Automate Deal Updates with HubSpot Association Workflows

Why is this hack helpful?

Often, you need to update information on one record (e.g., a deal) based on another (e.g., a contact). However, HubSpot doesn’t allow you to update a specific deal easily—changes often apply to all associated deals.

With HubSpot’s new Association Workflow Actions, you can now use Association Labels to update specific records while leaving others untouched.

Ready to learn how to do this?

Let's dive in!

Step-by-Step Tutorial 

If a contact may be associated with multiple deals over time, you can use Association Labels to flag which deal is currently ‘live’, and should be updated, versus closed deals.

Scenario

For instance, at an RTO, a deal is created when a student submits a form, which indicates they are interested in enrolling in a course. 

As they progress through the sales/enrolment process, they submit several forms, which need to update information on this deal for future record-keeping and reporting purposes.

After they’ve enrolled and completed their study, they may come back to do an additional course - and we need to make sure that only their current deal is updated, and the closed-won deal is left as-is.

To do this, we’re making a couple of small changes to the existing process:

1. First, Create Association Labels

You’ll need to create 2 Association labels, one to indicate a live deal, and one to indicate a closed deal. We went with “Active” and “Completed” for the two association labels.

2. Next, Create a Workflow

Create a workflow that triggers if a deal is in any of your non-closed deal stages. Add “Apply Association Labels” action to set the “Active” association label between the deal and the contact.

3. Set up a Closed Deal Workflow

You then need to set up a similar workflow for deals that are in a closed stage - however this time, you’ll need to add a ‘remove association labels’ step, and remove the “Active” label (though don’t remove the association entirely!)

Activate both workflows, and enrol all existing records to ensure the label is set for all your current deals as well.

Finally, go into the workflow/s that copy contact information to the deal. In the ‘edit record’ actions, update the “Association to Object” dropdown to be “Active” instead of “All deals”.

With this change, only active deals will be updated by the workflows, leaving any information on closed deals unchanged.

The same logic can be applied to other scenarios, such as managing deals for different product offerings by creating unique association labels for each product.