No Time to waste? Here's the summary.

HubSpot released a new option: you can now create Custom Objects to collect and store data that doesn't fit into any of the standard categories, such as contacts or tickets. With Custom Objects, you can generate even clearer reports and set up automated follow-up actions, for faster communication and action for hot leads and existing clients. And your team can find all info in one place. Time saved!

Organizing your data

To know what’s happening in your organization, you keep track of several factors. Basically, any CRM system has the option to save these items:

• Contacts
• Companies
• Deals
• Tickets

It’s a great start, but we often find that there’s specific information in organizations that doesn’t really belong to any of these categories. So, you either have to resort to an additional system (time-consuming and confusing), or you fail to measure it correctly, if at all. 

Still, that information could be vital data to base strategies and tactics on. How do you measure it then, without messing up the other data and workflows?

That’s where HubSpot Custom Objects comes in. With these specific cases in mind, HubSpot now lets you create, well, custom objects. To give you a better idea of the possibilities, here’s how we use it for our clients:

Example 1: Driving lessons

One of our clients is a driving school. Their driving lessons, in various forms, are of course an important part of their business, organization, and planning. With Custom Objects, we can create a category called ‘driving lessons’ and connect this to a contact. You can also add other important information to it, such as:

• A unique ID
• Duration (45 / 60 / 90 or 120 min)
• Instructor
• Feedback forms
• Price
• Route

With this data, you can create reports and dashboards. You can create workflows for ‘objects’ just like you would for any of the ‘standard’ categories. 

You can set up triggers that are directly linked to specific properties of your object. Think e-mail campaigns or notifications to the right team member: you can all set it up within HubSpot.

Example 2: Online classes 

If you have an e-learning platform, or e-learning is part of your business, you can now create a custom object for classes. Again, link it to the right contact and add all the information you need to set up follow-up actions.

• Unique class ID
• Date
• Start and end time
• Teacher
• Location or Zoom/Teams link 
• All communication with students
• Price / pricing

This is great to keep students up to date, without the hassle of manual work. You can easily set up automated workflows and actions such as reminders, e-mails after class, and anything else you need to communicate. 

Example 3: Orders

You could already track deals, a.k.a. sales activities in HubSpot. Now, you can also keep track of orders. 

It’s important to note that this doesn’t replace your ERP or TMS, but it can be a great addition to it. It gives you the benefit of having really all customer information at hand in one place. You can log the following things in an order object:

• Unique order ID
• Status (i.e: Pending, On-hold, Processing, Completed, Cancelled, Refunded)
• Price
• Connected contact
• Connected company
• Connected deal
• Connected ticket
• Starting location transport
• Destination 
• Supplier

Use the reporting tool to learn and improve

You can easily convert your custom object information to reports that make it easy to track data. Within HubSpot, you can build segmented reports that show you everything you need to know, all at once. Whether that’s numbers or trend lines: it’s all there.

What do WE think about Custom Objects?

We did miss an option like Custom Objects, yes. Without it, we often noticed there was a need to check two separate systems to get all the necessary info. Now, that’s a thing of the past.

Our focus is on automating processes for ambitious marketing, sales, and service teams. We make sure that data within different systems can easily be shared and that processes are running smoothly and automatically. Custom Objects helps us do that even better.

Do you want to know more about how we would use Custom Objects to power up the processes in your organization?

We’d be happy to tell you more.