HubSpot's Data Model

Thank you so much for having me. It is such a pleasure to be here. I spend so much of my day to day thinking a lot about you all and how to make HubSpot better for you. And I'm so thankful for all of your feedback always. And I'm going to use a big chunk of today to ask you all questions and we'll do our best to make sure that there is plenty of time for me to answer your questions as well. My name is Maggie Mirsky. I'm a product lead, I think about data setup. I have been at HubSpot for about five years and I'm based in the great state of Rhode island. So I live about an hour ish from our main HubSpot office and oops. Whoa. Okay, there we go. Okay, I'm going to do a little bit of highlighting of stuff that we released in 2024 and some current open betas, which I think are pretty cool. And I want to make sure to get input from you all. Also will definitely encourage you all to join them. I'm going to, as I said, ask you a bunch of questions and then do my best to have plenty of time for Q and A. All right, we are going to jump right into a demo. Okay. And whoops. Okay, give me one second. I want to make sure I'm sharing the right thing. Okay, can you all see the object library?

Yes.

Okay, cool. All right. If you have not seen this part of HubSpot, it is you go to Settings, you go to Data management, and you go to the object library. I wanted to plug that. Last year we released four, four new objects and they are available for everyone. So regardless of your tier or hub, you get access to appointments, courses, listings and services. If you are interested to learn more about any of these objects, you can click Details and it'll give you the out of the box properties as well as the associations that come with this. So service is associated to appointments, companies, contacts, et cetera. These objects are pretty fully baked. We think of them as just an extension of the HubSpot data model. I've seen some people refer to them as custom objects, but they're very much supported and available across HubSpot. And so when you toggle them on, you'll see all the places that they are supported. This is actually kind of a short list. It's like all of this and more. And so when you enable that object, it'll start showing up truly everywhere from your nav. It'll show up down here, it'll show up on the index page and reports and listings. Truly like we really intentionally got very broad support and the intention here is just to enable you all to store more data in HubSpot more easily, especially if you don't have an enterprise license and so you don't have custom objects. We want to make it easier for you to store information about your customers and your business in HubSpot. If there are other objects that you all are like, wow, this would be really helpful for me. I'm ending up having this in an extra system and it's kind of a mess or I'm smooshing this into deals or tickets or contact properties. Please tell us we're kind of eagerly listening for other ways that we can be thoughtfully extending our data model. Okay, while we are here, I also want to highlight kind of long awaited beta. In my opinion, I'm pretty excited about it. So if you go through this same details flow, you'll see a pencil icon next to any of the objects on this page. If you click it, you can rename your object. So let's say my company used the term organization. You can go ahead and enter that and hit save and you will pretty quickly see that reflected most places. So we're currently in a private beta. The key gap that we're closing right now is that we have a fair number of properties that include the name of the object, e.g. company domain name. And so we're working on especially those kind of host by default properties auto updating that name. And then we're also trying to make sure that the nickname or rename of your object is reflected in all of the different workspaces. But you'll pretty quickly see when you so again we change companies to organizations so if you go to your nav you will see it reflected there and it is pretty consistently updated across the vast majority of HubSpot. Again, we're working on closing any of the kind of outstanding gaps, but pretty excited about that functionality. Do I have any questions before I move to my next thing?

I I have a question. So people were sounding off in the chat with, you know, other objects they would like to see in this object library. I see deliverables, territories, offices, events. What are your thoughts on adding more of those or creating a custom object versus just renaming one of these that are provided here.

Yeah, that's been an interesting theme that I I've been surprised by how much that conversation has kind of blended together custom objects and renaming the renamed object. You know, any of these objects come with a set of defaults and Somewhat of an opinion. Some of our objects are much more opinionated than others. Like Contacts, for example, comes with a bunch of specific functionality around email and interaction listings, comes with a lot of properties that are relevant to a physical property. So like a building has like square footage, number of bathrooms, etc. Custom objects are really intended to be used for things that are very specific to your business. So anything that is a custom concept or custom idea, I'm not going to sit here and say like, obviously people are going to do whatever it takes. You all are very creative, you'll get the data into the right format. But I think in this moment, if it feels like it's an object type that would be helpful for everyone in your industry or with your use case, we're pretty eager to know that. And there's a potential that we'll add more objects. If it feels like it's something that's really unique to your business, I would recommend using a custom object. I mean, you obviously could go forth and rename an object and add a bunch of custom properties. I'm not going to say you can't do that if you have access to custom objects. We would definitely recommend that because you have kind of the ultimate level of customization. Did I answer the question?

Yeah, no, I think that was a great answer. Thank you. And then someone. I've lost it. John asked, is there anywhere that the name does not get changed in like reports or settings or anything?

Yeah, we're. Yeah. So we're the couple that we're really actively working on closing right now are the. What I said before about kind of like some of those default property names. So like company owner, contact owner, we're working to have that part of the flow. And the sales workspace, the help desktop in the customer success workspace are not currently reflecting those renamed versions and we're working on making those updates as well. There are a couple of other edges. Like, you know, we're trying to make sure that property. No, sorry, permissions, like there are a couple parts of settings that we're working through and so I'm not going to say we're even. When we get to public beta, we may not be at 100% coverage, but we're trying to get as close as possible. But just to kind of like show you really quickly. So if we go here, we have organizations, you can see that that got reflected immediately and these tabs actually showed up correctly. This is like a brand new portal. So I don't have anything in here, but your column names might Actually, and I think actually all of these look correct. Right? So organization, these are the associations, but some of the kind of generic column names like company name and company, company owner, those aren't getting updated quite yet. But if you went to anything like lists, you should see the name reflected as well. So here you can see organizations. So we've done our best to do to get like, pretty substantial coverage and we're continuing to close gaps as they come up.

Amazing.

All right, I'm going to switch gears and keep us going. Okay. Hopefully you all are familiar with the data model overview. We think about it as this kind of visualization where you can click on objects, see their associations, learn information about every single object, all that jazz. And over the years we've gotten a lot of feedback that's like, okay, but what can I do here? Like, it's helpful to be able to see things, but I can't do enough. And so we now have in beta the ability to edit your data model. And so the intention here is that all within one space, you can do a whole bunch of things. So you could, for example, go ahead and create a property. This is like a pretty fast creation process, but we're going to continue to kind of iterate and make it as quick as possible. So all within that one flow, I made a property and now I can see it under my recently created properties. I can also click to view all within this screen. That is honestly the best that I've ever been able to visually wrap my head around associations. We have this new view so you can see all of the objects that are associated to contacts, and then without even needing to leave this context, you can go ahead and you can create an association label. So, I mean, you know, let's say we're adding like an influencer label. I can go ahead, check that it looks correct, and then quite quickly see that new label get loaded. So our intention here is to really streamline and create a singular space where you can do all your data model configurations. I'm in a pro portal, so I can't create a custom object. But if you are in an enterprise portal, you could create your custom objects here, create your association labels here. And we're really trying to streamline everything, and so the next phase will pretty much replicate and shift over everything I just showed you in the object library. The longer term goal, we're really trying to strategize the best way to make it so that all things related to objects, associations and properties can be managed within this one central kind of visual space and we're hoping to take everything that you like about settings and then make it way better and make it so you to click around a lot less. So again, this is in beta right now and we will kind of continue to add more awesome functionality into this space. Okay. And then I think my last thing that I wanted to plug is that last year we shipped a couple of templates or kind of like set of industry recommendations. So for pro customers there's real estate and education. If you are an enterprise customer that has sensitive data, there's also one for healthcare. And then we currently have a beta that we are planning to roll out over the next few weeks which uses Breeze to automatically generate information about your. Your Sorry. Automatically generate a customized data model recommendation and we use information that we have about your company. You can also give us information as well. So we look at your portal domain and we gather information specifically this set to provide a set of recommendations. For the purpose of this demo. I'm going to imagine that I run a plumbing company. I think that I set my domain as rotor rooter, which I think of as like a pretty big plumbing entity. And so when I go ahead and hit generate, should be taking that information about what I provided I'm looking for, as well as information that HubSpot already has about your company to generate a customized data model recommendation. It's usually pretty fast. Kyle said this is one of his favorite things to demo because it's always a little different, which is a little stressful for me, but also exciting. I think it's definitely the power of AI to see what kind of good recommendations you can get. My outcome is a set of recommendations for facility services. It says a recommended data model for facility services companies to track customers, plumbing issues and the status of service delivery. That all makes sense. The nice thing is that you then have the option to choose to apply whatever makes sense to you. And so you can change the name of something. So if you didn't want the word issue type, you just wanted issue name, you can change that. We tell you what property options come up. So these are fun ones like clogged drain, leaking pipe, sewer, backup water heater issue or other. There's kind of basic things like preferred contact method. If you decided you didn't care about something like frequency of issues which is one time or recurring, you can uncheck it and then it won't get applied. You can also get things like association labels. So this is between contacts and tickets and so each contact can be associated to many tickets with the Label support ticket. Again, if you wanted to update that language to support issue, you can do that all kind of within this nice streamlined UI and you really have the ability to, you know, the intention here is to get you up and running or get you kind of recommendations around common terminology and practices in setting up your data model. So this is a pretty robust set. I'm not going to go through every single one would recommend you do before you apply it. Last one I'll flag is that there is a deal pipeline that comes that is included here. And so again you can change any of the labels if they don't make sense to you. So this is new request scheduled in progress, awaiting parts. Let's say you wanted to change this to be blocked. You can hit apply and it'll immediately get reflected as well. So as soon as you get to the place where you're like okay, cool, this makes sense. I've gone through, I've checked everything you can hit next. It'll give you a summary of the changes. If that feels like too many changes, you can always go back and then you can go ahead and hit confirm. I think it's pretty cool. You go from kind of no customizations to a bunch in a pretty short amount of time. And we're really, I think this is kind of the tip of the iceberg. We're really eager to explore different types of recommendations that we can provide you all to accelerate folks use of HubSpot or really deepen it. I think this is probably most helpful for a newer portal, but I could imagine a future where we provide a set of recommended reports or workflows that might make sense for either your industry or your use case. I think that is the majority of the stuff that I wanted to get through. Would recommend you all check out these two tabs. They're not going to be particularly exciting in this portal because it's brand new, but last year we did release this ability to track your data limits for records, associations, properties, association labels and pipelines. And then this analysis tab is not super exciting because I made my portal yesterday, but it is shows you the ability or it's the chart that is showing you a breakdown of per object type, what is the source of creates, deletes, updates and merges. And so it's a nice thing to check every so often to just make sure that things are behaving correctly and kind of make sense in terms of how your data should be getting into updated into HubSpot, updated, etc. I think those are all of my features I was hoping to cover.

Neil just asked in the chat, how effective would the Breeze recommendation be on an established but imperfect install? Do you want to talk about new setup versus optimizations for existing customers?

I mean, my thing is like, it can't hurt. It's all additive and you get to choose what you apply. And so I would recommend going through the flow and seeing what comes up. I think hopefully it's some inspiration or like an idea of another way you could be using HubSpot functionality. You may say, wow, we actually have a bunch of that covered already. But even if it's just adding one pipeline super quickly, that feels worthwhile to me. And we'll continue to iterate on different ways to get those recommendations or just use AI to accelerate your data model configuration. Okay, can I ask my questions or are there other.

Yeah, no, I think go for it.

Okay. All right. So I just want to say let's make setting UP and using HubSpot's data model as simple as possible. That's definitely the goal. And so eager to get your input on the best way to approach that. So I'm curious for all of you, what is the most time consuming part of setting up your data model? What is like slows you down and you feel like it's just way more inefficient than it needs to be. Okay, so this is. People will respond to the chat now, right?

Property creator via CSV import.

Got a couple interesting. Can somebody add more context on the bulk property creator and what's so time consuming about it?

Salim, if you want to raise your hand, we can bring you on stage. This is a thing. I've heard a lot of requests for Maggie and I think there's actually an app that in the marketplace that does this, but I'm a little unclear on what it specifically needs to do.

Yeah.

Hello everyone, can you hear me?

Yeah.

Yep.

So I've worked with a lot of HubSpot partners and a lot of our initial work is data architecture that's happening mainly outside of HubSpot. And once the data architecture is clear, be it based on an integration with another system or just a net new HubSpot portal, we have a giant CSV of all the objects, all the properties and everything ready in a CSV. And we always end up having to create a custom tool internally that leverages the API. That way we can feed a CSV and auto create all of these properties. We just simply wish there was an out of the Box HubSpot tool. That way we don't have to Build a custom one that is based on three organizations that I've three partners that I work with and every single one of them had an internal custom tool for that.

Yeah, interesting. We're starting to dig into a concept of kind of like what I was showing you with recommendations or templates where, I mean, I can't say we're committing to this, but we're digging into whether or not partners could create a set of recommendations. And I think you could probably have potentially two versions of that. Right. One that might be available on a marketplace and one that you might use yourselves where you could add a collection of configurations, then kind of batch apply. But I know that that cross portal migration or setup can be really tricky.

Yeah. One thing to note that while having preset templates is valuable, there are a lot of cases where with custom integrations where the models are super custom and having the ability to set those properties up, do our property matching and then just upload a CSV would be extremely valuable.

I see. Okay. So yeah, the ability to bulk create properties via CSV where you're just defining what the property name and property type.

So we're defining property label property, internal value, property type, and if there's enumeration, we're also defining enumeration labels and internal values.

Okay, interesting. Kyle, can everyone else hear what Salim just said?

Can everybody hear Celine?

Okay. Okay. I was just.

Yeah. If you're having issues with sound, just go ahead and reboot your browser.

Yeah, just refresh it.

Okay, I'm scrolling back up. Thank you so much. That was super helpful. We got interpreting what our business team needs. Dig into that. Is there a way that HubSpot can be helping you interpret what your business team needs? I don't know if anyone answered. Okay, we'll keep going. All right, I see a bunch of other properties related stuff which is interesting. I think somebody said like, like bulk updating options. That makes a ton of sense to me. I think that there is this, like, I don't know if it's a growing trend, but definitely common usage where people make similar properties across multiple object types and they want them to kind of behave pretty similarly. I'm just scrolling really quickly.

Just came in at the bottom. Connor says one major frustration is getting the entire data model built out, placing the properties in their correct objects, then seeing users duplicate properties using the wrong type and or placing them in the wrong object. I would love to see Breeze make suggestions to use existing properties rather than create a new one. This is something that came up on the Monday morning Briefing I run yesterday also that just in the property creation flow it would be cool if Breeze could do like AI powered fuzzy matching. Right? Like to say like oh you're creating a birthday property but we already have a date of birth property so maybe don't do that for example.

Absolutely. I agree. That seems really cool. I will advocate for it. I have no idea how possible that is technically, but I absolutely understand the intention there and it seems like a reasonable, not too far off feature for us. Okay, I want to respond to Anastasia and then I think maybe go on to my next question. So Anastasia, you said do data models provide a view to show automations reference between objects such as roll up field or workflow that updates contact property based on deal update. So I think what you're saying is aligned to a pretty common piece of feedback that my team gets which is being able to see how the data is flowing between object and various records. And I agree, I think that like you know, a lot of times there's a challenge of oh, if I make this update, what am I going to break or what, what else is going to be impacted? How do we help you with that? Like what is an ideal version of that experience? Because I absolutely understand the goal but I have always struggled to think through like what, what that might look like. So if anyone has ideas on how you would want to see like the, the lineage or way in which data is moving across properties, please tell me.

I will mention here while people are typing that oh no, Anastasia, are you trying to talk?

We can't hear you but we can make that.

We can bring you on stage if you would like. Oh, there she is.

Yeah. So if there was like a dropdown within the data model so you know how you can go viewing all objects if there was something else where you could do view connections or view like connectivity even just so it also touches that way and then like the type could either be property like if it's a calculation or a roll up what something that touches or if it's a workflow that would update cross object and then you know it does the actual lines. So you can like click and say hey, okay, here's everything that touches between the contact and the deal. Oh this one property actually seems to be a lookup and then it continues being looked up across across from deal to contact a company or custom objects because I think that's where a lot of duplicate and conflicting actions happen. So people are like oh I really need this property that does this. You could check to see if there's already one that like a workflow that is doing an update between contact and deal at the same event. They can update the existing workflow rather than creating a new one that either conflicts or just creates noise.

Yeah. So it seems like there are a couple of things. One is being able to see just seeing the flow of data, but also seeing maybe all of the connections between properties. Do we already have a set of workflows that are updating contact properties from deal properties? Is that right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Okay, cool. This is super helpful. I'm going to keep us moving. Thank you all. Lots to digest. I'll definitely do another spin through the questions later or feedback later. Okay, what are your biggest data pet peeves? Please chime in the chat. Dirty data for sure. Okay, Caitlin, I know that there's active work going on in that space, duplicate properties. So I feel like we should have had a word cloud or something to see the. The trends here. Unpro profile data, duplicates, duplicates. Okay.

So Jeremy mentioned lazy people and everybody else is mentioning duplicates. I spoke at an event a few weeks ago and an attendee came up to me and requested that we build a dashboard that shows which users have created the most duplicates so they can be punished.

But we're talking about duplicate records, not duplicate property types.

Is that right?

Or are we talking about both? Both. Okay.

Oh, it happens to both for sure.

Okay. Yep. Property management. It was getting like a little violent in the chat. Okay, Interesting. Okay. Wow. Such a. Such a property leaning space. Cody, can you. Cody Lopez, I saw that you said inboxes automatically creating contacts. Can you say a little bit more about that either in the chat or tell us if you want to come off mute?

Yeah, I think we ideally would be able to use our shared inboxes or. And. Or help desk more effectively, but because these are shared inboxes, like sales at, you know, customer service at things like that, we get a ton of spam to those email addresses. Oftentimes it's where we would like to send HubSpot notifications for things that need to go to the group as a whole, as opposed to, you know, individuals. And every single email that goes there, even if they're on the never log list, it creates a new contact.

Interesting.

That is. That is a huge hindrance and one of the reasons that we haven't been able to adopt it for years now. Just having automatic contacts create every single time any comes in to a shared inbox.

Yeah, I know a bit about the inbox, but I'm definitely not a Pro. But I will pass that feedback along. That's super helpful context.

Thank you.

Sure. Okay. Lots of, lots of good stuff in here. I think I'm going to keep us moving, but thank you all. And if you have other pet peeves, please keep adding them into the chat. Okay. This is something I've been thinking about a little bit. We kind of have a version of this, but if you had an admin dashboard, what information would you want in it? How would you want to get alerted? I'm guessing we want some duplicate information. Just. Just a hunch. But I'm curious, like if there was a space that was just for you, what kind of information would you want tracked in? Okay. New properties, created activity. Yeah, I, I agree. Anastasia. I think that kind of an admin oriented log of actions would be quite helpful. Oh, interesting. Chris. Okay. AI specific stuff, broken workflows, duplicates, marketing, Contact velocity. Paul loves enthusiasm for an admin dashboard. Okay. Integrations. All right. These are great tips. Yep. Limits. Okay.

I will be exporting this chat out and sharing it with Maggie as a CSV. So keep it coming.

It's super helpful. Honestly, I've been thinking about this quite a bit, so this, these like concrete examples are quite helpful.

Casey said, I don't necessarily want to be notified about duplicates, but I do care when people are doing admin actions like creating properties and workflows. I'm going to call that one out.

Yeah. What I'm. This is like all in my head. So just, you know, as many caveats as possible. But we have this feature, the audit log that I think is powerful but doesn't have enough coverage and I think is a little hidden, honestly. And so I would love to have a kind of more filterable version of that so you could easily see who's creating properties, who's updating workflows, kind of what's changing so you can have a good handle on it. And that way if something doesn't go according to plan, you can at least kind of find the information easily.

One thing I'll mention there is I see a lot of updates coming to the audit log. It seems to be getting more and more stuff all the time, but it's not in any way opinionated if you go to it. It's just like a list of all the things that have ever happened in your portal at all. Go to the Security center. It's very different. It's like, hey, here are the things we think you should be checking out.

Alum. Definitely pass us along to the pm. The PM who used to own the security center now owns the audit log. And so I'm sure.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, I'm sure they would love that, that positive praise. But also I think they're trying to figure out how to make the audit log as like, powerful and helpful as it could be. All right, love this. Thank you all. This is like such helpful inspiration and input as we all think about the next phase. Okay, this is my last question for you all, and then I'll. I'll just be around to answer questions. So if you had an assistant that could do HubSpot tasks for you, what would you want it to take over? I know that there are things that you probably want to do yourselves, but if you had a, you know, maybe not quite at your level, but an assistant who you could say, please do these tasks for me, what would they do for you? Wow. Dupes. What, what a theme of the day. Who enter tons of our historical data. So much data cleanup, get my sales down. Good stuff. So many dupes. I know.

Clean up their own portals. I'm going to take, take that away.

Yeah, I saw permission.

I know. I did too. These responses are coming so fast that it's hard to keep tabs on. Oh yeah, Jessica, you said permission management. Can you share more about what. What would be helpful there?

I'm interested to hear what she says, but it just occurs to me, like it wouldn't even require AI or something if you have a user who over the course of like three months does not access a tool or a feature they have permission to use if those permissions just clamped down and they lost.

Interesting. I was thinking about the opposite way, Kyle, I thought you were going to end on like, if they haven't used it, like send them a nudge and say, hey, why aren't you make sure you use this cool new thing.

Yeah. My guess is customers tend to give more access than they should.

Yeah, I think that's right. Okay, Jessica, what would be helpful?

If you're talking, we can't hear you, you might have to update your browser.

Yeah.

I. Glad to come back.

Okay. Yeah. Aurora, I would love to dig into what you said around new user onboarding with timed videos or walkthroughs and a resource location for existing users to review the how to's that concept so interesting to me and also appealing. Is that something that, like, tell me how that would work ideally for you? Hi.

Yeah, I think so. You would have to be able to customize it based on what, like position the individual is in. So you know some level of allowing a customization for this, but essentially I was an admin at my old company for about four years with HubSpot, and depending on how quickly, like there was turnover or how fast we were growing, I would be the one who was showing them around the system. It wasn't.