topic Custom field of a lookup type in Sales Hub Tools

Custom field of a lookup type

AZlotko — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:19:16 GMT

Hello Community,

Here is the task:

I want to assign a company's partner who is responsible for a deal.

A deal owner will be my partner manager, but physically a partner works with a customer.

I want to display in the deal record which of my partners is working on a particular deal.

Partners, as organizations, are kept in the Companies section.

I thought I could add a custom field 'Partner' to a deal object and be able to select a partner, similar to how associations are used when creating a deal for a company or a contact.

So, each deal should have two associations: Company 1 (the potential customer) and Company 2 (our partner who works with this customer).

How can this be done?

Just linking more companies to a deal can solve the task partially.

I want to be able to filter all deals a certain partner is working on.

I would appreciate your help.

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

karstenkoehler — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:22:58 GMT

Hi @AZlotko,

HubSpot does not have lookup fields – if you want a field with a selection, you would have to maintain this manually at this point.

The correct way to go (and what I would consider best practice) are indeed associations. Specifically, with the addition of association labels: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/object-settings/create-and-use-association-labels

That way you can specify that a relationship between two records has a label (e.g. "Partner"). You can then build lists, reports, workflows etc based on this label.

This is limited to Professional and Enterprise subscriptions. In the free CRM and Starter subscriptions this is not possible and you would have to manually maintain a custom property.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

AZlotko — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:54:31 GMT

Thanks Karsten.

This sounds like a viable solution (using a label).

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

OliverFedtke — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:04:20 GMT

Hi,

actually, HubSpot supports lookup fields, meaning you have a Drop-down referencing another object.

For example, if you want to set a value for "best Friend" on a contact and the options in that field should be populated automatically by ll available contacts, you can create a lookup field via API:

https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/reference/api/crm/properties#post-%2Fcrm%2Fv3%2Fproperties%2F%7Bobjecttype%7D

{

"name": "best_friend",

"label": "Best Friend",

"type": "enumeration",

"fieldType": "select",

"groupName": "contactinformation",

"referencedObjectType": "Contact",

"displayOrder": -1,

"externalOptions": true

}

LookUp fields are just not available via the GUI.

I am not sure if you can actually filter the Contacts available for choice in this example based on parameters but maybe this would help you already with your project.

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

OliverFedtke — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:07:04 GMT

We need to be precise here:

LookUp Fields are unavailable via GUI but via API you can create LookUp fields referencing objects in HubSpot.

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

AZlotko — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:42:09 GMT

Thank you!

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

CBirkett0 — Wed, 21 May 2025 15:51:00 GMT

Do you know how to have the refernace object as a custom object? I've tried the name an the 'ID' of the object but it returns a validation error.

For Contacts, I noticed the label is the full name and the record ID is the internal value, are standard objects set up to do this in a way custom objects aren't?

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

Jenny26 — Wed, 21 May 2025 17:49:51 GMT

Oliver,
Thank you for this info. Do you know if it's possible to create a lookup where the property type was a multi-checkboxes or multi-select type?

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

CBirkett0 — Wed, 21 May 2025 18:07:41 GMT

Hi Jenny,

If you change fieldType to "checkbox" you'll get a multi select

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

Jenny26 — Wed, 21 May 2025 19:45:23 GMT

Thank you. Unfortunately, I tried it but than the lookup option goes away - all of the companies are no longer listed.

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

CBirkett0 — Thu, 22 May 2025 07:59:39 GMT

That's strange, I have a Multiple checkbox that works fine (for contacts):

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

Jenny26 — Thu, 22 May 2025 14:58:15 GMT

Thank you for telling me! I did this in my sandbox. I'll try again in our production account.

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

Jenny26 — Thu, 22 May 2025 15:22:55 GMT

I tried creating it again and it worked! Thank you! I changed the fieldtype to be checkbox.

Re: Custom field of a lookup type

Jenny26 — Thu, 22 May 2025 15:24:12 GMT

No need to reply - please see below. Thank you for your intructions on your blog at https://www.aquilliance.de/hubspot/lookup-felder-in-hubspot-anlegen/. Very helpful!