Custom Objects

Identifiers to zoom into

Quite simply, custom objects are identifiers within the database that help to separate specific aspects of the company, determine the points that need to be tracked and help to target communication precisely to the people or points to be reached.

While this is a feature developers work with, it provides clients great flexibility to define the objects that drive their business.

Examples of ‘custom objects’ will probably drive better understanding.

In the CRM, employees inside the company need to be separated within the database from customer contacts, for example. The system has to recognize different aspects of the company and the relationships according to functions. So, employee data becomes a ‘custom object’ and this helps to drive internal communication or any other dependent data right to whom it is intended for.

Another ‘custom object’ example. In most cases, referrals are tracked to see where customers have come from. But in the database, there could be a set of people who have referred not one, but more deals and helped to close them. How do you figure out which ones are the most important referral sources and then incentivize them further? Marking them as ‘referral partners’ in custom objects helps to see how much business or deals they have helped to generate.

Define customer requirements through custom objects

Now, let’s take sales people who are out in the field interacting with customers who ask them pointed questions. Now this is precisely what the internal content team is looking for – actual customer problems. This may or may not be part of the sales report but if a custom object is created around ‘Customer Query’, it goes into the database and the teams working on content get ideas fed to them on a regular basis. How well the content piece worked from this idea can be connected to other sales and marketing systems to build up a picture. And then, there’s a deep content piece generating business simply because it was picked up and categorized as part of a sales conversation. When sales teams see how their inputs are being used, the incentive is to add more content ideas that arise from sales calls.

In short, for any aspect of your business you define what needs to be tracked, create ‘objects’ for identification and connect the dots internally, so that you get a clear view of how well marketing, sales or services are working. Even after signing up customers, they can pass through an ‘onboarding’ custom objects stage where the process of onboarding is defined and then they can be moved or categorized under other heads later, depending on how the company is structured.

Expanding the power of HubSpot with Custom Objects

In HubSpot, there are four standard CRM objects: contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. There are also HubSpot-defined objects, such as products and calls. When your business requires a different object, you can define it as a custom object. Embrace flexibility to name the object, determine what properties it has, and decide what other objects it can be associated with.

Custom objects are very similar to any other standard objects in HubSpot, so there’s no adjustment period for your team or new apps to figure out — just better data. With custom objects, you can structure your data exactly how you need to, leveraging the uniqueness of your business to grow better.

Once defined, you can create properties and build associations between these and other objects. It gives you complete flexibility and control to match CRM data to business data and associating them with data parameters for your business.

Custom objects can be used to easily organize more information and handle functions inside the CRM. They are designed to run on the same internal infrastructure that of standard CRM objects.

Custom object privileges are only available for enterprise accounts. The only way to define a custom object is via APIs defined by HubSpot.

Some of the possible functions include:

• Personalizing automated marketing emails with custom object property values
• Report on the custom object records
• Enroll custom object records into workflows.

Slice and dice custom object data into reports that highlight exactly what you want to track. Select the exact custom object metrics you want to represent, then decide how you want to visualize it. Pie charts, bar charts, donuts charts, area charts, and more — the sky’s the limit. Compile your custom object reports into dashboards to summarize the insights your team cares about. Generate quality reports with quality learnings hassle-free.

BlueOshan can help you leverage HubSpot’s powerful marketing, sales, and service platform to grow your business. And use the power of automation triggered by data from your custom objects. We offer you assistance in understanding and maintaining all of the power and ease-of-use that teams need to scale and grow.