Ask Me Anything: Custom Objects

[ajoselow]

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. 

Ask a question below and learn from: 

@ajoselow - Product Marketing Principal 

@ebeck - Product Marketing Manager

@jeffreyr - Director, GTM

@KyleJepson - Academy Professor

@mhodsdon - Solutions Architect 

@nmedina - Product Marketer

@ncarbone - GTM Manager

@Shelby - Product Marketer

Not sure what to ask? Here are a few sample questions to get the conversation started: 

1. What are custom objects?
2. When should I use a custom object versus a custom field? 
3. 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! 

[SMA]

Hi,

Are we able to to create custom objects wich use the same interface as Deals or Ticket objects? For example Kanban view. 

[KyleJepson]

Hi @SMA -- We don't currently have a Kanban view for custom objects. This is something we're considering, but as far as I know, it isn't in development yet. For updates, watch the post on the ideas forum: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Custom-object-pipelines/idi-p/366409

[kelseyingram392]

Hi product team, 

Question regarding syncing information between systems. If we use a custom object for subscriptions, for example, and we need to integrate our HubSpot instance with another platform, which integration tools would we be able to use? PieSync? Zapier? 

Thanks!

[kgroover]

Hi @kelseyingram392 ! If you need a custom objects integration beyond what PieSync and Zapier provide, Lynton can help you with that. We're AIC certified and an Elite partner and handle all kinds of custom HubSpot integrations. Feel free to schedule a call or email megan.putman@lyntonweb.com if you want to discuss! 

[rohri]

Hello @kelseyingram392, thanks so much for participating.

Currently there aren't any connectors that work with Custom Objects.

PieSync can sync Contacts and Companies (not yet Deals, Tickets, or Custom Objects).  We are working on it, but I don't have a timeline for when it will be available.

Zapier is similar, in that it can interact with our standard objects but not custom objects, at this time.

As more integrators become comfortable using our Custom Objects, I expect other iPaaS providers to include Custom Objects, but there isn't anything available at this time outside of a custom integration using the APIs directly.

[ConversionCrew]

Hi Adrienne, 

we've implemented custom objects for a client and he's an avid user of the Conversations Inbox as well. Both him and me now wonder why our custom object doesn't appear in the sidebar on the right within Conversations. All other objects are represented there for quick view and editing: Tickets, Deals and Company. Shouldn't custom objects be displayed there as well by default, or the option to get them to appear there? Could mean a huge win in the daily workflow of the client.

Looking forward to hearing what your thoughts are.

Thanks in advance!

Best, Ron

[jeffreyr]

Hi Ron / @ConversionCrew - This is a very fair thing to point out and something I'll surface to the Conversations team to ensure it's on their radar. As you might imagine, there are a lot of corners of HubSpot where Custom Objects should probably be reflected, and we are working hard to find any we've missed!

[ConversionCrew]

Hi Jeffrey, thanks! I can imagine custom objects having impact on lots of places in HubSpot. In general we can tell a lot of thought went into it already and it's working like a charm so far.

[ridingforlife]

@KyleJepson The coupon codes would have to come from our website platform so they will work for redemption. We are currently scoping out building an internal tool for that, as it's just batch generation but we want it on request. Then we'd hook that up to HubSpot so that a coupon code could be generated in a workflow (ex: contact enters workflow as it's their birthday, call made to generate coupon code, send back coupon code and store it to the contact, then send a marketing email to contact with coupon code details). My thinking with the custom object is would it be a better fit to store all the coupon information than on the contact record as custom properties?

[KyleJepson]

That makes sense to me. I agree that it would be better than using properties because then you can have more than one coupon associated to a contact. Also, we just today released an update to workflows that makes it possible to create custom-object records using workflows, so this could all work very nicely, I think.

[NCO]

Hey @KyleJepson - appreciate all of the insight that you and the product team have shared here.

I've read through the threads and have skimmed through the Hubspot Academy collateral; apologies in advance if the questions below have been touched on and I just missed them:

1) Is there a way (or a plan) to view an overview of custom objects as a standalone list? Contacts, companies, deals, and tickets have their own dashboards and having such a view for a custom object would be incredible.

2) You mentioned above that custom objects can be pulled into marketing emails. It may already be an option with help on the development end but is it possible to pull custom objects onto a landing/website page without using HubDB?

3) Do custom objects integrate well with the external connector apps (Zapier, Integromat, etc.)?

Thanks for all of your help - super excited to get started here!

Regards,

Noam

[KyleJepson]

Hi @NCO! Great questions--here's my take:

1. Custom objects each get their own index page, complete with filtering, sorting, creating views--everything you can do with contacts/companies. They don't, however, get their own spot in the main navigation (this is something we're mulling over--I don't know what the plan is, here). But you can get to them by navigating to contacts (or companies or...) and using the dropdown selector to find them. It looks like this:
   
2. Yes! I believe this feature might currently be in beta, but there's a little bit of HUBL code you can put into your templates to pull in custom object (or standard object!) data. Sample use cases include real estate listings, job postings, etc. Documentation here: https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/cms/features/custom-objects
3. This one, I don't know the answer to. The API endpoints are all there, but I don't know for sure if Zapier etc. have created anything with them yet. Hopefully someone else on the thread will be able to give you a more solid answer here.

[NCO]

Thanks for the quick responses Kyle - much appreciated as always!

[ridingforlife]

Would custom objects be a good use for unique coupon codes? Each record is a unique coupon that holds all relevant data (alphanumeric code, discount amount, expiry, etc.) and then could be associated to contacts somehow?

[KyleJepson]

Hi @ridingforlife! You could definitely create a Coupon object that has the properties you mentioned, and you could have it be associated to contacts (or to deals... or both!). I'd be curious to know more about how you would generate these coupons and what you would do with them once they exist. This is a pretty unique use case, and that has me feeling pretty excited!

[Andersh92]

Hi, 

We're thinking of whether or not to use custom objects for company locations and mother/daughter structures. The alternative is using custom properties with e.g. multiple checkboxes to display this kind of information on the contact/company record.  

Do you have any recommendations as to how we should attack the above scenario? I would think custom objects is the best solution, but I'd really like your take on it before making a decision. 

Thanks. 

[KyleJepson]

Hi @Andersh92! I think we'd have to dive a little deeper to understand the situation fully, but there was at least one company in the beta program this summer that used custom objects for company locations and was pretty happy with it. I don't know any details beyond that, though. I'll see if I can get someone with more insight to respond to this question.

[Andersh92]

Thanks @KyleJepson That makes sense.

The situation is that we have sales reps working their sales processes towards say 50 of total 100 companies underneath a parent company. Let's call the parent company "Tomato Group". Then Tomato Group has 100 locations with names along the lines of Tomato Dublin, Tomato London, Tomato Manchester, etc. 50 of these locations are in sales processes with our sales reps. Would it be smart if we created a custom objects for "locations", so that we could see all these locations from the "Tomato group" company record?

This would also make it better for our sales reps to easier manage their sales processes, as with "location" as a custom object, I assume they can associate deals to the respective locations, rather than associating all deals from a tomato location to the parent company (Tomato Group), as is the case today. 

Lastly, we would also like to see from all the Tomato location records that "Tomato group" is the parent company. In my head custom objects sounds much better than creating custom properties for this matter, and I can't really see a good way of handling this using custom properties instead. Do you agree? 

And by the way, sorry for the Tomato-example. I have no idea why I chose that as my example company name. I must really like tomatoes I guess.. 

Thanks! 

[KyleJepson]

@Andersh92 -- Hey, tomatoes are delicious!

Is there a reason parent-child relationships for companies wouldn't work for you? https://knowledge.hubspot.com/companies/how-can-i-add-a-parent-or-child-company-to-an-existing-compa...

[Andersh92]

@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. 

[aguth]

Hi,

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.