Customizing HubSpot Records: Why Now’s the Time to Go All In

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask into action and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers.

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 it's Annapolis or. I think that's where she's back to now, you know, hey, we're. We're throwing up some prayers for you. Hopefully life isn't too crazy, but we're still. We're still going to talk about HubSpot today, even though we're. We're one woman down. So I've been having fun because we've kind of. The last couple episodes, we've been doing like, a round robin scenario of like, hey, what do you want to talk about? You know, and people are getting nerdy on things that they're passionate about. And. Max, you picked record customization.

Yes, sir.

So I'm. 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 HubSpot, and you just use it how it was. And we got to the point where we could, like, change some properties and move some things around and add a few things here and there. But a lot has been changing as of lately, you know, 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.

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? Like where, what, what for you is record customization in your mind?

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 of records or records of 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. Because let's be honest, you got a lot of different teams, you got a lot of different people using HubSpot. They want to see a lot of different data points. They, you know, and 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. And we don't want to be nasty. Don't be nasty. Right. We don't want our records to be dirty and nasty. We want them to be clean. Right. Anyway, 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 fangy puppets on it. Right? Yeah. 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. We're going to get that.

I know, I'm just saying don't go there yet.

It's a big one we're going to talk about.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's what I think kind of got me on the. Let's talk about record customization.

Chad, are you in the same camp? Do you think of different things like talk, Talk me through it?

Yeah, yeah. Well, first, before we, before I dive into that, I'm curious, Max, when you mentioned you wanted to talk about record customization, I feel like this new big secret update that we're going to get to, that's not a secret, but later that we're going to talk about, was that had that already dropped or did that drop after you had mentioned you wanted to talk about record customization?

No, it had dropped before.

It had dropped prior.

Okay. Yeah, I wasn't sure. Because I. I had no inside knowledge. 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. 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, you know, publicly make good on a promise to get a tattoo of a corporation on my body. So that's why we're here, if I'm being so honest. Yeah.

So. So no, at least we're trading on this one.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, for me, yeah, I mean, 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, you can really tailor it either to teams. You can tailor it to specific roles so that people only see what's relevant to them. 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 uniform record editor, where you can manipulate the entire record rather than, like, oh, well, let's manipulate the left sidebar. Then we'll do the right sidebar.

That 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 that's so many improvements even before this one.

Yeah. So let's dive into that. Let's dive into, like, if. If you go back in the Wayback Machine, right. That you hop in your DeLorean, go back however far you want to go. Let's. Let's start where. Where we've been and for YouTube, what have been like, historically, the biggest frustrations or limitations with customizing records in HubSpot.

George, let me ask you this. Yeah.

You know how.

On the left hand sidebar. Yeah. Which typically houses the about section. Yeah. Right. How long ago do you remember having the ability to make that thing conditional?

Oh, well, conditional. Not long, maybe. I don't really. Has it been Like a couple years, brother.

That thing's been conditional since I was still an implementation specialist. Really? Yes, sir. Yeah, that dude. I remember when that came out, I was like, this is the coolest thing ever.

How long ago was that?

I started being a product trainer in 2018. Oh, yeah.

And as.

As long as 2026. And we know.

No, no, it's not 2026 yet. Don't do that.

2025. Sorry. Good God. Where'd that go?

Yeah, seriously.

I was an implementation specialist somewhere between December of 2015 and 2000. In March of 2018.

Okay.

I believe. Okay. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But was only there. Right. So for anyone who, like, doesn't know what I'm saying when I say conditional stuff. Okay. On HubSpot, there are. There are three columns on your records. There's the left sidebar.

Within a record.

Yeah. When you're within a record. Correct. When you're within a record. Not. We're not talking about the marketing tools or anything else, 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.

Whatever that object type is, whatever that object, contact, its contact, properties, deals, first.

Name, last name, email, whatever. You got your middle panel, which historically has just been activity stuff.

Yeah.

For really.

Longest time.

Longest time. Yeah.

It was only a timeline. Forever.

Yeah. No, granted, for a couple years we've had like custom cards in the overview tab and like some new stuff. Right. Yeah. And then on the right hand panel, historically, again, most of the 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 I like to.

I like to say on that sidebar, it's associations, apps and attachments.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's really. Yeah. You see. Yeah. For. Yeah, for a long time, apps that had UI extensions. Right. Were also, you know, you know, shoved on that right sidebar panel and had no other sucker would get real cluttered.

Real quick, especially if you didn't modify the original.

Yep. Yeah.

Long in the tooth. For sure.

Yeah. Line, the tooth. Right. The teeth were so long. Saber tooth. That's what we've kind of had now. The, the, the. The big thing, the big reason why we're why I'm freaking out today and I'm super excited. Or actually wait, we didn't explain what conditional stuff is. Yeah, 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. 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 and you can collapse them, 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 lifecycle stage. Yeah. 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. 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. 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. Right. But that, that property wouldn't be relevant for any US based customers.

That was oddly specific.

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 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. And the point of doing this is, is so you can reduce the amount of noise. Right. And unnecessarily blank and empty information that sits on your record.

I like to call it doom scrolling. The unnecessary doom scrolling that you do on Mr. Left Hand Sidebar.

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 something.

Like the customer experience is important, but the user who's serving the customer needs to equally have as Good.

Yeah. As an admin. As an admin, that's your customer. Yes, exactly. Right. Is the user. Right. So like the reason this is important is because again, one of the best possible HubSpot is 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 sequences and meeting links, like all like it's got all these cool tools. Sure. It's got all these cool functional things. But like, you got to remember it's like there's a lot of people who, when we think about what makes your CRM useful. Right? Yeah. It means the information I need is right there and I can find it instantly and I don't have to spend much time looking for it. Right? Yeah. And my God, record customization is one of the best, best, best, best, best, best tools you can leverage to make that super easy for people. Right? Yeah. Because you got to remember people aren't going to go into their CRM to go find information if it is a giant pain in the butt to find it. Right.

If I have to go to all properties every time I need to figure out a flippity flop about somebody is whatever. Yeah, like ain't nobody got time for that.

So it's a double edged sword though, right? Because it's like, all right, I don't want to make my records super messy so I'm going to have people go to the record. There's a button you can hit called View all properties which, which will literally just show you all properties you have for that record. Right. In a full list view, including like.

Hundreds of properties that HubSpot has by default that many of our blank frequently.

Literally every single one, right click there. You can hide, that's true, you can hide the blank ones. Right. But what you got to remember is you're functionally leaving the record to go. Look at that. Right, Right. Like you're leaving the record, you're going like a super deep level into it. Right. And you can't see all your other stuff. Right. You're going to like, you're essentially not on the record anymore.

We're single page without promise.

Yeah, 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 going to put all the information I possibly can on the record page itself. Well then what sucks about that is that. Yeah. You're then entering this world of just this infinite Doom scroll on the left hand side, right, to. To kind of like view stuff. So then you go, okay, well, you know, that's, that's tough. That it's like an infinite amount of like, you know, stuff. I got to scroll on the left to go find something. Right. 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 of a. One of 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 like three going on three?

Maybe it's been about three years for the middle column.

Right.

I mean that's, that's what I would. I remember. Before we dive into the middle column, I do want to highlight that conditionality used to be required that you utilize an enumerative property. So something that's like a multi. Checkbox or a dropdown.

Yep.

Prior to this awesome update, one of these, this newest, most awesome update.

Yeah, we'll. We'll talk about that.

Oh, okay.

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. The conversation was like, what did you historically hate about it? But I. I will say this.

Still getting there. Yeah.

Here's what I do want to say before I, I forget about this. I need everybody to go into. Let. Let's just say the contact a. A contact record and go into the about this contact. Or for us, it's a. It's about this. All right. Because we call our humans instead of context. But go into your about this contact and if first name, last name and email are in that actual area under the about or job title. What's the matter? Yeah, what's the matter with you? You're showing the information that is already above the communication central. First name, last name, email and job title is above notes, email, calls, test. Get it out of there. That's four properties. First name, last name, email and job title that don't need to be in about this contact record. Like slim it down. Don't show duplicates. Okay, I'll shut up. Go ahead, Max.

Pay attention to that too. Yeah, also pay attention 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 going to show up on the top left. Yeah.

And that's what is important when you're creating those custom objects, is choosing those thoughtfully.

Right. Yep. So anyway, so we're talking about getting stuff into like the middle panel, right? Yeah. And you know, within the last three years, like the, the whole sort of like pre curated, sort of like cards, you know, 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 took on sort of like a predefined structure. And 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. Right. But that's also like a whole other. UI extensions are a whole other thing.

UIes are their own thing.

Yeah, yeah, 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. Thanos Glove.

I was wondering if I was in a different universe right now.

Yeah, yeah.

Max has his own multiverse over there.

But see, see, here's, here's what got tough, right? It created an issue where that middle panel got super messy.

Yeah.

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. 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. Yeah. Right. But then our middle and right hand bars end up becoming a tab.

Hell.

Right? Because sure, if you don't want to get it all in one tab, the next best option you had was put it on multiple tabs. Right. Which allow you to have different groups of cards. Right. But then it just got busy horizontally. Right. Well, instead of vertical.

The only way to dimensionalize it before was based on team. So 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. 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 exactly right.

Because then you. Then you're not even talking about just editing one section. You're rebuilding the whole damn record at that point.

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.

But still, you're making a whole separate record, and when you edit one, it's not editing the other. Right.

They didn't used to have the ability, like, the card library thing now, which is amazing because you used to be like, oh, hey, yeah, I want to clone. You know, like, I want to add a new section. I, like, 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.

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. Oh, yeah, 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.

Which people are looking for. For invoices and line items, you know, like, where is it over here?

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, yeah.

You don't need.

If you're not using it, get them out of there.

Yeah, if.

Simplify your life.

Yeah, simplify your life. Simplify their life. You know, without a doubt. So, yeah.

So what dropped right before I said, hey, we should do this.

Yeah, yeah. Hang on, hang on. So let me do my job. So, Max and. Max and Chad, what recent updates or features have made the biggest difference in how teams can personalize record layouts moving forward?

Thanks for asking that question, George.

We definitely were. I mean, I am here for a reason, right?

I'm playing Liz today, so I'm trying to hurt cats, and I'm not really good at it, but. So, like, what are the updates?

What an amazing question, George. I'll tell you. Okay. I will tell you how good of a update.

Well, thank you.

Listen, 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 the whole tab property.

The entire tab.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tabs themselves. Yeah, Right. So it's like you got 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. Okay.

That excites.

They did hide. You can hide it conditionally too.

Oh yeah.

So it's always there. Unless something is true, then hide it.

So it's like an exclusionary filter type thing circumstances.

And not only for the tabs, but also for the middle column cards themselves as well.

So, so it's interesting because what I hear you saying almost is like, here's just a use case. You know, you've got status active and inactive. So like if all of a sudden somebody goes from being an active customer to inactive customer, you said to inactive, all of a sudden you could make things just disappear.

Yeah. Yes, correct.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, 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. 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.

Got it.

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.

If, if associated object X equals whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If.

Or number of records associated or whatever you. Something like that. But this is like insanely more powerful because you're 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 brutal.

So, so what I heard is you can now have conditional left side conditional center. Conditional.

Right.

And so basically you can make this thing lay out 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 bow. Is. Is there anything else on this update that you're like need to talk about, want to talk about or the user should, should know about?

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 extremely granular level Now.

Oh, boys, boys. Did you know, did you know that.

You can also do it in the sales workspace?

What are you talking about?

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.

Which goes past just the. If I, I go into CRM and go into a record.

But yeah, if I go Unified Record.

Editor customized there if I go into a workspace and therefore it has its own customization.

Oh, beyond deal configuration. And same with help desk.

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. Like, yeah, what are some, what are some creative or like 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? Like, where does your mind go of like, hey, here's the top 1, 2, 3, 17 things that you talk to people or do for people when you think about this.

Yeah, for me it's get the, like get an understanding of the roles and the things that people need to perform or that the actions that they need to perform. Like 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, 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. 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, like, like 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, you know, like, you know, and so go to a default view if you absolutely. 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 life cycle of the customer, where the customer is at, give whoever is looking at it relevant information. The only thing you need to consider is SE is like sensitive information at that point. 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. But now I'm thinking only branch out if you absolutely have to.

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. 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. Because here's the thing, if someone just sees a gigantic ocean of blank properties, none of them are going to seem important.

No.

Yeah. Right. But when they're, when they see like.

Oh, there's like four or six.

Right. It's like, oh, they're blank. 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, 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. Right. You know, so it's just, it's just much better. And again, like, part of. I know we've had a lot of conversations around adoption. Right. People aren't going to adopt the CRM and use the CRM if it just seems like this big, messy, confusing thing. Yeah. 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. 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 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. Yeah, right. And people can really do that now, which is so. Which is great.

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. 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? Where do they start? Like, what, what are some easy wins?

Yeah, true. So you don't want to like, you don't want to like accidentally create like a massive project for yourself and disrupt a bunch of people and just go in there and start like doing shit like, without telling anybody. Right? Right. But I think you do want to like go experiment a little bit, right? So something you should probably do is go pick a record that people use a lot. Okay. Go, go clone that view, right? So instead of the default one, go like, make a new one, you know? Yeah. To kind of play around for me.

I always call it the Chadmin View.

The Chadmin view. Make a chad view.

You've actually named my test view?

Yeah. Okay, go make a test view, right? A Chadmin view. Call it Chadmin view, right? And go zero that thing out. Go zero it out. Go delete everything, right? And start from absolute zero. And just say, 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 would be really relevant in this situation, but not that situation. 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? 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. 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. But it's one of the ones that are, like, mostly most important to get feedback from the people who are actually using it. Because record customization affects lots of people, right? Yeah. So you do want to get a lot of good feedback and then you want to document the process, especially if you have conditional stuff happening, right? Because you don't want a ton of people coming to you saying, like, oh, I can't see this information anymore. Well, oh, well, it's because you don't have this property. Flip to this property, or like, whatever it may be. Right, right. 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 going to work on autopilot, which you can do for sure. Like, there's certain situation situations where you're going to be like, oh, well, I know because of this, you know, demonstratively, you know, factual way that our process works, that I'm going to have this information set to this. So I know this is going to show up. You can make those judgment calls. Right. But, like, I would, I would, I would highly implore you to also, like, communicate those changes to people in case. Yeah, this, the process doesn't always go the way as planned.

That's why you definitely want to mess around in that test view. But to make the test view work. Just one side note too, for newbie coming in, you 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 got to put yourself back to where everybody else is, if relevant, when you're, like, not testing, because then you're going to 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, 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 kind of still suck. But those I'm sure will get a facelift at some point.

Dude, quick actions are the biggest low hanging fruit I think. Oh dude. For HubSpot team, those could be so good. They could be amazing. They are so use.

They're useless.

Yeah, so useless.

Can I ask you guys a real granular question too? So obviously part of this record customization is even the understanding of creating custom properties. And, and the reason I'm bringing up custom properties or even just properties in general because I'm super curious you too. When you think about custom, you know, record customization or customizing the interface, have you guys been using the like text inside color tags or like. Yes, like talk? Yeah, ye just talk to the audience about like being able to add colors to the record and what that can mean for people.

I forgot about that one dude. That, that one slid in out of nowhere.

Yeah. That just put that sucker right into your DMs and said howdy.

Yeah, yeah dude. So when you have dropdown properties or multi, is it drop down and checkbox properties? Yes. Or more like tag, 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 color around them.

Yeah.

And they're purdy right now here's the thing. There's a reason to do it other than oh, it looks nice. Yeah. Right. 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 going to 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 a lot of information about system.

Yeah. Like you know, just because you can customize like crazy, it doesn't mean you're not going to 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 you a quick way to like find and locate information because like the color thing stands out on that like, you know, white.

Also on index pages it's very helpful too.

Yeah, 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. It's one, one other thing that's really helpful about the colors too, I 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 dropdowns that don't mean anything to a new person, but when it's green, yellow and 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. So I think that's particularly helpful for just new hires, right?

Yeah, very, very helpful.

Yeah. It communicates. What does it mean when a property is set to this value? Right. Maybe you might see green and go oh, that's inherently positive. Maybe it's red and you're like oh, that does not mean something good. Right, Right. So it's a great way to like is kind of like helps you like heat map stuff on an index page. Right. But you know, also kind of communicates the, the situation of. All right. If it's set to this value, like that's good bad or you know, maybe it's just something to help you kind of like differentiate it. Right? Yeah. Yeah, man.

So 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 item for you guys?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I want to see. I, I, 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 it's just, it's, that's just a, like a fact. I'd like to see them do some like more creative stuff with the URL properties that just came out. Right. Like if anyone is like you can now there's 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 we just made them a little bit more aesthetic. For example, when it has a value, I'd love for it to just show a button with a label instead of just the link URL value itself. Right. You know, 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. 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, 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 because the one 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. 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 like a different level. I'd love to see some sort of like process builder that, that brings in like the new HubSpot forms builder in some case. Right. Like imagine a world and it's like we can sort of kind of do this with Playbooks a little bit. Right. But I'd love to see, you know, something where like you could create like a process, like a process card. I think in Salesforce they call these like flows. I want to say you guide a.

User through a predetermined set of action sequences. You build the whole visual flow.

It's like filling out 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 record IDs are required, but it's basically a multi step form that you can just embed that sucker 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, UI extension for something like that. Right. And that's out of. Frankly, that's out of the realm of. Of affordability and possibility and technical expertise for most people. Right. I'd love to see some sort of declarative process flow guided action, like builder type thing. That would be. Yeah. Super neat.

I have a simple one.

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.

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?

No, no. Why not? Hit. Hit the brakes. I mean, what I mean, I guess. But part of me associated object properties. I think 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. Like, some things just belong how they are and where they go ahead and land this plane. Listen, here's. Here's my. My action or takeaway for this one.

Weirdest objection. George. 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? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode, make sure you head over to thehubheroes.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 Hub Heroes podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. 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.