Automated Parent / Child association

[COHagan8]

Hi all,

I’m building a workflow where ChatGPT identifies whether a company is a parent or a child.
That part works.

Now I want to auto-associate them — and I’m stuck.

• Domain matching doesn’t work (parent & subsidiaries often share the same domain)

• Company name matching doesn’t work (messy CRM, inconsistent naming)

My question here would be:

Does anyone have an idea what signals could actually work here? .

Thanks! 

[SteveHTM · Accepted solution]

@COHagan8 - I agree this is a thorny issue. The Single domain multi-tenant issue exists everywhere. And I have been forced to conclude that the Parent/Child functionality in HubSpot is too weak and fragile to really support the real world effectively.

I have adopted two solutions at my clients, based on variations of this domain and organizational hierarchy problem:

- [scalable approach] Create at least one custom object to represent intermediate tiers of the organization - office locations vs corporate location for example. The custom oject regime can be set up to suit the business type - I've done this for franchises, car dealer networks, healthcare chains, etc. You can associate Contacts either with the organizationall sub-entity, or corporate level, or both. I have argued in the Ideas community tha this option should be one of the sem-custom object templates now available, which would make it accessible to non-enterprise HubSpot instances.

- [less optimal] Create a an artifical location subdomain - dallas.company.com/boston.company.com - for each child-type organization, and reserve company.com for the parent. This can work well in organizations with only one tier of hierarchy, but requires some careful explicit association logic (don't use the HubSpot default) to make sure that contacts get tied to the right organizational entity. Again, I feel this is weak and can be error prone.

Hope this is helpful.

Steve

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Hey @COHagan8 - interesting project here! +1 for what @SteveHTM offered. I see a lot of folks frustrated by this feature limitation in HubSpot. I was thinking since you're already using a gen AI tool, maybe working with another one might help. 

Since we know that reliable signals for auto-associating parent and child companies extend beyond domains and names to include firmographics, keywords, and external enrichment data, I'm thinking about tools like Claude, (which can now write to HubSpot!) Make, or Tray to help. They could maybe help with your auto-associating by integrating AI enrichment services into HubSpot workflows. I also know Insycle has bulk parent-child fixes, dedupe beyond domain and Workflow integration for auto-association.

You should be able to use HubSpot workflows triggered by new companies where ChatGPT tags parent/child. Enroll based on tag, then branch: query enrichment APIs for signals, compute similarity scores (like maybe via Make's AI modules), and associate via HubSpot's "Associate record" action using record ID or custom ID matches.

Hopfully this helps with some additional tools and inspiration. 

[SteveHTM · Accepted solution]

@COHagan8 - I agree this is a thorny issue. The Single domain multi-tenant issue exists everywhere. And I have been forced to conclude that the Parent/Child functionality in HubSpot is too weak and fragile to really support the real world effectively.

I have adopted two solutions at my clients, based on variations of this domain and organizational hierarchy problem:

- [scalable approach] Create at least one custom object to represent intermediate tiers of the organization - office locations vs corporate location for example. The custom oject regime can be set up to suit the business type - I've done this for franchises, car dealer networks, healthcare chains, etc. You can associate Contacts either with the organizationall sub-entity, or corporate level, or both. I have argued in the Ideas community tha this option should be one of the sem-custom object templates now available, which would make it accessible to non-enterprise HubSpot instances.

- [less optimal] Create a an artifical location subdomain - dallas.company.com/boston.company.com - for each child-type organization, and reserve company.com for the parent. This can work well in organizations with only one tier of hierarchy, but requires some careful explicit association logic (don't use the HubSpot default) to make sure that contacts get tied to the right organizational entity. Again, I feel this is weak and can be error prone.

Hope this is helpful.

Steve

[Victor_Becerra]

Hi @COHagan8  — thanks for sharing this, and very cool use case.

I’d like to invite some community subject matter experts to weigh in.
@danmoyle @karstenkoehler @SteveHTM — do you have recommendations for data points or matching strategies that tend to work well here?

Thank you in advance for any guidance you can share.

Best, Victor