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:

1) Create a custom association label

• Follow the steps outlined in the HubSpot knowledge base article to create association labels
  • Navigate to the contact object, navigate to the associations tab and click create association label
  • Choose “A pair of labels” and name the labels
    • 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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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