Blog | Using HubSpot’s Companies Tool for Sales & Marketing (+Videos)

Companies are more than just a property in your HubSpot portal—they’re a critical means of organizing and profiling contacts in your database. That’s why HubSpot has a special page under your contacts just for managing companies.

What is the Companies tool in HubSpot? Where can you find it? What can you do with this tool? How can your sales and marketing teams use companies in HubSpot to improve how they manage prospects and customers?

What Is the Companies Tool in Your HubSpot Contacts Database?

The Companies tool in HubSpot is a way for you to save records of all the organizations that you interact with through your HubSpot portal. It allows you to store and review information about each organization for future reference—including a list of all contacts in your database who are associated with a given organization.

Where Can I Find the Companies Tool in My HubSpot Portal?

Looking for your list of companies in HubSpot? They’re super-easy to find. Just click on the Contacts dropdown in your HubSpot nav bar, then click on “Companies” and viola! You’ll be in your companies tool.

Alternatively, you can click on the dropdown in the upper left of your “Contacts” database view and select companies from that dropdown menu.

How Can I Create Company Profiles in My HubSpot Database?

There are a few ways to generate company records in your HubSpot portal.

Manually Creating Company Records in HubSpot

You can manually create a company record in your HubSpot portal. To do this, go to your companies page in your HubSpot account by clicking on “Contacts,” then selecting “Companies” from the dropdown menu.

From there, you can click on the “Create company” button in the upper right of the window. Here, you’ll be prompted to assign your new company record a company name and/or a company domain name.

Once you enter a domain name or company name, you’ll open up options to edit the company owner, city, state, industry, postal code, revenue, etc. This information helps you make a more detailed profile about this company in your database—it can also help fuel your buyer persona creation efforts in the future.

You can even set a service-level agreement (SLA) for that company record in your HubSpot portal. This helps you assign a general level of importance to communications from that company. Here’s a quick video walking you through setting up a new company in the HubSpot companies page:

Automatically Creating a Company in HubSpot

HubSpot can also automatically create company records based on your contacts’ email addresses—and then automatically associate those contacts with the newly-created companies. If the contact has a free email address, such as a gmail.com address, then HubSpot will look at the contact’s website URL property to match that contact with an appropriate company record/domain.

Here's how to turn on automatic association in HubSpot:

• Click on the settings icon (the gear-shaped icon) in the top right of your HubSpot portal navigation.
• Click on the “Objects” dropdown in the left menu navigation.
• Click on “Companies” in the dropdown.
• In the “setup” tab (which should open by default), click on the box next to the “Create and associate companies with contacts” option so that a checkmark appears.
  • When you click on the button, you may see a pop-up. Click “Yes” to retroactively associate companies with all of your existing contacts in your database and “No” to only apply the setting to contacts added after you change this setting.

Here’s a quick video to walk you through the process:

Since I already had the setting on for this demo portal in the tutorial video, I clicked “No” to avoid accidentally creating a bunch of new company records or associating companies with contacts that I did not want associated with them.

4 Reasons to Associate Companies with Contact Records in Your HubSpot CRM

So, why should you associate company records with contacts in your CRM database? Here are a few reasons:

• It’s Easy to Do. First and foremost, adding companies and associating contacts with them in your HubSpot CRM is easy. So easy, in fact, that you can set it up to happen automatically with just a few mouse clicks!
• It Helps You Make Better Customer Profiles. Tracking the companies that your contacts are associated with can help you make more comprehensive and useful customer profiles for your marketing. Knowing what companies your contacts are working for helps you understand their specific challenges to make more effective marketing. You’ll be able to use this information in your account-based marketing efforts.
• It Can Help You Improve Sales Messages. When you’re moving contacts towards the end of your sales funnel, having specific messaging tailored to their needs and concerns can be an enormous benefit. By associating contact records with companies in your HubSpot portal, you can use personalization tags for [Company Name] to specifically reference their company in your communications templates.
• It Helps You Coordinate Your Efforts with a Single Prospect Company. If you have multiple contacts within the same organization, you can coordinate your marketing and sales efforts with those contacts more easily if you know they’re all part of the same organization. It also helps you create more personalized and impactful messaging when you can reference that you spoke to a prospect’s colleagues with messaging like “Hey, I spoke to Bill from your accounting department about how you could save money with our solution.”

What Company Properties Can You Track in HubSpot?

So, what properties can you track about a company in the HubSpot platform? What’s the information you put at your fingertips when you use this feature? There are a ton of properties that you can track in HubSpot.

The defaults include:

• A short description of the company that you can manually create.
• Annual Revenue. An estimate (or if available, an accurate statement) of the annual revenue of the company.
• Business Units. Which (if any) business units the company has been assigned to.
• City, State, Country, Street. Properties highlighting the physical location of the company’s offices or where they operate out of.
• Close Date. The date when the company became a customer. This is automatically set by HubSpot when you have an associated deal if you set the lifecycle stage to “Closed — Won).
• Company Domain Name. The company’s website domain. If you have the tool enabled, HubSpot Insights can use this information to give you basic information about the company. For example, if there was an email in your contacts that had a domain of ABCCompany.com and that was to a domain in the Insights database, then you would get pre-populated information about ABC Company.
• Company Owner. The user in your HubSpot portal to whom the company is assigned.
• Create Date. The date the company was added to your database.
• Created By. The HubSpot ID of the user that created the company.
• Like the “about” field, this is a short description of the company and its goals. Typically, this is manually created by a HubSpot user.
• First Contact Create Date. The date when the first contact for this company was created in HubSpot. With automatic association turned on, this will often be the same date as the company create date—but it can be different. For example, if the contact was added before the company record was, then the contact create date may predate the company create date.
• First Deal Created Date. The date of the first deal for a contact associated with the company record.
• Ideal Customer Profile Tier. A measure of how well the company matches your ideal customer profile.
• A statement of the type of industry the business is associated with.
• Is Public. Whether or not the company is publicly traded.
• Last Activity Date. When the last time a HubSpot-tracked activity occurred with this company—such as an email, note, call, meeting, SMS message, etc.
• Last Modified Date. When the company record was last modified.
• Latest Source. Source of the last session with any contacts associated with the company. HubSpot also tracks additional data about the session (Source data 1 and 2), and the timestamp for the interaction.
• Lead Status. The company’s sales/prospecting/outreach status at this time. There are five default options, but you can also create custom lead statuses to match your organization’s sales & marketing pipeline more closely.
• Lifecycle Stage. The stage of the customer lifecycle that the company is currently in.
• Merged Company IDs. A list of the record IDs of any company records that were merged with the company record you’re currently looking at.
• Company Name. The name of the company.
• Number of Associated Contacts. How many contacts you have in HubSpot that are associated with this company record.
• Number of Associated Deals. The number of deals that are associated with this company record.
• Number of Child Companies. A count of the number of “child companies” that are associated with this company record. We’ll talk more about child companies later.
• Number of Employees. The employee count (estimated or accurate) for the company in the record.
• Owner Assigned Date. When the company owner was assigned to the record. Automatically set by HubSpot at the time of assignment.
• Parent Company. The name/company ID of the parent company of the record you’re looking at.
• Record ID. The unique identifier for the company in HubSpot. This is an automatic field and cannot be edited.
• Target Account. Whether the company is considered a target account in your ABM strategy.
• Total Revenue. The total value of deals you’ve closed with the company.
• The company’s relation to your organization (prospect, partner, vendor, etc.).
• Website URL. The company’s web address.
• Social Media Information. Details about the company’s social media profiles, if known. Can include Facebook company page, fans, LinkedIn bios, and more.

This is not a complete list of the properties that HubSpot can track by default. Additionally, you can create custom properties in HubSpot to add to this list to better focus on the company properties that matter for your sales and marketing efforts.

How Do I Edit Company Properties in HubSpot?

To edit an existing company property in HubSpot or create a new one, you’ll want to go to your settings menu by clicking on the gear icon.

From there, click on “Properties” under the Data Management header in the left menu navigation. You should see a screen listing all of the properties in your HubSpot portal.

• Click on the box next to “Select an object.”
• Choose “Company properties” from the dropdown menu to refine your search to only the properties related to companies in your HS portal.
• To edit an existing property, mouse over it and click on the “More” button. You will see a menu pop up with an edit option (among others). Click on “edit.”
• If you don’t see the property you want to edit in the list, you can either click on the “next” button at the bottom of the list to navigate the entire list of properties one page at a time or type the name of the property you wish to edit in the search bar.
  • You can also sort properties by the fields you see on the screen. For example, if I clicked on the “group” header of the table, it would start sorting each property by what data group type it was assigned.
  • You can also narrow down your search by using the filters next to the search bar. In the example, I could filter by group types, field types, users who created the field, or by access permissions.

Here’s a video showing the process:

In the video, you may notice that a couple of the properties I clicked on couldn’t be edited. This is because they were default properties provided by HubSpot. Meanwhile, the property created by a user could be edited. When editing a property, you can change things like what group the property is associated with, its description, the field type for the property, rules (like if the property is visible in forms or shows up in search results), set character limits for plain text fields, and the property name.

Editing a custom property can be useful if a property needs tweaking and you don’t want to lose all of the data you’ve already collected from prospects related to the old version of the property in HubSpot.

To create a new property in HubSpot, simply click on the “Create property” button in the properties settings page to get started:

• In the popup menu, choose the object type (company, in this case), select a group, and assign a label. You may also choose to add a description of the property here if you wish to help explain it to other users in your portal.
• Click on “Next:
• Choose a field type and edit it. This will affect how the property displays in forms and how your prospects can interact with it.
  • In the example following this list, I chose a dropdown select, but there are many kinds of fields that you can create. Feel free to experiment to create the most valuable and relevant fields for your organization!
• Click “Next”
• Choose whether you want this property to be visible in forms, pop-ups, and chatbot features.

Here’s a quick video showing a potential form for a company offering shipping solutions:

Adding Parent or Child Companies in HubSpot

In that big old list of default company properties that HubSpot tracks, you may have noticed that “Parent Company” and “Child companies” were included in the list. But, how can you add a company as a parent or child to another one in HubSpot?

Here’s the basic process:

• In your top nav menu in your HubSpot portal, go to Contacts, then click on Companies from the dropdown menu.
• Click on the company you want to edit.
• In the right-hand panel of the individual company profile screen, scroll down to the “related companies” card and click on “+ Add.”
• If adding an existing company in your database as a parent or child company, use the search bar under the “Add existing” tab to find the company. Otherwise, click on the “Create new” tab.
  • If adding a new company, you’ll need to create a new company profile for the parent/child organization, just like you would when adding a new company to your HubSpot portal from scratch. Once finished, the company will be added to your existing contacts so you can find it under the “add existing” tab.
• Select a company from the search bar by clicking on it and then click on “Next.”
• Click on “+Add association label.”
• From the dropdown, add the appropriate association label (Parent or Child Company, in this case, though other options can be added).
  • If you want to create a custom association label, you can do so by clicking on the “manage association labels” option at the bottom of the dropdown menu.
• Once you’ve assigned the appropriate association, click on “Save.”
• Viola! You’re done!

Here’s a quick video showing the process:

Importing Company Properties into HubSpot

Have another CRM where you were keeping company records data? You can import it into HubSpot using property migration tools—assuming that you have import permissions in your portal and can set up import files (or are migrating from a platform with a HubSpot integration to simplify the import process using a two-way sync feature).

Setting Up Your Import File

If manually importing properties, you can either import objects into your HubSpot portal one at a time or conduct a “multiple object and activity import.” Odds are that, to save time, you’ll want to do the latter.

First, you’ll need to set up your import files. You will need to create a table in a .csv, .xlsx, or .xls file for the import. This import file can only consist of ONE sheet. So, you’ll probably want to set up separate files for different kinds of imports. In this case, we’re focusing on companies.

Additionally, any monetary values will need to be in U.S. dollars, with appropriate decimals. For example, 225.00 instead of 225, as the second one would not import properly because of the missing decimals.

There may be further limitations depending on your HubSpot subscription type. For example, free tools users are limited to file sizes of 20 MB and 50 imports per day. Meanwhile, Starter, Professional, or Enterprise subscribers have a limit of 512 MB files sizes and can do 500 imports per day.

HubSpot requires the following properties in the import file:

• Contact Properties. At least one of the following: first name, last name, email, or (for existing contacts) record ID.
• At least one of company name, company domain name, or (for existing companies) record ID.
• If making a new deal, deal name, pipeline, and deal stage are needed. For existing deals, record ID.
• For new tickets, ticket name, pipeline, and ticket status. For existing tickets, you need the record ID.
• This requires unit price and name. For existing products, the record ID.

NOTE: Any properties you wish to import will need a column head that matches exactly with the name of a property in your HubSpot portal. For example, Company Name to import a company name, Task Title to import a task, etc. Also, tasks will need to have a due date property to import as well. Dates can be entered as month-day-year (MMDDYYYY) format, day-month-year (DDMMYYYY) format, or year-month-day (YYYYMMDD) format.

For the most part, we’ll be concerned with the requirements for the companies import. However, if you want to pull in related contacts and deal information, you’ll also want to consider contact properties, deal properties, tickets, etc. They’ll just need to be processed as separate imports.

Once you’ve created the company in your HubSpot portal and it’s been assigned a Record ID, you could use that to help associate future imported data with that company record.

Conducting the Import

Once you’ve set up your import file with all of the data you want to import and verified that it’s all in the right format, it’s time to start importing!

• Go to Settings in your main nav bar (the gear icon in the upper right).
• Go to Import & Export in the left nav menu (it’s under the Data Management header).
• Click on “Go to import.”
• On the Imports page, click “Go to import.”
• Select “Start an Import.”
• Select “One file” and click “Next”
• Choose “Multiple Objects” and click “Next”
  • There’s also a “One object” option if you’re only importing one record, but this is limited to calls and tasks only.
• Select the objects and activities you want to import, then click “Next.”
• You will be taken to a screen to choose the file to import, you can either search your computer or drag-and-drop the file into the field.
• Choose how you will import companies—create new companies only, create and update existing companies, or update existing companies only.
• Select how the import tool will handle the data being imported (create new, update existing, or both).
• Choose an appropriate language for the column headers.
• Click “Next” and verify that the import can complete properly. If a column or file is improperly formatted, you’ll see a warning symbol explaining what the issue is.
• Click “Next” after reviewing the import’s integrity and resolving any issues.
• Set an import name and choose a format for the dates in any date-related information columns.

Here’s a quick video showing the process for importing multiple properties from a single sheet:

How Marketing Teams Can Use HubSpot Companies

Now that we know how to set up companies in HubSpot and even import company records into HubSpot, how can your marketing team put that information to use?

The big use for HubSpot’s “companies” data in a marketing team would be for account-based marketing (ABM). This is a marketing strategy that focuses on companies at the outset instead of focusing on individual contacts within a company.

Here, you start by identifying target companies, engaging with them through personalized content and campaigns, and then build lasting relationships within the organization to lead to new opportunities over time.

Instead of targeting James the accounting VP as a buyer persona to target, you would do market research to find companies that could benefit from your goods/services and do a deep-dive into the decision-makers within the specific organization.

Where a buyer persona is a generalized hypothetical profile of your ideal buyer, an account-based marketing strategy would go right into whatever details you could find out about a real person.

This helps you create more personalized content, shorten the sales cycle (by reaching directly out to decision-makers in a target account), and waste fewer resources on prospecting.

To accomplish this, your marketing team could either review the current company records in your HubSpot database, filtering out the organizations that don’t meet your ideal target profile until only your top targets remain.

Alternatively, you could manually add organizations that you know would be a great fit for your business and then start using ABM tactics to engage with decision-makers in that organization. Of course, this may be easier said than done. Decision-makers in businesses often have one or more gatekeepers who intercept communications and then pass on the ones they feel are actually valuable.

By looking at parent and child company associations within HubSpot, marketing teams might be able to identify great prospects for future marketing campaigns. For example, if ABC Child Company A uses your goods and services, then their parent company, ABC Parent B, might also want to requisition them for their own operations.

Even without the ability to reach out directly to decision-makers in an organization, marketing teams can keep that target account in mind when creating new content and advertisements to speak to their biggest pain points and goals—potentially drawing contacts from inside the target account and getting a proverbial foot in the door.

Odds are that, once contact is made and the lead is put through the qualification process, marketing will want to hand them off to the sales team.

How Sales Teams Can Use HubSpot’s Companies Tools

For sales teams, the companies tool in HubSpot can be nearly as critical as the conversations tool. It’s a place to quickly review all of the companies the sales rep is responsible for handling, monitoring which companies are close to closing a deal, and seeing which ones need immediate follow-up.

Managing Communications with Companies

For example, a sales rep could search for companies that they’re the owner of in HubSpot and sort them by last activity date to see which companies have recently interacted with the brand and which ones are going cold. This could help the rep create a quick sales nurturing sequence for companies that are hot leads or to re-engage with cold leads and reignite interest as needed.

Verifying the Right People Are Assigned as Owners

It can also provide an at-a-glance view of company locations and industries to help sales reps quickly assess if the company is assigned to the right owner or if they aren’t actually a sales-qualified lead.

For example, say that Reginald is in charge of sales for the New York Tri-State area, but there are companies assigned to him out of Texas, which is Ralph’s turf. Reginald could check the “My Companies” view in the companies tab, look at the city or region for all of the companies assigned to him, and see that some incorrect assignments were made. From there, he could reassign the leads to Ralph or check with Ralph to see why those leads were assigned to him—such as the target companies opening up new offices in NYC and needing local support.

Keeping Track of Deal Timing

It's also a good way to check to see if it’s time to upsell or resell an existing customer. If you have a company in your database that typically orders new parts or supplies every three months, and you see that it’s been two months since your last deal or interaction with them, you’ll know it’s time to send them a reminder. This could help you stay on top of more forgetful customers who lose track of time so they don’t lapse on critical supplies/services.

Reducing Redundant Communications

Another way of using the companies tool is to save time on sales efforts. For example, if you see that you have five contacts all from the same organization, and you only need to talk to the decision-maker to close the deal, you can save time on creating personalized emails for the non-essential contacts since you know that writing to them would not move the deal closer to closing.

Keeping Track of Payments

Is a corporate client using a payment method that’s about to expire? It’s important to stay on top of customer payment methods so that you can get paid for the goods and services your organization provides.

Stay on Top of Tickets

Are there any open tickets with the company in question? If so, are they still within their SLA period or are they running behind? Keeping track of companies to see if they have outstanding tickets needing resolution helps you provide better customer service—which helps improve customer retention in the long term. This functionality overlaps strongly with the conversations tool.

These are just a few of the ways to use the companies tool in HubSpot as a sales rep or team lead.

Additional HubSpot Resources:

Need more information about the companies tool? Check out these resources straight from HubSpot:

• HubSpot Companies Main Topic Page
• How to create companies in HubSpot
• How to add a parent or child company to a company record
• List of default company properties in HubSpot
• Target accounts guide page
• How to add multiple domain names to a company record
• How to associate company records with contacts
• HubSpot insights on company records