Should I be using custom objects in HubSpot?

At Inbound 2020 - HubSpot’s annual two-day business conference - HubSpot announced the launch of Custom Objects, much to the joy of Hubspotters all around the globe. In this blog we explore what custom objects are, and how you can use them to tailor your HubSpot portal.

Inbound 2020 – one of the most awaited global tech events of the year – was pushed into the virtual corner in September (like so many similar events) but didn’t disappoint in its delivery of a two-day insightful conference.

Filled with HubSpot product launches, thought leadership and marketing experts revealing their golden strategies for success - from the likes of Marcus Sheridan, John Legend and Bob Iger - there was one product launch which took center stage: Custom Objects.

With a frenzy of information hitting the fan, we’ve scaled it back to give you the basic low down on what they are and whether you should be using them in your business.

What are custom objects?

In the simplest sense, custom objects provide you with complete flexibility to match your CRM data to your business.

This flexibility opens up a whole new world for a lot of HubSpot clients who are now able to start customising their HubSpot portal to their specific needs. I.e. instead of having a contact, company, deal, ticket, object or record in HubSpot (HubSpot’s basic fields), you can now have multiple unique records based on your specific business needs.

What are the benefits of custom objects?

The launch of custom objects can provide lots of key benefits to a business. These include:

• More flexibility with your CRM

• Match your unique business needs and data structures

• Replace storing data in non-conventional ways

• Scale your business

However, creating and using custom objects in your business can be a complex process so we advise only using them if you have to – with support from a HubSpot partner, HubSpot’s basic fields should be sufficient to suit most business needs if manipulated correctly.

What industries would benefit from custom objects?

If you're currently using deals, tickets, companies, or even contacts, to store data in a non-conventional way and you're looking for a lot more flexibility and scalability with your CRM architecture, then custom objects is a really great tool for you.

There are a few key industries that custom objects specifically work brilliantly for. These are:

Real estate: If you’re a real estate agency, you may need a ‘home’ object so that you can store multiple different listings against a contact or deal.

Manufacturer: by using custom objects, manufacturers can now easily track orders or specific products

Events: If you’re an events company that doesn’t want to create multiple different fields every single time you have a new event, you can now have a single object for events. These could then be associated with a contact, company, deal or ticket.

What’s an example of custom objects in practice?

To dive a little bit deeper into some of the used cases where we've previously used deals to store data, and can now use custom objects, let’s look at the tourism industry – specifically a wine farm we worked with in South Africa.
Before the launch of custom objects, we used deals to store information, integrated from multiple different platforms. These platforms managed their hotel bookings, workshop and activity bookings, spa bookings, restaurant bookings, wine tastings and even someone accessing the WIFI on the farm.

All of these actions would be stored on deal records which, as you can imagine, massively cluttered up the deal part of the sidebar in their contact records in HubSpot, particularly if the contact did a lot of activities on the farm. This meant, looking for information quickly on a contact record was difficult and time-consuming, so they needed a much better system.
With the introduction of custom objects, the wine farm now have the flexibility to create objects for each of these interactions on the farm, so that when you view the contact record in HubSpot, you can see all of their interactions separated by the different objects - not all lumped into one deal section.

This makes the process much cleaner and a lot more scalable going forward as it gives them a much better view of the customer and their interaction with the farm.

The use of custom objects also makes them open to scale their business as they start introducing the other sister farms into HubSpot.

Conclusion…

With the above examples, you can see that the introduction of custom objects really opens up quite a lot of flexibility for enterprise companies looking to deploy HubSpot in a way that matches their unique business requirements and data structures.

Our HubSpot specialists have been eagerly using this new feature already and educating our clients on the new tool, so if you have any question around custom objects please don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we can definitely work with you to architect a solution for your business using custom objects.