Sep 21, 20205:28 PM - last edited on Oct 16, 20205:29 PM by jennysowyrda
HubSpot Product Team
[Closed] Ask Me Anything: Custom Objects
Hi everyone,
My name is Adrienne and I am a member of the Product Marketing team at HubSpot. As you may have heard, HubSpot introduced a very exciting new feature at INBOUND, custom objects. This tool is something we’ve been working on for quite some time, and we’re excited for you to finally get to try it out.
Whether you’ve been eagerly awaiting this release, or you’re just starting to familiarize yourself with the tool, we want to hear from you and answer any questions you may have about custom objects.
To ensure you're set up for success with custom objects, we've brought together our most knowledgeable HubSpotters to answer all of your questions.
We will be answering questions from Monday October 5 - Friday October 9.
Not sure what to ask? Here are a few sample questions to get the conversation started:
What are custom objects?
When should I use a custom object versus a custom field?
How can I learn more about custom objects?
Want a primer? Here are the basics:
Custom objects are a set of customizable records within your CRM that supplement standard CRM records in a more flexible way. Custom objects allow you to supplement data in a scalable way with flexible associations, so you can name the object, determine what properties it has, and decide what other objects it can be associated with in your CRM. For more details and use cases, I encourage you to check out the custom objects feature page for an overview of this powerful new feature.
How to get involved: Drop your question in the comments below and we’ll respond throughout the week. If you see a question you’re interested in following, give it an upvote to ensure we know you’re interested in learning more!
This AMA is now closed. Thank you everyone for your participation and questions. Stay tuned for more AMAs to come!
@KyleJepson Yes, that feature has it's limitations and we have tried that previously. It doesn't solve the issue. I still think custom objects is the best solution, but as you've said many times, we're going to think this through before creating it. Thanks.
Custom objects seem super exciting for us, can't wait to start my experiments. I expect that adding custom objects will increase the number of custom prpoerties in use in our portal. I'm wondering if you consider raising the number of searchable custom properties? AFAIK recently it is 3, and by adding new data dimensions we'll quickly run short with that.
Hi @aguth! This is all still something we're figuring out. We are working on getting custom-object properties added to search, but we haven't ironed out all the details on limits and things. All of that will hopefully get ironed out in early to mid 2021.
Hi @KyleJepson, thanks for the clarification indeed. This would be a big addition and I understand that it would take some time for it to trickle down to Custom Objects, so if you ever hear about Beta or Alpha access to it, we'd be happy to give it a test run. 🙂 Following on the Car scenario, could I be able to create associations between the custom object and companies through a workflow the same way that I can now with Contact Owners? For example, we are syncing the Cars and their drivers through the API. But I'd like the cars to be also associated to the company that the drivers are part of. I believe we can do this through the API but would there be a way of doing it from a workflow? Say the enrollment trigger is Contact's buying role is Purchaser AND is associated to a Car, copy contact's Company to License's Company property? (I think I may have answered my own question here haha, but I tried doing something like this earlier but found that there was no way of copying it so thus my question).
Second scenario is a bit more into the weeds. Say the Car Object has a date property that I define as Lease End. Could I create workflows that say that ON the Lease End date, update all contacts associated to it to change their Contact Property: Is Active Driver, to NO? Or, in case there are multiple cars people can be driving, a Contact Workflow that if the associated Car's lease period is to expire, changes their active driver status? What can be done if there are multiple cars that person can have access to? would it be an IF no other Lease End date at a further date is known, then change the status? Seems just a tad more convoluted than what workflows give us the chance to do. Again, thanks again for this AMA! Pretty cool ideas and concepts being baked here. 🙂
Now you're asking hard questions! 🙂 There isn't currently a way to center custom-object workflows around a date property the way you can for contacts. I don't know of specific plans to correct that, but in general we are working toward object parity in all parts of the platform, so I would expect that this will be possible someday. In the meantime, you could do something like this:
That's a bit of a workaround, but if your leases are a year long, it should do the job.
Your second question is indeed more convoluted, but it makes a lot of sense. We know we need more robust logic functions in workflows, and this is something that we're thinking hard about. I can't promise that workflows will function in exactly the way you're imagining, but I would bet if/thens and loops and other basic functions like that will be available in workflows in the near-ish future.
(Same note as last time--I'm not in charge of product decisions. I do hear things that happen behind the scenes, but I'm not in a position to promise things, let alone dictate timelines for those things.)
Hi, I have asked this elsewhere, but the answers here seem more varied.
Would it be a good idea to use a Custom object to track referrals between contacts (Customers). So one Customer, ther referrer could refer several other contacts to our business (referrees). We would like to keep track of which contact refered which other contact and then email the referrer at certain points of the referree's journey, to thank them.
How would I need to set this up to work, considering different contacts could be referrers, referrees or in fact both.
We currently use custom properties, but this is clunky and has difficulty referrencing to the referrer, without using some zapier magic to make it happen. It also means not all referrals are always tracked as things in the external workflow breaks down.
With that said, it may be that a "Referral" Custom Object could get you closer to a home-grown system in HubSpot. This may be worth digging into further, but from a database perspective it feels like you could create a Referral Object with some properties to define the referral itself. Perhaps a Referral Type, Date, etc.
You could then associate the referrals with Contacts, and could associate them to the Referrer contact as well as all of the Referrals.
The biggest challenge you'll run into with making this feel complete is that when a Referral is associated to a Contact we cannot make that contact be a certain Association Type or give them a Role. For example, you would have more than one contact associated to the referral, but wouldn't be able to (at a glance) see which contact was the Referrer vs the ones Referred. We can get around that with a Custom Property for the Referrer, and then associate all contacts.
It's not perfect, but might get you moving towards something more sophisticated.
As always, your first step should be to make sure you are clear on the use cases you want to work through at the end of the project. What emails need to be sent and to whom, and what needs to be included? What data needs to be collected for internal reporting? Where does the most important pieces of data need to be stored for you to be able to "do your work"?
Hello HS Custom Objects crack team! Fantastic work and thank you for all the support. Are there plans to incorporate multiple properties where we can associate contacts under different conditions? (Following the Cars Custom Object example, a Car Users property linked to X contacts and also a single Car Owner property linked to a Y contact, and just for fun a Car Drivers propery with multiple Z contacts)
Hey @BDaniel -- If I'm understanding you correctly, then there's a separate feature currently under development that I think would address this. Here's what we're working on:
Elsewhere in this thread, someone asked about being able to associate multiple companies to a contact (edited). This is something we're actively working on, and I speculated that it could be available in beta before the end of the year. That might sound totally unrelated to what you're talking about, but the way we're thinking about this feature is enabling users to create named associations. So a contact might be associated to Company A as an employee and associated to Company B as a board member. There isn't an "Employee" property or "Board Member" property on contacts or companies--the association itself holds this information.
Once we get these sorts of associations right between contacts and companies, then we plan on rolling this out to assocations between other objects. When we get there, you could have a car objects with one contact associated as the owner and a couple other contacts associated as drivers etc. Which I think gets at what you're asking for, but if not, let me know!
(NOTE: None of this currently exists in HubSpot today, and plans can change. I'm not directly involved in the development of these features. This is just my understanding of the world we're trying to get to.)
@KyleJepson I really like the concept of named associations. Big upvote. Very useful in lots of applications. Also in custom objects!
But: when you write (at the top of paragraph 2: "being able to associate multiple contacts to a company", surely you mean "being able to associate a contact to multiple companies", right?
I still find limitations with the hubspot campaigns feature. I leverage campaigns in SFDC.
What about creating a campaigns custom object in Hubspot to enable more 1 to 1 synching from campaigns in SFDC? With the goal of enabling attribution to multiple campaigns as well as more custom reporting.
Would this be the type of use case one might explore?
@HubspotAdmin This is a very good thought, but I don't suspect this is a good use case for a HubSpot Custom Object today. The Campaigns object in SFDC gets used in a variety of different ways, as do "Campaigns" in HubSpot.
It may be that creating a Campaign object in HubSpot could help with this, though there may need to be some custom development to make sure it is syncing properly with the Campaign object in SFDC.
My initial thought would be to unpack what you mean by "enabling attributuion to multiple campaigns" and "custom reporting" into reporting requirements and from there it may become more clear whether a Custom Object is necessary for what you need to do or whether there is a more straightforward solution such as using Lists in HubSpot based on Campaigns in SFDC.
Longer term, the custom object capabilities will continue to improve and your use case here may be something we can solve more appropriately using a custom object.
I'm curious to learn more about how Custom Objects could be applied to tracking our client's subscriptions (as alluded to in the Custom Objects intro video). How do you see Cusom Objects being better (or just different) for tracking subscriptions as opposed to a "Subscription" company property
I'm thinking of doing the same as you did on Oct 5, 2020. Using Subscriptions as a CO instead of using properties (or any other type of structure) seems promising.
Did you try to use it? If so, what are/were your experiences?
Hey @Herschel ! I think there are two main advantages to using a custom object rather than a property for tracking subscriptions:
First, an object can hold more information. You could have the name of the subscription, its start date, end date, and anything else you wanted to track there.
Second (and this is probably a bigger deal) is the ability to associate multiple custom objects to other objects. For example, if a contact or company has more than one subscription at the same time, you can associate multiple subscription objects to it in a way that would be hard to replicate cleanly using custom properties.
I hope this helps! If you have follow-up questions, I'm here for them!
Hi @ridingforlife ! These are great questions. Here are some (hopefully equally-great) answers:
Yes! When you create a workflow, you have the option to select contact-based workflow, company-based workflow, etc. Once your custom object is created, you'll see it listed there, too, and the process for creating a workflow will be exactly the same as what you're used to with standard objects.
This question was discussed elsewhere in this thread, with three different people weighing in on it. Check that out for the official answer on when/if a UI will be created, but my unofficial answer is that there already is a UI (kind of). You can watch a video of me using this secret UI here.
Yes! Once the object is defined, it gets a page just like the one for contacts and companies. You can filter, save views, and create new records just like normal.
Yes! I believe this feature is currently in beta, but it does exist and will be generally available before long. UPDATE: Actually, this is live and available now. Sorry to misspeak!
I definitely recommend checking out HubSpot Academy's lesson about custom objects--it answers these questions and more!
Most of our Contacts are Clients or Candidates and sometimes can be both. Should we create 3 contact types or should we create 2 custom objects (Clients and Candidates) and link the records together when a contact is both?