You've probably already heard that you can now create custom objects in HubSpot. But as we heard in the movie Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.
Let's remember the current HubSpot objects for most of the licenses: contacts, companies, tickets, businesses, quotes, products, tasks.
How to know if you need a custom object in HubSpot
- So the first thing you should think about is whether the information you're wanting to have in your CRM could go inside one of these existing objects. Because there's no point in making everything complex if we can solve it in a simple way.
- The second thing to think about is whether it is static or dynamic information. If the information is closely related to another object, say a contact or company and changes over time, you probably want it to be a custom property, such as email or billing address. If the information is static and requires an extra subset of information then perhaps a custom object is the solution.
- The third thing HubSpot recommends is to look for an existing 3rd party integration that solves what we are doing. For example, gotowebinar to find out what webinars a contact signs up for.
How to plan the creation of your custom object
A custom object must have a process that your company carries out to track that information (such as contact information, a business or quote, a support ticket). If you don't have the process, then you must first define it.
In turn you must think about what reports you need to see and have to monitor this process. If you don't need reports to monitor it, then you don't need a custom object.
Once you have this defined, you can go on to list the properties that this object will have. You must also define how this object relates to the other existing objects.
Once you have created your new custom object and its properties, remember to define a data housekeeping process. For this, remember to use the custom reports for this new object.
What IS NOT a custom object
I can help you by telling you what we do NOT consider appropriate for a custom object:
- Videos/Webinars (it's an event or activity that a contact does. Many 3rd party applications to leverage).
- Distributors (is a type of company)
- Referred company (can be defined at the company level as a secondary related company)
- Services you sell (you can solve it with products)
- Events (unless you are an event organizer)
- Applicants (they are really contacts whose type is other/applicant)
- Employees (these are contacts)
- Campaign (there are campaigns in HubSpot for this classification of marketing and sales actions).
If you want to know more you can watch the video about the HubSpot User Event that we have made:
If you don't know if this is what you need or you think you need a custom object but don't know how to plan it, let alone implement it, we can help you.
Ideas for custom objects
- Cars / Car Brands: If you are a car rental / broker
- Courses / Cohort: if you are in Education .
- Also Teachers could be another CO.
- Trials / Users / Accounts : If you a SaaS company
- Candidates: if you are a HR recruiter
- Properties: if you are a real state agent/ broker
- Also Owners could be a CO to differentiate them from customers who buy/rent the properties.
- Partners: If you develop a partner ecosystem associated with your customers
- Shipping: This could be useful for an e-commerce (to store all the shipping info) also goes with Logistics companies.
We can continue adding examples but you have to mainly consider the company's necessity, each case could be different and 'd need some evaluation.