Fine tuning HubSpot’s CRM – the customization possibilities

The power of leveraging HubSpot’s CRM comes from the way it can be customized and extended to manage processes within a company. At the base level, it is a repository of all interactions the company has had with prospects and customers.

In a recent webinar, Amy Chamness, Product Marketing Manager of HubSpot, demonstrated how HubSpot’s CRM could meet a company’s specific requirements – how to model the need, how to customize it, and how to extend it.

Why is it important to be able to customize the CRM?

Businesses of all sizes are rapidly changing. In the current wave, they are changing at a pace that we have never really seen before on the technological side. There are tons of advancements, for sure. Generative AI is coming out of the woodwork, and that has obviously changed the priorities at companies.

Resource pressures are being placed on businesses, and every department is being asked to do more with less. All business adaptations require resources that they do not have. They are being restrained, and budgets are being reduced. A recent Zoom Info study showed how CRM implementations are a multibillion-dollar business. 

The average implementation of a CRM costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.  It is common when doing an implementation for a lot of the budget to be allocated for customization - whether you are setting up a new CRM or ripping out a different CRM and customizing it from the ground up. Or engaging with a partner or a developer to change something about your CRM implementation.

Typically, that involves some sort of business process change. AI could be a common sort of instigator. Or market dynamics could dictate a change in your processes. It could also be that you need to incorporate new technology. The reasons could be many, but the basic change involved means that you have to customize the CRM to manage these changes on the ground.

HubSpot’s CRM is seen as 1.7 times more customizable than Salesforce, as evaluated by existing customers. That is one of the factors driving greater adoption and helping companies meet the twin needs of staying within tight budgets and making the necessary changes.

So, what are the changes that you can make easily?

The first is your model, so modeling your data within the platform. That is typically something that happens at the start of an implementation.  By mapping your data structure onto the HubSpot platform, the features that are in that space include things like custom objects, custom properties, timeline events, associations, etc. 

The second piece is configuration. That is when you configure pre-built HubSpot defaults to meet your business needs, and these do not require complex developer skills but can be managed by HubSpot admins - going into a pipeline and making a tweak to a stage. Or going to an index page and changing it so that it represents the data that a given team needs.

The third category is extending your data or data structure in HubSpot. This makes HubSpot not only a tool that is easy to use but also easy to adapt.

Examples to illustrate the ways in which it is being used

In data modeling, a shipping company needed to represent warehouses within HubSpot. They used a custom object called the warehouse. They defined the associations within the platform so warehouses were associated with deals amongst other objects, and then they used Association labels to define how a warehouse interacted with a specific deal. Whether it was the primary warehouse, the other warehouses involved, the current status of that warehouse, or the products being fulfilled, shipped, or procured out of that warehouse, they were all represented.

In configuring, a university has two different teams using the contact object, recruitment and admissions. The school configures the contact object, so that recruiters and admission agents have unique views of the contact record, displaying only relevant data.

And as far as extensibility goes, a garbage collection business customizes the company record to include a custom tab. On this custom tab, they have a card that integrates an external map tool so that drivers can easily locate the company on their route.

Custom cards are exciting, but they are just the first step in this world of UI extensibility. There are a ton of other touch points within the interface and within the CRM that HubSpot is currently working on to build more use cases that customers can deploy, specific to their needs.

Blueoshan has implemented several projects for clients that do each of the functions outlined above. Whether it is expansion of the data structure, configuring internal processes, or extending functionality.

If you are underutilizing the power of HubSpot’s CRM, we can work with your teams to expand both functionality and save resources. We have built special modules to handle multiple types of configurations and make these changes at speed. And since we have worked on databases with millions of records, we know the complexity involved and how to solve tricky issues.

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BlueOshan is a HubSpot Diamond -Tier Solutions Partner. Delivering worldwide from India