit, you can ensure that preference pages, subscription types, and statuses are independent of each other to streamline customer contact preferences.
• Organize your marketing assets and create reports to understand your performance across your business and even across individual brands.

Overall, business units make it much easier for companies with various divisions to operate from one HubSpot account, without the need to build complex forms and set up custom properties for email subscriptions.

Reasons to Use Associations

With associations, you can:

• Get a holistic picture of your contacts to get the right context and identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
• Get a complete understanding of a person’s job role and any previous communication to provide them with a better customer experience.
• Personalize interactions based on prior communication and purchase history.
• Keep your CRM organized by associating contacts who are associated with several organizations as a single contact, ultimately reducing redundancy and duplication.
• Automatically associate your contacts whose email addresses end with the same domain.

Associations allow you to unleash the power of automation with contact, company, and deal workflows. Usually, marketers had limited control over to whom marketing emails were delivered to, from associated records in HubSpot. Now, with the associations, marketers have more flexibility and control.

How Do Associations Work in HubSpot?

HubSpot allows you to form as many associations as you need to appropriately organize your contacts. It includes:

• Between Companies
• Between Contacts
• Between Objects (Standard or Custom)
• Between Tickets
• Between Deals

Also, associations allow you to create labels that signify a person’s role within a company, including:

• Director
• Board Member
• Investor
• Advisor
• Decision Maker
• Point of Contact
• Employee

To use this feature, you need to have super admin permission. Once you do, you can easily early access its beta version. The existing associations will remain the same, however, for new ones, you can create labels and can record up to 10,000 records.

How Do Business Units Work in HubSpot?

HubSpot allows you to create business units if you have super admin permissions. Before getting started, make sure to associate the brand domain you want to connect with the business unit.

• In your HubSpot account, you can create a business unit and select the brand domain you want to associate the business unit with.
• In your business unit settings, you can manage your existing business units (renaming or deleting a business unit, customizing branding for business units)

When you create a business unit, the business unit’s contact property will automatically be created in your account. You can refine your contacts by business unit. Also, you can automatically set this property when a contact submits a form associated with a specific business unit.

HubSpot’s new features have been crafted with specific goals and a customer-centric approach in mind. These new add-ons will allow businesses to operate efficiently and orchestrate a comprehensive CRM strategy through the HubSpot platform.

Wish to Enhance Your Marketing Efforts With HubSpot’s Associations and Business Units? Let’s Talk!