Deep Dive of Record Associations | HubSpot Admins HUG | December 6, 2022

Kyle, there was a question about the Q and A section.

Oh, yes, yes, sorry. And turn on the Q and A. Okay, that's now on. Great. Welcome, everybody, to this session on Associations and HubSpot. Super excited to have Rachel Webb here, who is the expert on all of this. We will be. So Rachel has plenty of time at the end for questions, but I will be monitoring the chat and the Q and A. If you have questions, if you have things you're hoping we'll talk about here, drop them in there. We'll get to as many as we can. But, Rachel, I'll let you go ahead and take it away.

Awesome. Thanks, Kyle. Hi, everyone. Let me share my screen. Okay. Can you see my screen?

Yes.

Awesome. Okay. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for dropping in to chat all things associations. This is my first, first admin hug event. So I'm very excited to be here and tell you a little bit about where we're headed when it comes to associations. And I'm even more excited to hear your thoughts and feedback. As Kyle mentioned, I think the way we can approach this is, like, throughout the presentation, if you have questions, comments that come up, like, drop them in the chat. And between me, Kyle, and Jeff, who's also a product lead at HubSpot, on this call, we will try to address them, whether that's during the presentation or afterwards in the Q and A, which we'll have ample time for. Okay, so quick introduction. I'm Rachel. I'm a product manager in the CRM group and I'm responsible for associations as well as our record creator tool. So today I'm going to start off by grounding us in where the CRM is headed. Then I'm going to talk about the past, present, and future of associations. And then, as I said, there will be time at the end of the session for questions. And some of these I may punt to Jeff, who's a product lead on this call. Okay, so quick overview of our goals as a CRM platform. First, we want to expand our data model. So we want to make it easy and seamless for customers to represent the nuances of their business in HubSpot. Second, we want to give admins more control over their CRM. And this leads us right into the third goal, which is improving rep effectiveness. So we want to make sure that reps are introducing the right information at the right time, which saves rep time and also improves data quality for admins. So these are kind of the three goals that we're pursuing as a platform, and these are the three Goals that are guiding a lot of the way that we think about associations. So with those goals in mind, I'm going to quickly cover what we're even talking about when we use the term associations. So, associations are relationships in the CRM that show how records are connected. So for example, an association between a company record and a deal record shows that there's a relationship between those two records. And associations are controlled by admins in object settings. So obviously these relationships can get pretty complex pretty quickly. And we know that even with the improvements that we've made over the past couple years, today's association functionality isn't at the point where you can fully reflect the nuances of your business. In HubSpot, we know that this has caused a lot of pain for customers in the past, because if those relationships aren't captured correctly, it's really hard for a team to do their jobs effectively. So, bringing you into the past flashback, two years ago, our association's functionality had a few big gaps. So to be more specific, you couldn't associate multiple contacts to a company. You couldn't apply labels to associations to capture the nature of relationships. You couldn't associate records of the same object type. Think like contact to contact, deal to deal, except for parent child company associations, which don't actually have real association powers. You couldn't associate multiple companies to deals and tickets, and you couldn't associate custom object records to other custom object records in in the ui. In the past couple of years, we've closed a lot of these gaps. So let me give you some examples of how customers are using this new set of associations functionality. So the most popular association pairing that we've seen in the data since we rolled out these improvements is between contacts and deals. This is reflected by the fact that top labels customers are using include things like decision maker, primary contact partner, owner, influencer, champion. Basically, the goal is to make it clear who has what role when it comes to creating a deal record or a contact record. Another common use case that we see with our associations improvements is deals that involve several players. Think of a construction project where you might have a contractor and developer and architect, et cetera, or a media project that would involve an investor, distributor and a few things, film studio. So those are just a few of the use cases and common labels that we've seen when it comes to our association's improvements. But you'll notice that one gap that we've left here is the ability to associate records of the same object type. But I will talk about that in a few minutes. I'll pause here in case anyone has comments or questions. I see that there's a few comments in the chat and I guess I'll ask the group like if anyone used these features who's in this webinar? Feel free to drop kind of common use cases that you've seen, things that you've done with these improvements in the chat.

Yeah, I'm seeing. I like Matt has a former employee label. I think that's interesting. And I see Matthew primary onboarding contact. So that's similar to what you were mentioning, except post sale.

Yeah, labels to define another company's influence on a deal. That's interesting too. Yeah, the contact labels seem to be really, really important and really popular. Okay, I do see some comments about same object association, so maybe we'll keep that more quickly.

Rachel is master of tension here.

Okay, so this covered kind of our past and present of associations. So now we're going to look ahead into the future. I'm going to categorize what we have planned into three buckets in beta, which means we are testing on the roadmap, which means we're committed to working this in 2023. But we. And then the last category is in planning, which means that we know that we're needing to investigate this project. We're actively investigating it, but we don't have a timeline yet that we can commit to. Okay, so first project that's in beta, parent child company calculations. So this is the ability to create a calculation property using the parent child company associations that currently exist in the record today. And I can do a quick demo of this making sure that. Oh great. Okay, so here I am creating a new property. I've selected my company object type, company information and I'll select my calculation field type. I've created a sum and so I'm in my company property and I can choose company as my associated record type. And when I select my association label I'll select company. And let's say I want to sum up something like number a total open deal value or total revenue for example. So when I create this property, this would sum up the value or the total revenue of all associated child companies to a company record. And so this is meant to kind of just be the first kind of taste of same objects functionality. This only exists for companies right now because that's the only functionality that you have to create company to company associations in HubSpot at the moment. But in the future we hope to expand this to include deals to deals, tickets to tickets, contacts to contacts to have these calculation properties for all standard objects. So this feature is in private beta, which means that CSMS can request it on behalf of customers and it will be moving to public beta in the near future, at which point customers will be able to opt themselves in. And this is ProPlus and all hubs, so I'll stop there if there's any questions. Oh, I see associations with workflows also coming next in this.

Okay, May is asking, I think, a clarifying question. It gives just a sum and not records, so.

Oh, oh, yes, if I'm understanding correctly. So this would be any calculation that you can currently do.

So you could do a count if you wanted to, or you can do a sum if you want to sum things up.

Yes, yes, exactly. I just chose some for the purpose of this demo because it's easiest to think about. But yes, you could do any of the calculations. Oh, interesting. Okay. Okay. Shall I move to the next feature?

Yeah, I think so.

Great. Okay, so the next one is configuring associations during record creation. So this is also in beta and this means that you can send an association as visible or required when a deal, ticket, company or contact record is created. So I'll also show you how this works. So here I am in my customize the Create deal form. You can see that separately. I have another property, another feature called Add Pipeline Logic, which is also in private beta right now, which is making it look a little bit different, but in terms of associations. So right here on the left sidebar, I can now check and uncheck each association. These are my custom associations and make them required. I think from the community feedback, the most important piece of this was making contacts, a contact association required when creating a new deal or a new company. And so that's what I'm doing here. And the other point that's important here is that when you make a company association required, this will automatically be the primary company on that record. And that's just because we have kind of a default setting around the primary label to make it easier to report and refer back to those records in terms of workflows. So this is applicable to all standard object record creator forms. So deal ticket contact company and is in private beta today. So again, you can request it through your CSM and it will be in public beta also in the near future. And this is Starter plus all hubs. So I'm curious if anyone in this. In this webinar is actually in this beta, curious for their feedback. How does a contact get associated to a deal through a Company contacts can.

Be associated directly with deals.

Yeah, I guess maybe I'm not following through a company.

Matthew and Abby, you can be added. You just need to talk to your HubSpot, contact your. Your customer success manager. They have tools to opt you in.

So yes, can make it happen today. Oh, if a company has multiple companies, are all contacts associated to this deal? Darn. I think I'm not following that question either.

Yeah, so may. Let's connect afterward. I think I can answer these questions for you, but yeah, okay.

Yeah, so for this feature, I think CSMs have been can either request through the app and I can make it like ungate you today or you can ping your csm. That would be the way to get into this beta. Okay, so now moving on to features that we have on the roadmap. So the first is the ability to manage associations through workflows. And the idea here is that custom customers can customize their workflow logic to associate records. So you'd enroll a record in a workflow and then associate it with records that match a specific property value and then be able to apply association labels to that relationship. There are a few different use cases here and I'm actually really curious to hear in the chat what use cases people are thinking of. One is automatically applying association labels to records created via workflow. So let's say I want to trigger a workflow when a new deal is created from a contact record and automatically associate it with with that contact and give it the label primary. For example, another use case that we've heard is associating a record to another record based on a property like location. So if a contact record is located in Boston, it automatically gets associated to a Boston based company based on that value of the property. This feature you can see is a little bit more TBD in terms of when it's coming. Who would get it? We are aiming for mid 2023. The teams involved are kind of like actively investigating and working on this feature. But again, definitely curious to hear other use cases as that really helps us build something that we can kind of test with customers earlier. I see a hollow view, which seems like a good sign.

Yeah, I see lots of happy exclamations in the chat, not a lot of feedback, just people want it.

Great, great. Okay, cool. Okay, so moving right along to I think the feature that was promoted heavily as part of this webinar's event description.

People ask me for this all the time, Rachel, all the time.

People ready. Ready to talk about it. Excited to see what people. People have to say. So this is the ability to associate records of the same same object type. So this means contacts to contacts, deals to deals, tickets to tickets, etc. So there are a lot of use cases that we hear from customers for this. Definitely would love to hear it more in the chat, but one example is education, so needing to associate students and teachers or professors, all of which are contact records. Another example is selling to a company that has a lot of different branches. So think of a hotel, for example, where you might want to associate deals to each other for that company, or company records to each other. So the way that we're approaching this project is that same object associations will have the same functionality as any other association. What's new is that we're introducing the ability to apply a pair of labels to a same object association. So this means that, for example, for a contact to contact association, I can apply the labels student and teacher to that pair. The purpose of this is that when these associations are used in filtering or workflows or reporting, you'll be able to tell which record you're referring to, even though they both have the same object type. And I can talk more about this if there's questions, but it's kind of a very new concept that we're introducing. In the current state of associations, you apply one label and that label goes, you know, one label per association pair. And so this is kind of a big change that we're introducing that we think will help customers in other parts of the app and also gives you the opportunity to kind of differentiate between which record is which. So we're targeting a mid 2023 release for this. And just like the rest of associations, any customer will be able to set a same object association, but custom association labels will be PRO plus. So I'll stop here.

Yeah, Andre, you associate husband, wife, child. So I think what if we have like a family and we have spouses and then they have a child? I assume the solution there would. You would have two different labels, right? You would have like a spouse label and then you would have like a parent child label and you would just associate in a triangle.

Exactly, exactly. A triangle association. Yeah, I think for that. So it would be two different associations. The piece of that that's interesting is I think having what we've been calling it is like the depth. So if you have like a grandparent, parent, child, the thing that we're going to be careful with there, we're looking at a limit of depth of 5 at the moment because we want to make sure. That there's. That we're de. Risking any potential of creating kind of looping calculations or like dependencies between those associations. So for example, if a parent ends up being. If a record ends up being associated to itself through a depth of like five or more, we want to be kind of very mindful about making sure that people aren't creating those associations unknowingly and then getting into loops later. But to that point, that is some. That's a use case that we're fully expecting. And in that case you would apply. You create two associations to represent that hierarchy.

Yeah, I think Francois, I think that gets at your question too. Will we be able to have a multi level hierarchy for the family example, A contact can be both a parent and a child. So yeah, for that example you have grandparent parent child. You would have two different parent child.

Exactly.

Associations.

Yeah, yeah. And it's just like today where one. One record can have multiple association labels on it. So one record can be both a parent and a child.

Yeah. Andre is not live yet. We're hoping middle of next year this will start coming out.

Yeah, not. Not live yet. We are also rolling that this out with the kind of assumption that there's kind of like priority functionality in terms of being able to just set up and display the same object association. And then there's the functionality that you would expect to get with full support from associations, which is reporting workflows, filters and so we're kind of approaching it with going for the priority functionality first and then working on the more. More in depth support later in the year.

Cool.

Trying to see if there's any other questions. I saw something about cardinality control which we'll cover shortly. Okay.

Yeah, I think you can move on everybody if there's. If there's a lot happening in the chat, which is awesome. If we're missing any of your questions, drop them in the Q and A. We will circle around to that at the end. So if you feel like you've been overlooked, just drop them in there.

Cool. And I guess before we leave. Oops. Before we leave, the topic of same object associations wanted to give you a sneak peek of how it will look. So on the left is the mock up of our new association label as experience for same objects where customers will be able to apply either a single label or a pair of labels to the same object association. So this would be. If you imagine now in your object settings when you go to create a new label, this is just a slightly different experience for a same object association. On the right is a contact record with a contact association on the right sidebar. And I can actually show you in my QA portal, here we are on a company record and here are companies that are associated to that company. This is obviously in development, but just wanted to give you a preview of how it will look, which is basically just like the ticket association card looks. That's how a company association card will look.

Okay, I like. Sorry, I just wanted to call out. You have two options, a single label and a pair of labels. So going back to the spouses and parent child, you could create one contact contact with a single label. Right, Just spouse. That's bi directional. A spouse is a spouse. But for parent child you would have a pair. One would be parent and one would be child. And you would say as you associate these ones, these two together, this one is the parent and this one is the child. This is the direction of the association.

Exactly, exactly. And the goal here is to give people flexibility. Maybe parent child isn't the label that you want to use. Maybe you want to use some other label to imply hierarchy. And so the idea is, for example, director and CEO. So that's exactly the case that we're trying to solve for in a flexible way.

Lizzy wants to know how you define which is which. So if you did have a parent child or director CEO label as you're making that association, how does that work?

Yeah, so when you're creating the label, it's kind of agnostic. Right? You're creating the label for contact to contact associations. You're seeing, I want one to be parent, one to be child. When you're actually applying that label, that will be a slightly different UI where we basically say, okay, which record do you want to be the parent? Which record do you want to be the child? And you may make that selection so that when you're on the child contact record, you'll see the label of parent record. And when you're on the parent contact record, you'll see the label of Chad record on the other record. So this will be a little bit more complex than our existing label ui, but we're definitely solving for that. So it's clear which one, which one is which.

Yeah, and I want to say, everyone, this is why it's taking us a little bit of time to get it done. People have asked me many times over the course of the last year or two, like, you've unlocked all the other associations. What's so hard about same objects associations? And I've always been like, I Don't know, I've just been told it's hard. But then conversations with Rachel and Jeff and others have made me realize like, oh, actually there's a level of complexity here that I don't think we fully appreciate. When you, when you associate a contact to a deal and say decision maker, you can sort of intuit that it is the contact who is the decision maker over the deal. You would never wonder like, oh, this deal makes decisions in regards to this contact. Right. But when you start associating two records of the same type together, you get a lot of ambiguity. And so having double ended two directional associations and being able to define these things more clearly requires new UI and new, I imagine, chunks of database to keep track of all this. And so that's why it didn't come at the same time as everything else. But I think when it comes, you'll all be really happy with it.

Fingers crossed. And yes, that's exactly why it's taking a while. But hopefully we're doing this in a way where it's thoughtful and people will be able to kind of intuitively understand it. So that's why we're putting in a lot of effort up front. Okay, onto the next one. So the next feature that we have in planning is called association cardinality control. And again, in planning means that we're investigating how to approach this, but we don't have a firm timeline or commitment for when it's going to be released. So association cardinality control means that you can control how many records are associated to each other. There are two flavors of this. First, cardinality control using association labels. The biggest example of this that comes up is parent and child association. You might want to say, I only want one parent deal to be associated to any other child deal. Many child deals can be associated to one parent deal, but only one record with the label parent can be part of that association. Another example would be wanting only one contact labeled CEO to be associated to any company record. The second flavor of this is controlling the actual number of records that can be associated to another record, regardless of label. So for example, only one contact can be associated to any deal record or only one contact can be associated to a ticket, but many tickets can be associated to a contact. I keep bringing up the contact use cases because those are the most common that we've heard for this, but there might be others that I'm not aware of. We want to be really thoughtful about the way that we approach this because cardinality is a new cardinality control rather is a new concept that we would be introducing in HubSpot and it's something that can't be changed once it's set. It would be really hard for us to allow customers to set cardinality and then try to undo it. That's why the rest of this slide is TBD in terms of when it's coming. I actually have a survey that I can drop in the chat once we're done with this presentation because we'd love to understand more about the needs here and the use cases. You can also fill out this survey if you have any other association related feedback and just want to chat. But let me actually maybe I'll bring it up now so that I don't.

Yeah, I think that's, that's a great idea. While you're paused, I just want to make the observation that for a long time one of the limitations in HubSpot's associations was that we had some enforced cardinality, right? Like you can only have one company associated with a contact or you can only have one company associated with a deal. And then we removed those limitations, but now we're trying to give you all the control to decide whether or not those limitations are right for your company. And I think that's pretty fantastic to give that level of control to, to our users.

Oh, oh, there's something wrong with my survey. Okay, let me figure it out. Actually, maybe I will. Let me see if there's something that I can do now to fix it and if not, then I will figure it out during the Q and A. Okay, I think I. I think I figured out I'm going to resend the link. Oops, sorry. Technical issues.

Oh, but apparently that one works. So.

Okay, okay, okay. So that was all the features that I had to talk about today. So now I'll lay out what's happening when on a timeline. So as I mentioned, parent child company association calculations and configuring associations during record creation are Q4 releases around Q2, 2023. We plan to release the ability to manage associations through workflows and associate records of the same object type. Although again, all of these timelines are estimations only. And then as you can see in TBD, 2023 is our timing for association cardinality control. And that's something we're actively investigating right now. So again, a couple big caveats. These timelines are estimations only, not commitments. They're based on what we know now. And also this timeline and this presentation are not comprehensive. So if you don't see something here related to associations it doesn't mean that we're not doing it. And that's where I think would really benefit from folks bringing up in the chat or in the qa, Q and A and in the survey. You know what's missing here? What are things that customers really want that we haven't included on this 2023 timeline or things that we need to look forward for beyond 2023. So wrapping this all up, I'll circle back to the original framework that I showed you at the beginning of this presentation. So each of the features that I just mentioned is aimed at improving our CRM in one of three ways. Expanding the data model, giving admins more control and improving rep effectiveness. And so we're really doing our best to map and be thoughtful about each of our associations projects to make sure that they're leading back to one of these three goals. Okay, that covers my presentation. I think we can move to questions and feedback and highlights of projects that we need to do that we're missing. But yeah, thank you, thank you so much for the opportunity to present.

Yeah, awesome. Thank you, Rachel. That's. I think this is maybe the most exciting session we've done so far. I. The one thing our webinar technology does not really allow is we can't see all the enthusiasm and joy. It's coming through the chat a little bit now. I saw some comments early on, people falling out of their chairs. They're saying this, you're doing big, impactful work and I really appreciate you being here to talk about it with people. So as predicted, we have a lot of stuff going on in the Q and A. Everyone, if you could shift over from the chat pane to the Q and A pane. It's like buttons near the top, right, the Q and A. Actually I'm sorting it now by upvotes. There's a little like button next to all the different questions. I don't know for sure, since there are so many here, whether we'll be able to get through them all. We will try, but to make sure we're getting to the most impactful ones. If there's a question you really want the answer to, if you could just use the thumbs up icon, we'll just work through them sorted that way. So now they're all jostling for position here. For now, the winner is Chris Davies saying this might be answered during the session, but if not, is there any plan to allow for addition, change and removal of labels in bulk?

Yeah, this is really interesting. I think we've seen this in feedback before. I think this could be part of workflows work that we do later in the year. We haven't confirmed exactly how that would work yet, but I think this is very much a known kind of functionality that we that we need to tackle. Just not sure exactly how we're going to do it yet.

Cool.

Matt asks will there be the ability to accurately report on association labels without using list workarounds? So I saw reporting come up a few times in the chat. I don't know how much direct influence you have over how associations show up.

In reports work in reporting. Yeah, I think this one I might I mean to take back to our reporting team to understand a little bit about like what the workarounds are. Right now the way that we're planning for reporting to work for same object associations is that customers will be able to report using the asymmetric label so that they know which which side of the relationship that they're referring to. But I think that's a topic that I would need to go back to get some more firm answers on.

Cool.

And just so you all know, reporting is a thing I get asked about a lot and I consider reporting my Achilles heel in HubSpot. I'm not strong at reporting. We will someday admin hug have a deep dive into reporting. I promise you that we'll just try to figure out the best person to do it because reporting is a massive world. Alan asks, what's your recommendation on requiring associations of records? For example, making sure every deal is associated with contact or every contact is associated with a company. This is from 28 minutes ago, so I don't know if this question has changed since you shared that this is.

Coming, but yeah, yeah. So I mean with our with the beta that I showed earlier when a record is created, you can now require associations for standard objects and for custom objects. We previously previously had that functionality. I guess if the question is like requiring an association throughout the lifetime of a record, that would be something that we haven't considered yet. Meaning like once an association is set it can never be unset. Haven't really considered that but would be interested to learn more about kind of the needs around that. But hopefully the beta solves at least part of that problem.

Cool.

I guess a sort of related to what you just said. Rachel, if people want to connect with you afterward, what's your preferred method for that? You LinkedIn person? Email person. You want to drop email?

Yes, let me drop my email in.

Okay.

Yeah. Oops. I think I just entered that as a Q A. Sorry, I'm clearly new.

I swear every session. Okay, okay. Rachel's email is now in the chat. So be nice, make good use of that. Let's see what just happened. Oh, I see. Okay, I scrolled down. Will custom objects be included in the Q2 2023 association workflow launch? So workflow stuff you're talking about, will that support custom objects?

I believe so, but let me confirm with the team. Yes.

Cool.

Will associations replace parent child that exists today? Also will we have the option to mandate associations? The classic make companies on deal mandatory. That one keeps coming up. So yes, that that's invaded now. But as far as replacing the current parent child, I assume company parent child infrastructure.

Yeah. So I would describe it as we are and let me just to show what I mean. So here's the. Yep. Okay. So here's the related company card that shows up right now. What we're doing is we're not getting rid of any of this data. We're moving these parent child company associations into this company card. So basically just re changing the label, making sure that all the customer data is kind of exactly the same as it was. And in the future you'll be able to still create those parent child company associations, but you'll also be able to create same object associations with labels other than parent and child. So hopefully that answers the question which is it'll look slightly different but all of the data will be the same and the functionality will be the same.

Cool.

And sounds like nothing will get lost or have to be redone. It'll just some migration will happen magically in the background.

Exactly. With magic. Yeah.

Is there any plan to filter activity logs via association labels? So I assume this is maybe on the. On individual records where you have the timeline in the middle filtering. Because right now like associated deal activity or company or contact information flows through. Assuming it's associated with both records. I think the question is will that be filterable to specific. Maybe like can I see deal for deals that this guy is the decision maker on or something.

Oh, interesting. Okay, we don't have plans around that yet. We do have the like we do have planned the ability to filter by same object associations and those association labels. But for the deal activity I'm not as certain that would be something that I need to go back and check with the filters team on.

Cool.

Will we have the ability to export a list of associations?

Yeah, wait, let me. Okay, so for import. For import export. We don't have that on the roadmap yet. That's Again, I think something that I have to go back to the import export team on.

With importing and exporting there's a couple different ways I'm thinking about this and I'm not sure which one Kristen meant but right now you can in an import define association labels, right? Like if you're importing two different objects that are associated with each other, you can apply association labels when you're exporting. I assume if you're on like a list of contacts, I guess I don't know if association type shows up on the index page and would be included in an export. So that's kind of like one way. The other way is just like the list of labels you have set up. Can you import and export those? And I think that is not a thing right now.

No, just. Yeah, I guess not just the list of labels. I don't think so.

Okay.

Kristen, let me know if we're way off base. Hopefully that was helpful. Lizzy hi. Would like to be able to use the same association label across multiple objects. For example, in deal we have purchasing customer and end user have had to slightly rename these in my custom objects of assets and sales orders.

Yep. This is interesting because it's come up for are same object association. So the way that we're going to approach it for same object associations is you can repeat labels across objects. So like between deals and companies you could use the same label but within an object you can't repeat the same label. So it's interesting that this is also brought up I think for just normal cross object associations. But that's definitely helpful to know which is we like the ability to use the same links is important here. So I think that's feedback for us.

Cool.

Rita asks will the workflow association updates allow us to also specify which associated objects to update instead of all associated objects? For example deals in a certain pipeline versus all deals.

Oh, the deals example is interesting. I think for the first part this is a requirement that we're kind of including in the scope for this work already. And that's part of the reason why it's a bit complex and taking us a couple quarters because we know that just returning all. Just returning all records and associating all records, excuse me, is probably not the intended behavior that people want. So for the first part, yes, that's very much within our scope. I guess depending on deal pipeline I'm not as sure but I'll but I'll bring that use case back to the team.

Cool.

Can the child deal for example be in Another pipeline, my case use case will be for the hospitality industry where the parent deal will be the reservation of the hotel or villa. The child deal would be any experiences bought during their stay at the hotel or villa. I assume there wouldn't be restrictions like associations. Don't really see pipelines or care about them.

Yeah, exactly. If I'm. If I'm following yes, you can associate in this future state, you'd be able to associate deals to other deals that are not in the same pipeline and apply the parent, child or any other label that you want to them.

Cool.

Aaron asks for the parent to child rollups. Does it work for multi tiered hierarchies? Meaning there's a parent with three child records and one of those child records has another two child companies associated with it?

Yes, the answer is yes, it would work for multi tiered hierarchies. We are looking at a restriction in terms of the number. I think this example is like a hierarchy of three. We're looking at a restriction on the hierarchy at around 5. And we're also looking at validations to make sure that people aren't creating kind of like nested associations where the parent is the child of itself or things like that. But the answer is yes.

Sounds like time travel paradoxes or just trying to avoid.

It does melt your brain a bit to think about the whole parent being. It's a little bit of Back to the future.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Will there be a workflow trigger when an association of label X is made? So like.

Okay, interesting. I don't think that's on the roadmap. So when an association label is a. Is it made or maybe I think it would make sense. Like when an association label is applied to a record, then trigger a workflow to associate it with another record. Would that be.

Or to take some other action. Maybe not rel. Not related to associations, but just like.

Interesting.

Yeah, I, I think workflow enrollments are tricky, but I assume like if you have a. An enrollment of is associated with. You have a contact workflow. And if you say associated with contact or with a company with label of whatever, they would be enrolled when that label gets applied. Right. Is that Jeffrey?

Sounds possible. Yeah.

Let us know if we're on the right track here. Okay. All right. Will it be possible to define different unique identifiers than email and company URL? Sometimes you want to create another record, but the email is the same, eg for family or for companies. The domain name is the same for parent and child.

Okay, so this is a question around and Oh, I wish I could like find the question and read it. So it's around the ability to define your own unique identifiers and then associate those two records without being told, oh, these are the actually the same record, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So like at a school the child just uses the parent's email address, for instance. We want them as separate records but we want to be able to. Or a company, parent company and child company have the same domain but we want to be able to associate them.

Got it. Yeah. This isn't, this is not currently on the roadmap, but I think this is something we've thought about for record creation more broadly in terms of allowing people more flexibility over record creation. So we'll definitely take note of this, this feedback, but no, not currently on the roadmap.

Cool.

Parker, short. Hello. Will associations replace buying roles on companies? Seems like it'd be better to have specific champions for a. As opposed to just static roles across the entire company.

Yeah, this is, this is interesting and a little bit I think goes outside of the particular, particular area that, that I'm owning. I think there is overlap between buying roles and associations. Associations give you more power and flexibility. So I think we are trying to move towards a more associations centric world because having a label like champion or decision maker and then being able to report on that filter on that gives you a little bit more functionality than the buying role. But I think that's a good observation for us to kind of guide people towards the, the action that we think is a little bit more powerful.

Yeah. And Parker, I'm actually, I'm a huge advocate of this idea. Ever since association labels came out, I've been saying now buyer roles, we launched fire rolls because we were launching ABM tools and association labels didn't exist yet. So we made it a contact property. I think it makes sense on every level for that to be association labels, but to undo it and rebuild it is complex. I was actually just talking with Jeff about this last week saying Jeff, let's do this in 2023. I don't get to make these decisions. Can we have association details like a way to put a one line description on the association aside from the label? For example, we use a former employer association label, but if we could hover over the label and then see was the CEO 2000-2021 that would be helpful. Wow.

Oh wow. Okay. Super interesting. We that that's not currently part of the plan but I think this is really interesting in terms of. We've also heard feedback around like association history and wanting to see kind of like the previous associations that were created so. I see. Exactly. I'm kind of like picturing how you would want it to. To work, but that's not currently on the roadmap. We're just focused on getting these, these asymmetric or these pair of labels out in the. In the short term.

Cool.

There's no end in sight to these questions. How you feeling, Rachel?

I'm feeling like really hitting home for me that associations cover every square inch of our product and so with a lot of these I think we have to rely a lot on other teams and it's. Yeah, it's such a far reaching functionality and impacts so many different parts of the app. So yeah, just really loving it.

Cool.

Do we foresee the ability to see more than one associated record in the view table right now? When you show Associate anything that has more more than one, it just shows two, three, four, five records. I'd love to be able to see the actual ones.

I'm not following the. What do you mean by the actual ones? Oh, I see the question. Do we see. Is this the view table like in the middle pane of the record? The record page? I have a couple follow ups on this question. So maybe Matthew, if you want to.

Hop over into the chat and give a few more details about where exactly you're looking, because there are a few different places associations are displayed, that'd be helpful. We'll watch for that. All right. Oh dear. Did I just dismiss the wrong one? Can these be applied to custom objects as well? So yes. Right. Association work the same. Rita, would it be possible to set dual labels used to look slightly different depending on which direction you're viewing it from. For example, if we were to replace parent child for whatever reason, the association company would be labeled as child from the parent record and from the child company record it would be labeled as parent.

I think I'm understanding the question. So once you apply the pair of labels or the dual labels and you've chosen which record is which, the way that if you wanted to switch them, if you wanted Rachel to be student and Kyle to teacher instead of the other way around, then you would remove or you would edit that label and re reapply that label. So I think if I'm understanding correctly, the answer is yes.

Okay. And also like you said earlier, when you're on for example the child record and you're looking at the associations cards over here, the parent will be labeled as parent. But when you're the parent and then you're looking at the child. The child will be labeled as child. So you'll always. Hopefully that will be clear.

You'll hopefully always know. Yeah.

Yeah. Aaron asked for associations, same object types. Will we be able to report on those? In the custom Report builder example, I have a company report and I want to filter based on the parent company information.

Yes.

Cool.

So many reporting questions. I'm sorry, I haven't gotten a reporting session on the books yet. Everyone, this is reaffirming the need. I'm going to follow up with some folks today.

I'll join that session.

All right, let's see. So Matthew added some clarification over in the chat here. When I'm in the view table, the pretty view where you can edit many at once. If you show associated companies and there is more than one, it shows two records versus just showing the names with a comma. Does that make sense? So on the actual index page for companies, it says two records. I don't know how standard objects have changed, but just a couple weeks ago custom objects got those columns added and it said if there's just one, it'll show the name. But if there's multiple and it says like 5 associated, you can click on it and it doesn't take you away from that page, it just expands and shows the list of five. Matthew. So if that's. I don't know how it works with label names and things or if it's different on. Not custom objects. Oh, you just want to, you just want them listed there all the time. That's feedback for the team that designed those pages, I think, which is useful.

Yeah.

So good to know. Okay, let's see. Is there anything in the pipeline for being able to add associated record columns to an index view? Example, being able to pull in a parent company's field in a company view or a company field into a ticket view. Oh, I can speak to this a little bit. So on the index page where you're looking at your list of companies, for example, you want to be able to add columns to that page from associated records. That is kind of getting into the territory of what the lists tool is for. You can, you can do that in a list. The index pages, we're always in attention because the, the index pages we try to make as instantaneous as possible. So the filtering options are by definition more lightweight than what you get in lists. And so I don't, I'm not close, I don't speak for that team, but my intuition is that you're not going to see cross object or cross association columns in an index page at least anytime in the near future because that would increase their load times. But you can do that in a list and then you can create views based on list membership if that's helpful. But you still won't be able to display those columns. So Aaron, I don't know if that, I don't know if that gives you what you're looking for, but that's, that's how I would answer that question. Oh, Rita wants to know if workflows will be able to remove associations if a corresponding property is cleared.

Super interesting. That isn't part of the first part of the work which is to create associations depending on property value. But this is really interesting feedback that I will bring back to our workflows team as they're building out that, that feature. So it's the ability if a property is cleared, meaning property is deleted or if the value is removed. That would be my follow up question to that.

Right. But I can imagine like just as property values change, maybe association labels would need to change too or be removed. So interesting. Connor asks, can cardinality control be set per relationship?

Interesting. My first pass would be not in our kind of like in our first kind of milestone of association cardinality control. We would be looking at it based on if you wanted to specify for a contact to deal for the contact to deal relationship putting cardinality in place by label or by the number of records, by the number of contacts or the number of deals that can be associated to each other. I think in a future state the idea of if I'm following like cardinality by even more specific than that, I would be curious as to like what the use cases are for that and kind of how, how, how you would expect that to work. But the kind of two flavors that we're looking at both involve like for a contact I only want one contact associated to any deal and that would be for like any deal to contact associations created. That's how that cardinality would work.

Cool.

All right, we've got four minutes left here and an unending number of questions. I think now is a good time for us to sort of start wrapping up here. Rachel did drop her email in the chat here. I'm just going to copy paste it lower down in the chat. Feel free to follow up with her if your question was not answered. Rachel, again, thank you so much for doing this, Jeff. Thanks for hanging out in the crowd and anyone else from the team who is here, I don't even know and thank you all for coming. This has been great. Rachel, anything you want to say before we shut it down?

No, I mean just that thank you for having me in this session. I learned a lot just from the questions. Love talking with you all and please follow up with me, email or in that form for any questions that weren't answered. Any questions that you have. Follow up questions for any clarifications that are needed. Always eager to have a chat about associations. So cool.

Yeah, and I totally forgot to do this earlier but I am also dropping a survey in here. I would love to get feedback on this session. Let us know how we did. And there's a text box there if there's any future sessions you want to see from the admin hug, that's the way to let me know. I've. I've got reporting on my list already. There's anything else you want to see from these sessions I'd love to know. So go ahead and fill that out. Give me some feedback. Thank you all for being here and I hope you all have a great week. Thanks Rachel again for, for joining.

Thanks Kyle. Bye everyone.

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