You notice that several sales representatives are adding new companies into HubSpot, but these companies aren’t connected to any contacts, deals, or tickets. This makes reporting and understanding the business relationship challenging. What’s the best way to ensure complete and useful company records?

In the HubSpot Data Integration certification, using associations to link companies with related contacts, deals, or tickets is the correct solution because associations are the primary mechanism for establishing relationships between different data types in the CRM. Without these links, data remains siloed in "orphan" records, making it impossible to perform comprehensive reporting or understand the full context of a business relationship. By creating these associations, users can aggregate information across objects—such as seeing all deals associated with a specific company or identifying every contact linked to a ticket—ensuring a unified, 360-degree view that is essential for accurate attribution and cross-functional visibility.