Customizing HubSpot Records: Why Now’s the Time to Go All In
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George B. Thomas:Yeah. Activate those powers. Well, obviously, you can tell I am not Liz, but I guess they had storms and internet outages and all sorts of fun stuff like that. So first of all, if you're in that area, you know, where there were storms, which there's storms everywhere and all over the places. But if you happen to live, I think Annapolis, I think that's where she's back to now.
George B. Thomas:Hey, we're throwing up some prayers for you. Hopefully life isn't too crazy, but we're still going to talk about HubSpot today, even though we're one woman down. So I've been having fun because the last couple episodes we've been doing a round robin scenario of like, hey, what do you want to talk about? And people are getting nerdy on things that they're passionate about. Max, you picked record customization.
Max Cohen:Yes, sir.
George B. Thomas:So I'm interested in that because I've always been a big fan of talking to people about wrapping HubSpot around their business, right? Customizing it to their needs. And for a long, long, long, long time, we really didn't have what I would call any type of customization. Like it just HubSpot was Hub Spot and you just use it how it was. We got to the point where we could change some properties and move some things around and add a few things here and there.
George B. Thomas:But a lot has been changing as of lately, maybe due to AI, maybe due to more humans, maybe due to inbound coming up, whatever. And so in this episode, we're going to kind of unchain you, Max, and Chad, you, and I'm sure I'll have some thoughts along the way around what is record customization. But let's start there, Max. Let's start with like, when you just threw that out, hey, let's talk about record customization. What are we talking about here?
George B. Thomas:Like, for you is record customization in your mind?
Max Cohen:So many things. I mean, for anyone who doesn't know, you got records in HubSpot, your contacts, your companies, your deals, your tickets, your custom objects, your I guess nowadays, we've got what? Listings, appointments, services, and like all these other additional objects you can get either way. Records, records, records, records, record. When we talk about record customization, we're talking about how you can customize the layout and the behavior of the layout and the information that is provided to you and shown to you in different circumstances.
Max Cohen:Because let's be honest, you got a lot of different teams. You got a lot of different people using HubSpot. They wanna see a lot of different data points. They you know, in in those screens, those places where you see properties, those places where you see relationships to other records, those places where you see any information you can imagine about the record. They can get extremely busy and unorganized and nasty.
Max Cohen:And we don't wanna be nasty. No. Don't be nasty. Yeah. Right?
Max Cohen:We don't want our records to be dirty and nasty. No. We want them to be clean. Right? Anyway.
Max Cohen:So record customization has always been something that I've been extremely passionate about because I like making HubSpot look cool. But I also like making it, like, functional and very easy to get the right information in front of people at the right time so they can get their sticky little thingy tappets on it. Right? Mhmm. Yeah.
Max Cohen:And so that's what we're talking about today, George. And the reason I wanted to bring it up is that we we had a massive, massive, massive update to record customization. Don't go there yet. We're gonna get that. I know what just saying.
George B. Thomas:Don't go there yet.
Max Cohen:It's a big one we're gonna talk about.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Yeah.
Max Cohen:And that's what I think kind of got me on the let's talk about record customization.
George B. Thomas:Chad, are you in the same camp? Do you think of different things? Like, talk talk me through it.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Yeah. Well, first, before we before I dive into that, I'm I'm curious, Max. When you mentioned you wanted to talk about record customization, I I feel like this new big secret update that we're gonna get to that's not a secret, but later that we're gonna talk about, was that had that already dropped, or did that drop after you had mentioned you wanted to talk about record customization?
Max Cohen:No. It had dropped before.
Chad Hohn:It had dropped prior? Okay.
Max Cohen:I I don't to say.
Chad Hohn:Because I I had no inside knowledge.
Max Cohen:Yeah. I had no inside knowledge into this one, Chad. And because of that Okay. Because of that, I have to get a tattoo at inbound because I'm an idiot. Okay.
Max Cohen:Because I'm dumb and I've got a big mouth and I say stuff. And then sometimes I say that gets me to have to publicly make good on a promise to get a tattoo So of a corporation on my
Chad Hohn:that's
Max Cohen:That's why we're here, if I'm being so honest.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. So no. It's time for training on this one.
Max Cohen:Yeah.
Chad Hohn:Alright. Well, for me, yeah. I mean, I I I definitely echo a lot of what Max was talking about. I mean, there's we'll dive into specifics, but, like, making HubSpot delightful for people to use is one of my favorite parts about it. Like, can really tailor it either to teams, you can tailor it to specific roles so that people only see what's relevant to them.
Chad Hohn:You can tailor it to, you know, conditionally showing things, and there's, like, you know, all sorts of different improvements that have been made over the years that I've been using it, you know, which is, you know, it's always been customizable since I've been using it to some extent. But, man, it's gotten better. There's been more added. They added the middle card a while back. They added the unified record editor where you can manipulate the entire record rather than like, oh, let's manipulate the left sidebar, then we'll do
George B. Thomas:the right sidebar. That
Chad Hohn:was yeah. Because you just had to, like, dive all you know, clicking your brains out left, right, and center to try and, you know, get the and you had to, like, map it in the old brain wallet to make sure or, like, keep it on two screens, you know, back in the day. So so let's So many improvements even before
George B. Thomas:this one has So let's let's into that. Let's dive into, like, if if you go back in the way back machine, right? That you hop in your Delorean, go back to however far you want to go. Let's start where we've been. For YouTube, what have been historically the biggest frustrations or limitations with customizing records in HubSpot.
Max Cohen:George, let me ask you this. Yeah. You know how on the left hand sidebar, which typically houses the about section. Yeah. Right?
Max Cohen:How long ago do you remember having the ability to make that thing conditional?
George B. Thomas:Oh, well, conditional, not long. Maybe, I don't know.
Max Cohen:Wait, really?
George B. Thomas:Has it been like a couple years?
Max Cohen:Brother, that thing's been conditional since I was still an implementation specialist.
George B. Thomas:Really?
Max Cohen:Yes, sir. Yeah. That dude, I remember when that came out. I was like, this is the coolest thing ever. Which by the way,
George B. Thomas:how how long ago was that? I
Max Cohen:started being a product trainer in 2018.
Chad Hohn:Oh. Yeah. And as long as
Max Cohen:Brother, I can remember 2026. And we
George B. Thomas:joke, no, no, it's not 2026 yet. Don't do that.
Max Cohen:2025. Sorry. It's 2025. Good God. It's 2025.
Chad Hohn:Where did
George B. Thomas:that go?
Max Cohen:Seriously. So I was an implementation specialist somewhere between December 2015 and 2000 in March 2018 Okay. I believe.
George B. Thomas:Okay.
Max Cohen:And the conditional left hand panel came out then to put things in perspective on how long Wow. We could make stuff on the record conditional.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Right? But it was only there. Right? So for anyone who like doesn't know what I'm saying when I say conditional stuff.
Max Cohen:Okay? On HubSpot, there three columns on your records. There's the left side
Chad Hohn:Within a record. Yeah.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Within a record. Correct. When you're within a record. Not we're not talking about the marketing tools or anything else.
Max Cohen:But you've got the left column, the middle column, and the right column. Typically, on the left column is where you see just properties, and it's like about this record, whatever.
Chad Hohn:Whatever that object type is. Whatever that object is. Contacts, it's contact properties, deals,
Max Cohen:details, last name, email, whatever. Company, got your middle panel, which historically has just been activity stuff.
George B. Thomas:Right? For the really long longest time.
Max Cohen:Longest time.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. It was only a timeline forever.
Max Cohen:Upgrade for a couple of years, we've had like custom cards in the overview tab and like some new stuff.
George B. Thomas:Right? Yeah.
Max Cohen:And then on the right hand panel, historically, again, most of this stuff, I'm not gonna say all of it, but most of the stuff is associations and relationships to other objects. Right? So if I was on a contact record on the right, I might see deals, the company I'm associated to, this, that, and the other thing.
George B. Thomas:I to say on that sidebar, it's associations, apps, and attachments.
Max Cohen:Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, yeah. You see, yeah.
Max Cohen:For a long time, apps that had UI extensions, right, were also shoved on that right sidebar panel and had no
Chad Hohn:other real estate would get real cluttered real quick, especially
Max Cohen:if in you didn't modify the
George B. Thomas:the tooth for sure, yeah.
Max Cohen:Long in the tooth, right? The teeth were so long.
Chad Hohn:Sabre tooth.
George B. Thomas:So that's what
Max Cohen:we've kind of had. Now, the big thing, the big reason why I'm freaking out today and I'm super excited, or actually wait, we didn't explain what conditional stuff is. So what conditional actually means and like why it's important, right, is again, if we go back to that left sidebar that usually shows a bunch of properties. Right? Yeah.
Max Cohen:One, you could break them up into sections, which is cool. Right? So you can have like customer information, location information, support information, whatever. And you can have these, like, different blocks, and those different blocks will show different properties. You can collapse them.
Max Cohen:You can do whatever. Right? The ability to make them conditional, what that means is you can say, only show this section of properties if a certain property equals a certain thing. So one of the more popular examples of doing this is showing different information based on life cycle stage. Yeah.
Max Cohen:Right? So for example, you might have like a basic about section that's always there. It says, first name, last name, email, phone number, right? No matter who you are, you got or you should have that information if a contact record exists, right? Maybe less so phone number, but like at least first name, last name, email, right?
Max Cohen:But then you might have a whole bunch of other properties. Right? It could be, you know, last support ticket date or level of customer. Right? Maybe you're you're you're you have a gold customer or silver customer depending on the products you sell, whatever it may be.
Max Cohen:Right? You have properties that may only be relevant in certain circumstances. Yeah. Right? For example, maybe there's like some special European tax number that your European customers have.
Max Cohen:Right? But that that property wouldn't be relevant for any US based customers.
George B. Thomas:That was oddly specific by
Max Cohen:the Yeah, I'm trying to find something really specific, right? So the whole point is what you can do is you can have these sections on the left hand side and you can say, if property X equals something, show the section, right? So a good example would be if lifecycle stage equals customer, show a section called customer information. And it would have a bunch of properties in it that would only be relevant if that person was actually a customer. Right?
Max Cohen:And the point of doing this is so you can reduce the amount of noise, right, unnecessarily blank and empty information that sits on your record.
Chad Hohn:I like to call it doom scrolling. The unnecessary doom scrolling that you do on Mr. Left Hand Sidebar.
Max Cohen:And you kind of alluded to this when you were talking about why you love doing record customization. You said something about like, you love creating good experiences for people or say It's like
Chad Hohn:the customer experience is important, but the user who's serving the customer needs to equally have as good of
Max Cohen:an Yeah, as an admin, that's your customer.
Chad Hohn:Yes, exactly.
Max Cohen:Right, as the user. So the reason this is important is because, again, one of the best possible, HubSpot has, like, a lot of cool features. Right? Like, when we think about, like, oh, it's good, you know, the calendar link thing. It's got the the, you know, sequences and meeting links and all of that.
Max Cohen:Like, it's got all these cool tools. Sure. It's got all these cool functional things. But like you gotta remember, it's like, there's a lot of people who when we think about what makes your CRM useful. Right?
Max Cohen:Yeah. It means the information I need is right there and I can find it instantly. Don't have to spend a lot of time looking for it. Right? Yeah.
Max Cohen:And my God, record customization is one of the best, best, best, best, best tools you can leverage to make that super easy for people. Because you gotta remember, people are gonna go into their CRM to go find information if it is a giant pain in the butt to find it. Right? I have to go to
Chad Hohn:all properties every time I need to figure out a flippity flop about somebody's whatever. Yeah. Like, ain't nobody got time for that.
Max Cohen:So it's a double edged sword though. Right? Mhmm. Because it's like, alright. I don't wanna make my records super messy.
Max Cohen:So I'm gonna have people go to the record and there's a button you can hit called view all properties, which will literally just show you all properties you have for that record, right, in a full list view.
Chad Hohn:Including, like, hundreds of properties that HubSpot has by default that many of our blank frequently.
Max Cohen:Literally every single one.
Chad Hohn:Right? But you can
George B. Thomas:hide those there you go.
Max Cohen:You can
George B. Thomas:hide the blanks.
Max Cohen:That's true. You can hide the blank ones. Right? But what you gotta remember is you're functionally leaving the record to go look at that. Right.
Max Cohen:Right? Like The user. Leaving the record. You're going like a super deep level into it. Right?
Max Cohen:And you can't see all your other stuff. Right? You're you're going to it like a you're you're essentially not on the record anymore.
George B. Thomas:It's a single page without promise. Yeah.
Max Cohen:Right? Exactly. So that sucks because you're getting people to have to kind of click in and then go through this scrolling and searching journey to find what they want and they go, oh, there's no value and then leave. So so then you may go, oh, I don't want people doing that. So I'm just gonna put all the information I possibly can on the record page itself.
Max Cohen:Well, then what sucks about that is that yeah. You're then entering this world of just this infinite doom scroll Yeah. On the left hand side, right? To kind of like view stuff. So then you go, okay, well, that's tough that it's like an infinite amount of like stuff I got to scroll on the left to go find something, right?
Max Cohen:So then you go, all right, well, then maybe what I'll do is I'll take advantage of some of these newer cards, right? And I'll put some stuff in the middle panel, right? And like one the really, like, I think one of the best things that happened you know, in the in the past, what? I don't know. What is this?
Max Cohen:Like, going on three maybe?
Chad Hohn:It's been about three years for the middle column. Right? I mean, that's that's what I would I would remember. Well, Antti TubeVal, Before we dive into the middle column, I do wanna highlight that conditionality used to be required that you utilize an enumerative property. So something that's like a multi checkbox or a drop down
Max Cohen:Yep.
Chad Hohn:Prior to this awesome update. One of these this new newest, most awesome update.
Max Cohen:We'll talk about that. Oh, okay.
George B. Thomas:Because can I also before we get into the middle, by the way, this was like we the question was and I'm just going to let it go because we're having a great conversation? Conversation was like, what did you historically hate about it? But I will say this.
Max Cohen:Still getting that.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Here's what I do want to say before I forget about this. I need everybody to go into, let's just say the contact, a contact record, and go into the about this contact, or for us, it's about this human. All right? Because we call our humans instead of contacts, but go into your about this contact.
George B. Thomas:And if first name, last name, and email are in that actual area under the about or job title.
Max Cohen:What's the matter with What's the matter with you?
George B. Thomas:You're showing the information that is already above the communication central. Yeah. First name, last name, email, and job title is above notes, email, calls, test. Get it out of there. That's four properties.
George B. Thomas:First name, last name, email, and job title that don't need to be in about this contact record.
Chad Hohn:Yeah.
George B. Thomas:Like, slim it down. Don't show duplicates. Okay. I'll I'll shut up. Go ahead, Max.
Max Cohen:Because you can let it also pay attention to that too. Yeah. Also pay attention to that too when you're doing, like, custom objects and you're choosing, like, your primary and your multiple secondary display properties. Right? It's like some of that stuff's already gonna show up on the top left.
Chad Hohn:That's what is important when you're creating those custom objects is choosing those thoughtfully. Right?
Max Cohen:Yep. So anyway, so we were talking about getting stuff into like the middle panel, right? Yeah. And within the last three years, like the whole sort of like pre curated sort of like cards situation kind of exploded onto the record scene where like you could basically build declaratively these custom cards that would show up in the middle, but as long as they, like, took on sort of like a predefined structure. And that's, I think, that's still the case today, right, where we're not in a place where we have, like, completely declarative totally custom cards unless you're coding them, which is a different story.
Max Cohen:Right? But that's also that's also like a whole other UI extensions are a whole
Chad Hohn:other their own thing. Yeah.
Max Cohen:Yeah. That is a that that is that that is like that's the the Thor the the Thanos hammer of record customization. Right? Or Thanos hammer. That's not right.
Max Cohen:Thanos hammer. Thanos glove. Whatever that is.
George B. Thomas:I was wondering if I was in a different universe right now. Max has so multiverse over there.
Max Cohen:But see, here's what got tough, right? It created an issue where that middle panel got super messy. Right? Because you're like, I can't make it conditional. I can't only have certain cards or certain tabs show up under certain circumstances.
Max Cohen:And I also can't do that on the right sidebar. So what we what what kind of happened is now we've created this problem where like, sure, our left sidebar that just shows properties can be conditional till the world's end.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Max Cohen:Right? Mhmm. But then our middle and right hand bars end up becoming a tab hell. Right? Because sure, if you don't wanna get it all in one tab, the next best option you had was put it on multiple tabs, right, which allow you to have like different groups of cards.
Max Cohen:Right? Mhmm. But then it just got busy horizontally. Yeah. Right?
Max Cohen:Instead of vertically.
Chad Hohn:Only way to dimensionalize it before was based on team. You had to like then go, all right, what is your user and team structure? Because we need to make sure we hammer out your org chart and get your org chart into HubSpot first.
George B. Thomas:Which by the way, a little bit. Which by the way makes a maximum lift. Yeah. To even be able to start to customize for the end user.
Max Cohen:Exactly. Right. Because then you then you're you're not even talking about just editing one section. You're rebuilding the whole damn record at that point.
Chad Hohn:I mean, luckily, they gave you in the unified record editor the ability to clone those bad boys so you could start from a good default foundation. But
George B. Thomas:But still, you're making a
Max Cohen:whole separate record. And when you edit one, it's not editing the other. They
Chad Hohn:didn't used to have the ability, like the card library thing now, which is amazing, because you used to be like, oh, hey. I wanna clone, you know, like, I wanna add a new section. I, add the new section manually every time wherever it was, especially before the unified record editor. Like, that's just a big quality of life improvement.
Max Cohen:Yeah. And then and then let's not even talk about, like, no matter what you did, the right sidebar was an infinite scroll of death.
George B. Thomas:Oh, yeah.
Max Cohen:Right? Like, unless you just got rid of everything and only had maybe a couple of association tables and, like, no apps installed. Yeah. Right? If that wasn't the case, you were screwed.
Chad Hohn:Which which people are looking for for invoices and line items, you know? Yeah. Well is it over here?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. But let's be honest. That's one of the first things I teach, by the way. If you don't have Commerce Hub, go remove these four cards. Yeah.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. You don't If you're not using it, get them out of there.
Max Cohen:Yeah. If if
Chad Hohn:if Simplify your life.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Simplify your life. Simplify their life, you know, without a doubt. So
Max Cohen:Yeah. So what dropped right before I said, hey, we should
George B. Thomas:do this Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hang on. Hang on.
George B. Thomas:So let me do my job. Max and Max and Chad, what recent updates or features have made the biggest difference in how teams can personalize record layouts. Oh, thanks
Chad Hohn:for asking that question,
Max Cohen:George. We definitely were I mean, I am here for a reason. Right?
George B. Thomas:I'm I'm I'm playing Liz today,
Max Cohen:so I'm trying to hurt
George B. Thomas:cats and I'm not really good at it. But so like, what are the updates?
Max Cohen:Are the Amazing question, George. I'll tell you. Okay? I will tell you how good of a update
George B. Thomas:this Thank you.
Max Cohen:Thank So what they did, okay, is they made it so the middle panel, individual cards themselves are now conditional. In that, you could say, oh, I only want this middle card of, like, associations to show up
Chad Hohn:the whole tab property, the entire tab.
Max Cohen:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tabs themselves. Yeah. Right.
Max Cohen:So it's like, yeah, tab one, tab two, tab three, tab four. You can say this tab isn't even going to show up unless this property equals something. And then they did it for the right sidebar as well. Did
George B. Thomas:that did that excite
Chad Hohn:you, Max? They did hide. You can hide it conditionally too. Oh, yeah. It's always there unless something is true, then hide it.
Max Cohen:So it's like exclusionary filter type thing.
Chad Hohn:Circumstances. And not only for the tabs, but also for the middle column cards themselves as well.
George B. Thomas:So it's interesting because what I hear you saying almost is like, here's just a use case. You've got status active and inactive. So like if all a sudden somebody goes from being an active customer and inactive customer, you said to inactive, of sudden you could make things just disappear. Yes. Correct.
George B. Thomas:Oh, yeah.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. And and it's not only for enumerative properties anymore. Meaning you could do a date is greater than a certain number of days ago or whatever. Right? And there's operators.
Chad Hohn:So it's not just is, it could be is unknown is one that works. So you could do certain data points are missing, bring things in. Like, I mean, they really now the one thing you can't do is multiple conditions. So there's it's not like filters yet. But
Max Cohen:Got it.
Chad Hohn:We're like, I think they're on the way to getting there. Like, I would love to do cross object association filters in there down the road. Right?
Max Cohen:If if associated object x equals whatever.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If or number of records associated or whatever, you know, something like that. But this is, like, insanely more powerful because light years.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Able as an admin, especially as a fractional admin, to deliver to somebody some very useful user interface update without having to go down the user and team discussion and build, like, eight different views and then try and explain that to somebody. Like that's
George B. Thomas:So what I heard is, you can now have conditional left side, conditional center, conditional right. And so basically you can make this thing layout any way you want by showing or hiding, and it doesn't have to be based off of Teams. If I wrap everything up into a nice Is is there anything else on this update that you're, like, need to talk about, wanna talk about, or the user should should know about?
Max Cohen:Well, this specific one? Oh. Okay. Like, it's just it's just it's it's so it's just so much better that, like, you you now have the ability to literally make what needs to show up show up and what doesn't need to show up not show up Did you know? Granular level now.
George B. Thomas:Oh, boy. Boy. Chad, Chad, Did you know?
Chad Hohn:Did you know that you can also do it in the sales workspace?
Max Cohen:What are you talking about?
Chad Hohn:You can conditionally customize the sales workspace record editor for when you're in the sales workspace and you open up one of like, you're in a deal view, for example. You know how they have their custom thing with the deal score and the AI and everything? All the conditional functions work there as well. And that right hand or that deal bar is both like a mixture of the left and right hand sidebar functions,
George B. Thomas:which is really past just the if I go into CRM and go into a record, but if I go The unified record editor. Customized there. If I go into a workspace and therefore see It records
Chad Hohn:has its own customization
George B. Thomas:Oh.
Chad Hohn:Beyond deal configuration. Oh, that's And same with help desk.
George B. Thomas:Okay. Okay. So this leads me to the next question, because we're quickly running out of time. Like now that we can do this in, well, just records in general, but also in workspaces. Workspaces.
George B. Thomas:What are some creative or high impact ways that super admins or teams should be using record customization to, I don't know, improve internal efficiency or create a better user experience? Where does your mind go of like, Hey, here's the top one, two, three, seventeen things that you talk to people or do for people when you think about this?
Chad Hohn:Yeah. For for me, it's get the like, get an understanding of the roles and the things that people need to perform or the actions that they need to perform. Like Mhmm. If it's necessary, like, I do like to get into at least a couple teams, maybe not the whole org chart at that point point, but, like, you know, sometimes it's nice to have things configured for you know? But but as much as I can, I try and make it a default view?
Chad Hohn:And if we have to branch off, we have to and we do. Right? But with the amount of flexibility we have now because, like, here's one of the hardest things is, like, you're trying to say, work with a team, and they have, like, a sales team and a finance team and, like, a marketing team. And you have three different sets of views, and they're like, how come their screen ain't looking like my screen? You know?
Chad Hohn:Like and, it doesn't look the same. And, like, they're like, well, they got the properties for the deal, whatever, and I don't. You know? Like, which I'm not knocking on anybody or whatever. It's just like that's how it goes.
Chad Hohn:You
George B. Thomas:know? Sometimes, you know.
Chad Hohn:Right? And so go to a default view if you absolute like, whenever you possibly can, just try and roll it up into one default view. Right? And then now you're able to show people relevant lifecycle of the customer, where the customer is at, give whoever is looking at it relevant information. The only thing you need to consider is is, like sensitive information at that point.
Chad Hohn:So just watch out for sensitive information that not every team needs to see. That's a great reason to separate teams. But at this point now, I think you're really able to like put the right information about the customer. Whereas my previous, I think, recommendation would be do the team discovery and show people the right stuff based on team. Right?
Chad Hohn:But now I'm thinking only branch out if you absolutely have to.
Max Cohen:Yeah. I think the other thing too to think about is like, this is like a wonderfully subtle way to be able to communicate to people what information do we need that we don't have. Right? You know, there should be a situation where like the only time you're seeing blank properties is when that customer, that person, that whatever has progressed to a place where you need this information now. Right?
Max Cohen:And it's kind of subtly telling you like, hey, dude, here's some here's some information we do need that we don't have. Yeah. Right? You know, instead of it could be because here's the thing. If someone just sees a gigantic ocean of blank properties, none of them are gonna seem important.
Chad Hohn:No.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Right? But when they're when they see like, oh,
Chad Hohn:that's not lot Right? It's like, oh They're blank.
Max Cohen:There's there's something that, you know, we're training people to say like, oh, if if there's some information here, it's only here if it's pertinent for whatever the situation is. So we should probably, like, make sure it's in there. Right? Instead of just, oh, you just see everything and it's all blank and that's fine. Yeah.
Max Cohen:Right?
Chad Hohn:You know?
Max Cohen:So it's just it's just much better. And and again, like, part of I know we've had a lot of conversations around adoption, right? People aren't gonna adopt the CRM and use the CRM if it just seems like this big, messy, confusing thing. And I think now more than ever, admins have the ability to dial back the confusion, simplify the information, get everything someone needs right at their fingertips. Right?
Max Cohen:Don't don't make it a wild goose chase to go find it. Right? And just make the experience a lot more enjoyable. Right? It's just like the the place that you're sitting in to do your work should have everything that you need at your fingertips and not a bunch of distractions or bloat.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Right. And people can really do that now,
George B. Thomas:which is So let's put we all in this digital virtual room, we've all been in HubSpot for a long time. Years, multiple years. Over a decade for some of us. Let's put our day one hats on. Somebody's driving down the road, they're headed to work, they're going to get a coffee to come back to their office, whatever it is.
George B. Thomas:They're listening to this podcast episode. They haven't even scratched the surface or thought about customizing records. Before this episode, didn't even know it was possible. Now we're telling them, hey, there's this crazy wild world out there. What's what's the low hanging fruit?
George B. Thomas:Where do they start? Like, what what are some easy wins?
Max Cohen:Yeah. True. So you don't wanna, like, you don't wanna, like, accidentally create, like, a massive project for yourself and disrupt a bunch of people and just go in there and start, like, do do doing shit, like, without telling anybody first. Right? But I think you do wanna, like, go experiment a little bit.
Max Cohen:Mhmm. Right? So something you should probably do is go pick a record that people use a lot. Okay? Go go clone that view.
Max Cohen:Right? So instead of the default one, go, like, make a new one, you know, to kinda play around with
Chad Hohn:For me, I always call it the Chadman view.
Max Cohen:The Chadman view. Oh, wow. Chad view.
Chad Hohn:You've actually named test view.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Okay.
Max Cohen:Go make a test view. Right? A Chadman view. Call it Chadman view. Right?
Max Cohen:And go zero that thing out. Go zero it out. Go go delete everything. Right? And start from absolute zero.
Max Cohen:And just say, what where just start adding properties that you know are important to people. Right? And as you do this one by one, you will start to come across properties where you're like, oh, this would be really relevant for these people, but not for these people. This should be really relevant in this situation, but not that situation. Yeah.
Max Cohen:And start documenting it, start writing it down, start thinking of groupings of this information and situations in which it would appear or wouldn't appear or for whom it could appear or not appear to. Right? And start building out like, hey, if I could totally customize this thing from the ground up, right, and only include what it needs to include and build in those special conditional situations, right, what could my records look like? Build that test record and then go show it to someone that uses it. Right?
Max Cohen:And say, hey, here's an idea we had for this. Does this make it easier to find the information? Does this organize it in a way that makes more sense? You know, because they might want it in a different tab. They may just want it in the same tab, but a different car.
Max Cohen:They might want this one above that one, or maybe it makes more sense for the right sidebar. Right? It's an experiment. It's an iterative process. Right?
Max Cohen:But it's one of the ones that are like most, most, mostly, most important Yeah. To get feedback from the people who are actually using it because record customization affects lots of people. Right? Yeah. So you do wanna get a lot of good feedback and then you wanna document the process, especially if you have conditional stuff happening.
Max Cohen:Right? Because you don't want a ton of people coming to you saying like, oh, I can't see this information anymore. Well, all of its walls because you don't have this property flip to this property or like whatever it may be. Right. Right.
Max Cohen:It takes a lot of delicate thinking and planning and, like, communications of changes and stuff to, like, pull that off, you know, unless you can build it in a way where, like, you know, it's gonna work on autopilot, which you can do for sure. Like, there are certain situations where you're gonna be like, oh, well, I know because of this, you know, demonstratively, you know, factual way that our process works that I'm gonna have this information set to this. So I know this is gonna show up. Yeah. You can make those judgment calls.
Max Cohen:Right? But like, would highly implore you to also like communicate those changes to people in case the process doesn't always go the way as planned.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. That's why you definitely wanna mess around in that test view. But to make the test view work, just one side note too for newbie coming in, know, like your first time in the record editor, or early on in your journey with this level of customization is you want to add a test team and assign that record, that unified record editor test view to your test team and temporarily put yourself on that test team. And also remember that like you're messing with it and you gotta put yourself back to where everybody else is, if relevant, when you're, like, not testing because then you're gonna start to, like, be off on your own branch of working on things. But, like, also the middle column also has so many cool cards in the card library.
Chad Hohn:You can have, like, different types of activities, activity totals, association label list cards, associated pipeline stage tracker cards, which will show you like, let's say you're in a contact, it'll show you the associated deals pipeline stages in the middle column with some relevant properties. And if there's multiple, you can see that there's like property date tracker cards, which are new, property history tracking cards, which are new, there's association tables where you can put associated object custom properties in the middle card, which is like things that people have been asking for for a long time. I wish the quick actions were better. They kinda still suck, but those I'm sure will get a facelift at some point.
Max Cohen:Dude, quick actions are the biggest low hanging fruit, I think.
Chad Hohn:Oh, dude. For HubSpot.
Max Cohen:Those could be so good. They could be amazing. They are so useless.
Chad Hohn:They're useless, yeah.
Max Cohen:So useless.
Intro:Here,
George B. Thomas:So can I ask you guys a real granular question too? Yeah. So obviously part of this record customization is even the understanding of creating custom properties. And the reason I'm bringing up custom properties or even just properties in general, because I'm super curious, you two, when you think about custom, know, record customization or customizing the interface, Have you guys been using the, like, text inside color tags or, like Yes. Colored thoughts?
George B. Thomas:Like, talk talk
Max Cohen:Yeah. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:Just talk to the audience about, like, being able to add colors to the record and what that can mean for people.
Max Cohen:I forgot about that one, dude. That that one slid in out of nowhere.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. That just put that sucker right into your DMs and said, howdy.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Dude. So when you have dropdown properties or multi is it on the selected dropdown? Uncheckbox properties? Yes.
Max Cohen:So more like tagging type situation. Right? You can go in and you can edit the field so that when you see it on a record, the options have like
Chad Hohn:color Color around around them. Yeah.
Max Cohen:And they're pretty, right? Now here's the thing. There's a reason to do it other than, oh, it looks nice. Yeah. Right?
Max Cohen:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really all about like how quickly people can absorb information when they're looking at a sea of information on a page. As much customization that you do, your records are gonna get inherently a little bit busy because there's some situations where people just need a lot of information at their fingertips quickly. Right? So like
Chad Hohn:There's a lot of information
Max Cohen:about people
Chad Hohn:in your system.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Like, you know, just because you can customize like crazy, it doesn't mean you're not gonna have situations where you got a lot of data points on a page. Right? And what's really cool is, like, those little colors that you do help things stand out and, like, drag the eyes towards them, you know, very easily on a page. It also is like a gives people a quick way to, like, find and locate information because, like, the color thing stands out on that, like, you know, white
Chad Hohn:page indexing pages, it's very helpful too. Yes. Right? On index pages, it's very nice. Like, when you're looking at a list view, it's really nice to be able to see those colors.
Chad Hohn:It's one one other thing that's really helpful about the colors too, feel like is even somebody who has no true context for maybe what your KPIs are or what your good or bad situations might be. Like, maybe there's words in those drop downs that don't mean anything to a new person. But when it's green, yellow, and red, they really know that that's a good thingy and not a good thingy, or it's a medium thingy. Right? Or a good score or a bad score.
Chad Hohn:So I think that's particularly helpful for just new hires. Right?
Max Cohen:Yeah. Very, very helpful. Yeah. It it communicates what does it mean when a property is set to this value. Right?
Max Cohen:Maybe you might see green and go, oh, that's inherently positive. Maybe it's red and you're like, uh-oh, that does not mean something good, right?
Chad Hohn:Right,
Max Cohen:yeah. So it's a great way to like, it almost like helps you like heat map stuff on an index page. Right? But also kinda communicates the situation of, all right, if it's set to this value, like that's good, bad, or maybe it's just something to help you kinda like differentiate it. Right?
Max Cohen:Yeah. Yeah,
George B. Thomas:man. Let's let's land this plane. Where do each of you see opportunities for HubSpot record customization to get better? Like, is there still like a wish list Yeah. Item for you
Max Cohen:Yeah. Yeah. I want to see I don't know exactly what it is, but like, well, actually one quick actions are a joke right now and they need to get better. Like, that's just a fact. I'd like to see them do some like more native stuff with the URL properties that just came out.
Max Cohen:Right? Like, if anyone was like, you can now there's like a property called URL field, which will just make it look like a URL even though you could already do this with single line text fields anyway. But since they are their own property, I think it would be super cool if, like, we, you know, just made them a little bit more aesthetic. Right? Like, for example, when it has a value, I'd love for it to just show like a button with a label instead of just like
Chad Hohn:The link
Max Cohen:URL value itself. Right? You know, and and just to like kind of like clean up the look and the feel of of those properties when you're viewing them. Yeah. The quick action stuff is definitely huge.
Max Cohen:But I think also like, I would love to see some kind of like I really want them to like double down on the customization of, like, the cards in the card library. Right? Like, association cards need a complete revamp in terms of the way of how they, like, utilize association labels, for example. Right? That's a big thing.
Max Cohen:You know, like because I can't make association tables that work like the association label lists cards, which is, like, really stupid. You know? Like, I wish I could just have an association table that would, by default, just lock in to showing records that have a specific label. Mhmm. Right?
Max Cohen:Problem that does that only shows your name and email. Right? It's so stupid. Just let me add the damn, you know, label filter. So that's that's that's that's a big one.
Max Cohen:But again, I'd love to see, like, some kind of like and this is like, I think, kind of like a whole this is taking cars to, a different level. I'd love to see some sort of like process builder that brings in like the new HubSpot forms builder in some case. Right? Like imagine a world when and it's like we can sort of kind of do this with playbooks a little bit. But I'd love to see something where like you could create like a process, like a process card.
Max Cohen:I think in Salesforce, they call these like flows, I wanna say.
Chad Hohn:You guide a user through a predetermined set of action sequences. You build
Max Cohen:the whole visual flow. It's like it's the automation behind it.
Chad Hohn:Or whatever. It's almost like you could use a form that pre fills information from the record you're on so it knows where to put the form data and what data to link to or whatever. Right? So you have different IDs are required, but it's basically a multistep form. And you could just embed that sucker.
Max Cohen:And the process has different steps, and you can say, take the information they filled out on the form and do X with it, right? Maybe it's like stuff it into this other property or stuff it into an associated property or go create a new record or something, right? I think that would be a really, really cool direction to go to kind of like build these processes because what people are only left with is like, all you can do is custom dev a UI extension for something like that. Right? And that's out of, frankly, that's out of the realm of affordability and possibility and technical expertise for most people.
Max Cohen:Right? Right. It's getting better. I'd love to see some sort of declarative process flow guided action, like, builder type thing. That would be Yeah.
Max Cohen:Super neat.
Chad Hohn:Have some thoughts. Yeah. I mean, on the left hand sidebar, I think people have always wanted to have associated object properties. I think that would be nice to have over there.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Or even just like associations on the left hand side too. Why not? And, like, properties on the right hand side. Like, why can't we have that?
George B. Thomas:No. No. Stop. Hit hit the brakes. I mean What?
George B. Thomas:I mean, I guess. But part of
Chad Hohn:me goes Associated object properties,
Max Cohen:I think.
George B. Thomas:Maybe we tipped over this. Like, it feels like we just went back to, like, and life cycle stages should be able to be customized. No, they shouldn't. Yes, they should. No, they shouldn't.
George B. Thomas:Like, some things just belong how they are and where they anyway, let's go ahead and land this plane. Listen. Here's here's my my action or takeaway
Max Cohen:for this one. Weirdest objection, George.
George B. Thomas:Here's here's my takeaway. If you are sitting here and you haven't messed around with record customization, if you haven't looked at the inside of your CRM, like it's creating experience for the people that you are, your customers, your internal team, then my takeaway is go look at record customization, think of all the things that you can do, and make the inside of your CRM as dope as what you're trying to do for the customers on the outside. Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast?
George B. Thomas:Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes. FYI, if you're part of the league of heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag hashtag hub heroes podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next.
George B. Thomas:Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.
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