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!
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.
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.
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:
In other words, you need to have any kind of Enterprise-level HubSpot subscription to create and use custom objects in your HubSpot portal.
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:
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:
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:
Custom object records are exactly like regular object records—just for the HubSpot custom objects that you’ve created.
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:
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:
Get a guide with pictures here. Also, here’s a quick video showing the process:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
So, how can marketing take advantage of custom objects? Here are a couple of potential use cases for custom objects in your marketing department:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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!
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!