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HubSpot best practices for contacts that leave a company

How can you track a contact that leaves a company in HubSpot while ensuring:

  • Retention of the activity history for this contact and their previous company.
  • Preservation of the association with the previous company.
  • Preservation of the contact’s name and details.
  • Addition of the association to the new company, if known.
  • Exclusion of these contacts from email campaigns to prevent hard bounces.
  • Highlighting that a contact previously worked for another company, with additional context if available.

There are several approaches to logging a contact that moves to another company in HubSpot. We prefer an approach that uses custom assocations labels as it meets all the requirements specified above. This is how a solution with association labels would look like for a contact Jonas De Mets that used to work for HubSpot and is now working for Koalify:

HubSpot best practices for contacts that leave a company-1

 

1) Create a custom association label

Create Assocation Label - Previous Employee & Previous Company.

2) Update the association label when a contact leaves a company

  • Navigate to the contact record with the association you want to update.
  • Hover over the association card, click More, then select Edit association labels.
    • Choose the new “Previous Company” option

✅ The contact's name and other data remains available.
✅ The link with the previous company is retained
✅ The activity history is preserved for both the contact and company.
❌ Creating a new contact would result in a duplicate, which we aim to avoid with Koalify.

Edit Associaton in HubSpot and label as previous company

3) Add the association with the new company [OPTIONAL]

When you know the new company a contact moved to, update the association label:

  • Navigate to the contact record for which you want to add the association
  • Hover over the company association card, click Add
  • Add an existing or create a new company
  • Replace "Previous Company" with the new company as the current primary company.

✅ This ensures that the link with the new company is clearly visible.

Update primary company

4) Remove the email address if it bounces and add the new email address [OPTIONAL]

If the old email address is a company email address, it will likely be deleted and bounce as a consequence. Therefore, it's better to remove the email address.

✅ Avoid hard bounces from email addresses that are no longer in use.

Delete the old email address if it bounces

5) Add and pin a note to the contact [OPTIONAL]

If desired, you can add and pin a note for the contact with additional context regarding the move to another company.

✅ This note can contain additional information about the move to another company, facilitating better conversations when the contact transitions to a new company.

Pinned Note

6) Follow-up on relevant contacts that moved to another company [OPTIONAL]

These could be interesting contact to follow-up and check their new roles especially if they were decision makers or champions at their previous company.

  • Create a list of contacts with the association label "previous employee"

HubSpot List Contact that left a company - blurred

Hope this helps you track contacts who leave a company in HubSpot! Let us know if you have any feedback or questions.