The Ultimate Guide to Using HubSpot Custom Objects (+Video Tutorials)

In HubSpot’s own words, objects “represent business relationships and processes.” Objects in HubSpot can be many things—contacts, deals, companies, and tickets are all examples of objects. They’re the basic building blocks of everything you do with your HubSpot tools.

While HubSpot comes with a wide array of standard “objects” for organizations to use, there may be times when you need something a little bit different. This is where HubSpot custom objects can be useful.

What are custom objects in HubSpot? How can you make them? How can you use them to improve your sales, marketing, and service efforts? Let’s get to the bottom of this with an in-depth guide to HubSpot custom objects!

What Are HubSpot Custom Objects?

Custom objects are a way for businesses to categorize information that falls outside of the default “standard” objects that HubSpot supplies as a part of its platform. For example, say that you wanted to track event attendance and use it to qualify leads. You could create an “[Event Name]” object in HubSpot related to that specific event.

From there, you could customize the custom object to highlight information about the event and set your object description so that future users know what the object is and what it should be used for.

So, What Is the Difference Between Custom Objects and Standard Objects in HubSpot?

To put it simply, the difference between a HubSpot custom object and a “standard” object is that a standard object already exists within the HubSpot platform while a “custom” object is created by a user.

The standard objects available in HubSpot cover the majority of needs for most businesses—custom objects just give enterprises that need them that extra bit of flexibility to more clearly mold their HubSpot portal to their existing business processes and needs.

Who Can Create Custom Objects in HubSpot? 

So, who can use HubSpot custom object creation tools? To create a custom object, you need to have “custom objects” access and “edit property permissions” access or be a super admin on your HubSpot account.

Note: HubSpot is rolling out a “partner admin” permission set that gives edit access to all CRM objects, but does not allow the partner admin to add or remove other super admins or manage account billing and financial transactions.

This new permission set is intended for use by organizations that help other companies manage their HubSpot portals, but do not need to have access to their clients’ account billing or financial transaction controls. Partner access would allow a user to create custom objects like they were a super admin.

In addition to having elevated account access to edit CRM objects, you need to have one of the following HubSpot account subscription types:

• Marketing Hub Enterprise. At $3,600/month (when billed annually)
• Sales Hub Enterprise. At $1,500/month (when billed annually)
• Service Hub Enterprise. At $1,200/month (when billed annually)
• Operations Hub Enterprise. At $2,000/month (when billed annually)
• CMS Hub Enterprise. At $1,200/month (when billed annually)

In other words, you need to have any kind of Enterprise-level HubSpot subscription to create and use custom objects in your HubSpot portal.

Considerations to Make Before Creating a Custom Object 

The custom objects tool in HubSpot can be an awesome resource for companies that need to track things not accounted for in the base CRM platform. However, before making a custom object, it’s important to make sure that it’s the right thing to do!

Here are a few things to consider before creating a custom object in HubSpot:

• What’s Your Use Case? What do you want to accomplish with your custom object? As the old cliché goes, failing to plan is planning to fail. Before starting a new custom object, consider what it is that you want to track and why. Also think about how you will use the object in your workflows and which teams can benefit from it. For example, do you want to use the custom object in a custom report? That would be a common use case to capture data that you might not be able to get with the default HubSpot objects.
• Do You Already Have an Object for This? After reviewing your intended use case, it’s time to verify that you don’t already have an object or property in your system that can serve the same purpose. Redundancy in data systems can create confusion as people lose track of which objects or properties to use for specific things. Checking that you aren’t duplicating an object that you already have can be crucial for keeping your HubSpot database neat and easy to use!
• Can a Custom Object Be Used for the Features I Need? Are there features specific to existing objects that cannot be used for a custom object? In HubSpot’s article on creating custom objects, they note that “bulk marketing emails can only be sent to contacts, not other objects.” So, if you wanted to create a custom object to send emails to leads based on that object, you would still need to use the standard “contacts” object. In this case, you might want to consider if creating the other object can provide a different benefit—such as by being a filter for a workflow or an active list membership.

How to Create Custom Objects 

Okay, you’ve checked that your account has the right HubSpot subscription and that you have the access permissions you need to create custom objects. You’ve also considered the type of custom object you need and verified that there isn’t already a similar object that you could use to fill that niche. Now what?

It’s time to start making your custom object, that’s what! Here’s the basic process for creating a new custom object in HubSpot:

• Go to the HubSpot settings menu in your portal by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right of your HubSpot portal
• In the left nav menu under the “Data Management” header, click on “Objects”
• From the dropdown, click on “Custom Objects”
• Click on the “Create Custom Object” button
  • If this is your first custom object, the “Create Custom Object” button will be in the center of the window
  • If this is not your first custom object, the button will appear in the upper right of the window
• A panel will slide in from the right. Here, you can;
  • Set up your custom object’s name—the system will ask you to set both a singular and a plural version of the name.
  • Enter an optional object description to explain what the object is and how it should be used.
  • Create the object’s primary display property. This is the property used to name a record of your object. For example, “Company Name” would be the primary display property for the “Company” object in HubSpot.
    • Set a property type for the custom object. The two types are “single-line” or “number.”
    • Set an internal name for the property by clicking on the pencil icon. NOTE: This cannot be changed once the property is created.
    • Choose whether the primary display property needs to be unique by clicking on the checkbox. If turned on, users will not be able to enter the same value for multiple records. If you plan on the object being used to capture data that might not be unique, such as the number of YouTube (or other social media platform) subscribers a contact has, this checkbox should be left off. If you know that the values need to be unique identifiers, such as ticket numbers from an event, then make sure to turn the checkbox on.
  • Create a secondary property for your object (if necessary). This is similar to the process for creating a primary property.
    • You can add more secondary properties by clicking on “+ Add property.”
    • You can also delete a secondary property by clicking on the delete icon that is next to the property you want to remove.
  • When finished with your secondary properties, click on the “Create” button at the bottom of the panel.

Here’s a link to a guide that walks you through each step of the process with pictures.

And here’s a quick video tutorial:

What Are Custom Object Records? 

Custom object records are exactly like regular object records—just for the HubSpot custom objects that you’ve created.

How to Create a Custom Object Record

The process for creating a custom object record can be similar to the process for creating any other object record in HubSpot, but there might be a few differences depending on the properties you’ve set for your object record.

Here’s a quick overview of the process for manually creating a new custom object record:

• Click on “Contacts” in the main HubSpot nav menu.
• Click on “Custom Objects.”
• Select the object you want to create a record for.
• Fill out the property values for the new record.
• Click on “Create [custom object]” or “Create and add another.”
• In the record screen that appears, associate the object with another object—this may require you to set up associations in your custom object menu.

Here’s a quick guide link and a short video showing the process:

Not seeing the option to associate the object record with other records in HubSpot? You might need to customize the create record form for your object in HubSpot since that option doesn’t seem to appear by default.

Here’s how:

• Go to settings (the gear icon in the upper right of your main HubSpot portal nav menu).
• Click on “Objects” under Data Management.
• Click on Custom Objects from the dropdown menu.
• Go to the Associations tab.
• Click on the object selection dropdown from next to “Select an object.”
• Click on the “Create new association” button.
• Click on the object you want to associate, such as contacts, companies, deals, or another custom objects.
• Click on “Create.”
• Click on “Create association label” to enter a name for the association from the custom object to the other object.

Get a guide with pictures here. Also, here’s a quick video showing the process:

What Are Custom Object Pipelines? 

You’re probably already familiar with the concept of a sales pipeline—the visual representation of the buyer’s journey as it relates to your business. Once you’ve created a custom object, you will have the ability to create pipelines for those custom objects with your own stages and view them in a customized board view.

A custom object pipeline is a visual representation of object records for a custom object.

How to Create a Custom Object Pipeline 

• Go to "Custom objects" in your settings menu.
• Click on the Pipelines tab.
• Select the custom object you want to create a custom pipeline for.
• Click on the “Create pipeline” button.
  • If making an additional pipeline for an object, select “Create pipeline” from the dropdown menu.
• In the dialog box, enter a name for the pipeline.
• Click on Create.

Here’s a quick tutorial video:

Did you make a pipeline you don’t need? You can delete it by clicking on the “actions” button for the pipeline and clicking on “Delete this pipeline” from the dropdown menu.

Modifying a Custom Object Pipeline 

The initial process of creating a pipeline for your custom objects is incredibly simple. However, the pipeline that creates will be similarly barebones. It will consist of just two “stages,” Open and Closed with default statuses. To use your pipeline, you’ll need to customize it!

From the pipelines tab of the custom objects settings menu, you can do things like:

• Renaming stages
• Changing statuses for each stage
• Adding extra stages
• Specifying conditional stage properties (and choosing whether they’re a requirement for that stage or not)

This process is largely similar to customizing deal stages for your sales pipeline, but for your object pipeline. Here’s a link to a quick tutorial and a short video showing some of the customizations you can perform:

In this example, you can see me customize a pipeline for registering tickets for event attendees where we capture when a ticket is registered, when an owner is assigned to that object, and when the object is closed.

Using Board Views for Your Custom Objects 

While you’re on the pipelines tab, you might have noticed a section on the page saying “Board customization” where you can customize what your HubSpot portal users see in the “pipeline board” for your custom objects. What is this “board view” and how can you tweak it to meet your needs?

What Is a Board View for a Custom Object Pipeline?

The pipeline board is a typical Kanban-style visualization that allows you to track where your custom objects are in your pipeline. Here’s a screenshot of an example pipeline:

What appears in this board view depends on the pipeline stages you set up for your custom objects. Also, custom objects will not appear in the board view until you assign them to a pipeline and a stage in that pipeline.

You can use workflows to set up an automated pipeline stage assignment when a custom object record meets the appropriate criteria or you can add a custom object record to a pipeline manually.

How to Manually Add Records to a Pipeline

To add a record manually, you just need to go into the object record and click on the dropdown under “[Pipeline name]” in the left menu of the screen, then select a pipeline for the record (you can have multiple pipelines for your custom objects). After doing that, just click on the “[Pipeline name] stage” dropdown and select which stage of the pipeline the record goes in. Click “Save” once you’re finished to complete the change.

Once your records are in the pipeline, you can drag-and-drop them to change which pipeline stage they’re in as well.

Here’s a quick video demonstration:

For this demo, the record was already in the pipeline. Had the record not been in the pipeline with a stage assigned, it would not have appeared in the board view.

About Board View Actions

To sort, export, or edit stages and card appearances, you can click on the “board actions” button in the upper right of the board view.

Clicking on “edit stages” will take you to the “custom objects” menu in your settings tab. Meanwhile, clicking on “edit cards” will give you a choice of whether to use the “default” or “compact” appearance of the cards. Compact mode squishes the cards so that there’s less information displayed, but you’re able to see more cards at once.

“Sort” allows you to change the order in which cards are displayed to better meet your needs. For example, if you want to make sure that you’re following up on records that have been in your pipeline for too long, you might sort the stages by oldest records first using the “Object create date/time” priority and the “Oldest” sorting.

How Can Your Teams Use HubSpot Custom Object Tools? 

Okay, so custom objects are a pretty cool feature. But, how can you leverage these tools for your sales, marketing, and service teams? What can you do with custom objects that you couldn’t do with the default HubSpot objects?

It’s hard to narrow this down as the possibilities are practically endless. There are so many things you could use a custom object or pipelines of custom objects for that it’s impossible to cover absolutely every potential use case. So, let’s focus on a few specific use cases for different kinds of internal teams to help inspire your future efforts!

Use Cases for Sales 

Custom objects can be a great way to provide your sales team with more detailed data about your hottest prospects that goes above and beyond the basic data normally captured by the CRM.

Following Up on Event Interactions

For example, say that your company was participating in (or hosting) a variety of industry events. You could create a custom object related to that event, such as an event ticket number that you could associate with each attendees’ contact record.

Using that information, you could identify which of your contacts attended the event, which ones registered but didn’t attend, and who didn’t register for the event. This can be useful for customizing sales messaging to those leads. If you had a booth at the event, you could even record the names and ticket numbers of those who stopped by to send them even more targeted sales messaging following the event.

Tracking Specific Products Owned for Upsell Opportunities

Say that your company offers a series of accessories for a core set of “mainline” products—such as cases, screen protectors, headsets, and external battery packs for touchscreen electronic devices. Wouldn’t knowing which customers own specific device types be incredibly useful for upselling them accessories for those products?

With a custom object for each core product type you sell, you can identify which customers own specific products and upsell them related products that can enhance their ownership experience. This helps sales reps (and marketers, too) focus their messages to prospects based on their needs.

Use Cases for Marketing 

So, how can marketing take advantage of custom objects? Here are a couple of potential use cases for custom objects in your marketing department:

Adding New Lead Qualification Criteria

For any marketing team, qualifying the leads passed on to sales is a critical effort. If too many poor-quality leads get marked as “sales qualified,” then the sales team will struggle to close deals and waste a lot of time that could have been spent on better-quality leads.

HubSpot custom objects allow your sales team to track more information about contacts in your HubSpot database—which can be used to enhance their sales qualification criteria. The more data you can capture about leads, the more clearly you can define their interests and needs. This can be immensely useful for sorting the most highly qualified and interested leads to the top of your list to pass on to the sales team.

Additionally, this extra information can be useful for customizing sales messaging to those leads.

Tracking Overall Customer Trends

Say that you’ve set up custom object pipelines for your different product lines. In your pipeline, you have an “expressed interest in” stage, a “purchased” stage, and a “left feedback” stage for the product. How many prospects are in each stage? How quickly do leads tend to move from “expressed interest in” to the “purchased” stage? How many of those buyers left feedback? Having the answers to these questions can be incredibly useful for your marketing team.

With this data, your marketers can identify your hottest products and use them in promotional messaging and materials to attract more customers to your product. Also, by tracking feedback, you can identify ways to improve the customer’s user experience with the product and increase customer loyalty.

Here, pairing your custom objects with workflows that move customers along the custom object pipeline as they fulfill criteria can be incredibly useful.

Use Cases for Service Teams 

Okay, you’ve seen some sample use cases for sales and marketing, but how can your service team benefit from using custom objects and pipelines for those objects? Here are a couple of examples:

Creating Custom Project Pipelines for Services

One way to use custom objects is to create them for specific projects initiated by your services team. The different stages of the custom object pipeline could be the different phases of the project with properties being based on completion requirements for each phase.

This can help your service team keep track of major projects in HubSpot without having to rely on an external board view system. For smaller tickets, the Tickets tools in HubSpot may be a better fit.

Tracking Service Type Frequency

Which services are the most frequently requested amongst the service team? What problems are they most often tasked with resolving? Using custom objects based on service requests to track how many customers that specific kinds of requests could be useful for helping to optimize your services team.

For example, are your service team members frequently fielding an easy-to-solve issue that customers could handle on their own (or is caused by user error)? Consider creating an FAQ post to address the issue or add the FAQ to the product or service page.

Are customers frequently asking for a specific type of service and your service team is overloaded? It might be time to expand your service team with specialists who are trained in that particular service type to help lighten the load.

These are just a few of the potential ways to use custom objects in HubSpot. What’s your favorite way to use custom objects? Share it in the comments below!

Helpful HubSpot Resources for Custom Objects 

• HubSpot CRM Knowledge Base Topics
• How to Create Custom Objects
• HubSpot Custom Objects Product Page
• How to Create Custom Object Pipelines
• How to Create Custom Object Records
• Customizing the Board View for Custom Objects
• Managing Records in Board View

Get Help With Your HubSpot Custom Objects

Managing custom objects in HubSpot can be an enormous challenge. Not only do you need to create the object, you need to set the right parameters for it so it can be used in the way that you need it to be used.

If you're encountering difficulty with creating or using custom objects in your HubSpot account, reach out to the Bluleadz team to get started! Our experts are standing by to help you transform the way you market, service, and sell your customers!