We get this request with the majority of the migrations we perform. Often, customers have to either abandon data or move it over in a way that isn't usable, so I look forward to hearing when HS will allow for the creation of custom objects.
I can illustrate in more detail how this could look like and what would help in our case
Background
Custom objects (behaves like a company, contact, ticket, deal), e.g. device, shipment, server, software instance, building, device subcomponent. A shipment can contain devices and a company owns devices and a contact might be assigned as device user and a deal will consist of multiple shipments. Also products could be an object (enabling them to have custom product properties which would be huge in itself). And so on.
Some more slides that might explain the concept of custom objects better than I did in my post above. This would be really helpful and extend the scope of Hubspot dramatically.
Other objects could be deliveries/parcels, subcomponents of devices, credit notes, loaner devices.
I come from a Salesforce background, and the inability to create custom objects and establish relationships is making it very difficult to use Hubspot as a true CRM alternative. I would love to see this functionality added.
@noahmckeon , @basil , @ThePaulShin we trully want this feature like you. Any chance you could get some more people to vote for it? I am pushing this idea in the forum to similar conversations.
This has been the reason for me to not choose Hubspot and instead opt for something like Eloqua, Marketo or SMC/Pardot on quite a few projects I've been involved in now.
Bigger businesses often have more data that is highly relevant for the customer journey/experience, and that could exponentially improve results if that data could be properly added to Hubspot in a structured manner.
Very tangible use case:
Just the other day I was involved with a project for a semi-government non-profit organisation that supports parents of children by sending them all kinds of personalized information as their kids age. This is their core business, so basically a lot of workflows that run off the child's date of birth in combination with things like gender and education level.
Of course, parents can and often will have more than 1 kid. But mixing all their kids' information in a single parent record isn't workable. Creating individual records for each kid also won't work because they'd all need the same email address. You *need* to store the kids' information in a separate object. One table for parents (contacts) and one table for kids, then link them up.
The team responsible for all this content is very basic: a few parttime ladies who approach it from a very content-oriented perspective, not at all technical or leadgen focused. They need a platform that has a user friendly front-end, like Hubspot. But the only MAPs that I know of that support custom objects are the big unruly beasts I mentioned before. I can't do that to them, so can't really recommend them a good solution.
I think this is one of those subjects that a lot of marketeers don't really understand how impactful it can be on their marketing performance, but the potential is huge. And that's not even considering custom objects' potential in Sales/CRM. Please consider adding this as a feature.
Another example is when a Company acquire/hire multiple services from our portfolio, so you want to manage each service as a diferent object, as they might have very different and specific lifecycles within each customer.
This is extremely important. Our customers need to sync data from their ERP to CRM for the sales team.
We would like to sync a complete Order history, Shipments, deliveries, invoices, returns etc.
For now, we've hijacked a type of Deals and created 382,860 Deals in status Closed-Won to give the sales reps an idea of orders placed by their customers. Still missing deliveries, invoices etc. 😞
Although I understand HubSpot is supposed to be a more "user-friendly" platform, with more baked elements, not offering us the ability to adapt the platform to our business needs is simply a backwards move.
To give you an example: we are trying to use intent data to create our predictive account scoring model, which is the foundation of our ABM strategy. This is a time-based object, since intent changes over time and it has to be a field associated with the company ID, so you can associate the record with the company.
We are currently evaluating whether Hubspot is the right CRM system for us. Unfortunately, we need exactly this possibility to really be able to map the data of our customers. We will continue to look around.