This is a key element to helping further reinforce the position of HubSpot as a CRM solution comparable to others in the market. This is a key onboarding issue that has to be overcome with users, as to why custom objects aren't navigable in the same way which you can navigate to contacts or companies.
Some custom objects sit behind the scenes and work well where they are, in the same which in which marketing events and calls do, as these are primarily accessed through a contact record, but where you have a custom object tracking a key component of your business which needs to be accessed independently regularly, not having the ability to edit the main navigation can make this an awkward experience.
As an MVP, I would recommend having an option set through the custom objects API which adds the custom object to the "Contacts" core navigation menu as per below sorted alphabetically with a maximum number that can be displayed per portal:
As a further development of this would be great, the option to add additional menus for custom objects would be amazing and would really support being able to create proper experiences with custom objects, something as per the below.
It would make sense to repurpose the navigation menus UI used within CMS Hub to manage this, therefore minimising the impact of this feature.
Overall, this would be a great feature to advance the UI and would be really helpful for us and our clients!
I upvote and high-five everything @adzleach says. this is a request we get from every enterprise customer we work with and 1 in 2 of the pro accounts. User adoption on behalf of the teams is the largest motivation behind the request.
What @adzleach said really. That's exactly how I'd love to see it in the interface. Having to navigate to contacts -> contacts, then select from a dropdown is a big roadblock for adoption.
I had another client of ours be frustrated and surprised when he discovered post-purchase of a Hubspot Enterprise license that the current way to navigate to a custom object has so much friction as it has today. It's great that there's all this back-end functionality with custom objects, like including them in templates and whatnot.
Yet these are small but essential tweaks that can make or break a front-end user's experience of custom objects, and potentially tank an entire implementation because of it.
Would love for this to be built into the roadmap - we are getting more and more queries around making custom objects more accessible so it's comparable in customisation to the likes of Salesforce and Zoho.
This request seems elementary within the CRM world and wouldn't be overly difficult for HubSpot to enable. Any ideas as to why it's taking so long to develop and deploy?
We need this. This is the third or fourth basic thing we just assumed Hubspot would be able to do for us that it can't. And with this one, like the others, it seems that there is just no roadmap or sense of ugency on Hubspot's part to get this addressed.