Custom Objects - limitations & best practices?

[Jenny26]

Hi everyone,

In addition to selling software applications, my company has a consulting division where they manage several consulting projects. We've been using a deal pipeline as a project management pipeline.

I've been playing in our sandbox with a "Consulting Projects" custom object using the custom object pipeline and associated to the client company and main contacts. It seems to be much better as we have more customization with the object creation forms, less clutter in the deals object, and more organization in the CRM.  I was recently cautioned from moving to using the custom object. The individual I spoke with  cautioned me saying that we would not have the activities recorded like we wanted and other possible limitations. 

What are your thoughts? What limitations have you experienced custom objects? Have your tried using custom objects for project management or perhaps onboarding? What best practices do you suggest?

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @Jenny26,

This is a great question, and thank you for sharing your thoughts @Olivia_Bagnall! 😄 

I would like to add our subject matter experts to this conversation to see if they have any thoughts.

Hi @christopher-RVO, @Teun, @BrianCarter, @Bryantworks - Do you have any insight for @Jenny26?

Thank you!

Best,

Kristen

[Olivia_Bagnall · Accepted solution]

@Jenny26 

Hi Jenny! Honestly, your situation sounds like either: 
-  a great use case for custom objects 
OR 

- a reason to start using the tickets pipeline for project management (although this does require service hub pro if you want to have ticket automation). 

I have worked with quote a few clients who use tickets for project management/onboarding and it works well! They don't feel the need to move to custom objects.  If you have Service Pro and are not currently using tickets than I would recommend exploring this alley first.

For me, these would be the biggest limitations of custom objects: 

1. Zapier does not support custom objects and so integrations need to be done via API and devs. 
2. Marketplace integrations, for the most part, only sync to standard objects. 
3. Custom object  personalisation tokens are not available in templates and consequently can't be used in sequences tools, marekting email text etc ...  in HubSpot.

Let me know if you have any further questions and I'll be happy to help! 

Olivia Bagnall Inbound Consultant and Project Manager Baskey   o.bagnall@baskey.eu www.baskey.eu Rheingasse 14, 50676 Köln

[Jenny26]

Thank you very much! I will take a look at the ticket pipeline idea. 

We'd need the ability to create a custom ticket creation form, though. Is that an option yet?

[christopher-RVO]

@Jenny26  I reiterate everything that @Olivia_Bagnall  said. 

I totally recommend using tickets for this as the native objects will have a lot of built in functionality compared to creating a custom object. 

In the SaaS world, I see the most success with using a ticket pipeline to manage onboarding and anything related to project management within HubSpot. 

To answer your question on the ticket creation form, yes that it totally possible. 



You can either create a Support Form as notated in the screenshot above, or create a form from scratch and add custom ticket properties to collect any relevant data. 

[Jenny26]

Thank you so much for thoughtful reply! My apologies - I wasn't clear on my question about the form. I'm actually referring to the 'create ticket' form in the service hub.

We have two tech support ticket pipelines. So, if we also use the ticket pipleline for project managment, we'd need a very different "create ticket" form.