Episode Transcript
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Intro (00:01):
Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are
you plagued by siloedapartments? Are your lackluster
growth strategies demolishingyour chances for success? Are
you held captive by the evilmenace, lord lack, lack of time,
lack of strategy, and lack ofthe most important and powerful
(00:22):
tool in your superhero toolbelt? Knowledge.
Never fear hub heroes. Get readyto don your cape and mask, move
into action, and become the hubhero your organization needs.
Tune in each week to join theleague of extraordinary inbound
heroes as we help you educate,empower, and execute. Hub
(00:46):
Heroes, it's time to unite andactivate your powers.
George B. Thomas (00:51):
Yeah. Activate those powers. Well, obviously,
you can tell I am not Liz, but Iguess they had storms and
internet outages and all sortsof fun stuff like that. So first
of all, if you're in that area,you know, where there were
storms, which there's stormseverywhere and all over the
places. But if you happen tolive, I think Annapolis, I think
(01:14):
that's where she's back to now.
Hey, we're throwing up someprayers for you. Hopefully life
isn't too crazy, but we're stillgoing to talk about HubSpot
today, even though we're onewoman down. So I've been having
fun because the last coupleepisodes we've been doing a
(01:35):
round robin scenario of like,hey, what do you want to talk
about? And people are gettingnerdy on things that they're
passionate about. Max, youpicked record customization.
Max Cohen (01:47):
Yes, sir.
George B. Thomas (01:47):
So I'm interested in that because I've
always been a big fan of talkingto people about wrapping HubSpot
around their business, right?Customizing it to their needs.
And for a long, long, long, longtime, we really didn't have what
I would call any type ofcustomization. Like it just
HubSpot was Hub Spot and youjust use it how it was. We got
(02:08):
to the point where we couldchange some properties and move
some things around and add a fewthings here and there.
But a lot has been changing asof lately, maybe due to AI,
maybe due to more humans, maybedue to inbound coming up,
whatever. And so in thisepisode, we're going to kind of
(02:28):
unchain you, Max, and Chad, you,and I'm sure I'll have some
thoughts along the way aroundwhat is record customization.
But let's start there, Max.Let's start with like, when you
just threw that out, hey, let'stalk about record customization.
What are we talking about here?
Like, for you is recordcustomization in your mind?
Max Cohen (02:50):
So many things. I mean, for anyone who doesn't
know, you got records inHubSpot, your contacts, your
companies, your deals, yourtickets, your custom objects,
your I guess nowadays, we've gotwhat? Listings, appointments,
services, and like all theseother additional objects you can
get either way. Records,records, records, records,
(03:11):
record. When we talk aboutrecord customization, we're
talking about how you cancustomize the layout and the
behavior of the layout and theinformation that is provided to
you and shown to you indifferent circumstances.
Because let's be honest, you gota lot of different teams. You
got a lot of different peopleusing HubSpot. They wanna see a
(03:33):
lot of different data points.They you know, in in those
screens, those places where yousee properties, those places
where you see relationships toother records, those places
where you see any informationyou can imagine about the
record. They can get extremelybusy and unorganized and nasty.
And we don't wanna be nasty. No.Don't be nasty. Yeah. Right?
(03:57):
We don't want our records to bedirty and nasty. No. We want
them to be clean. Right? Anyway.
So record customization hasalways been something that I've
been extremely passionate aboutbecause I like making HubSpot
look cool. But I also likemaking it, like, functional and
very easy to get the rightinformation in front of people
(04:19):
at the right time so they canget their sticky little thingy
tappets on it. Right? Mhmm.Yeah.
And so that's what we're talkingabout today, George. And the
reason I wanted to bring it upis that we we had a massive,
massive, massive update torecord customization. Don't go
there yet. We're gonna get that.I know what just saying.
George B. Thomas (04:36):
Don't go there yet.
Max Cohen (04:37):
It's a big one we're gonna talk about.
George B. Thomas (04:38):
Yeah. Yeah.
Max Cohen (04:39):
And that's what I think kind of got me on the
let's talk about recordcustomization.
George B. Thomas (04:44):
Chad, are you in the same camp? Do you think
of different things? Like, talktalk me through it.
Chad Hohn (04:49):
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 gonnaget to that's not a secret, but
later that we're gonna talkabout, was that had that already
dropped, or did that drop afteryou had mentioned you wanted to
(05:10):
talk about record customization?
Max Cohen (05:11):
No. It had dropped before.
Chad Hohn (05:13):
It had dropped prior? Okay.
Max Cohen (05:14):
I I don't to say.
Chad Hohn (05:16):
Because I I had no inside knowledge.
Max Cohen (05:18):
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 anidiot. Okay.
Because I'm dumb and I've got abig mouth and I say stuff. And
then sometimes I say that getsme to have to publicly make good
(05:40):
on a promise to get a tattoo Soof a corporation on my
Chad Hohn (05:46):
that's
Max Cohen (05:47):
That's why we're here, if I'm being so honest.
George B. Thomas (05:49):
Yeah. So no. It's time for training on this
one.
Max Cohen (05:52):
Yeah.
Chad Hohn (05:53):
Alright. Well, for me, yeah. I mean, I I I
definitely echo a lot of whatMax was talking about. I mean,
there's we'll dive intospecifics, but, like, making
HubSpot delightful for people touse is one of my favorite parts
about it. Like, can reallytailor it either to teams, you
can tailor it to specific rolesso that people only see what's
(06:14):
relevant to them.
You can tailor it to, you know,conditionally showing things,
and there's, like, you know, allsorts of different improvements
that have been made over theyears that I've been using it,
you know, which is, you know,it's always been customizable
since I've been using it to someextent. But, man, it's gotten
better. There's been more added.They added the middle card a
(06:36):
while back. They added theunified record editor where you
can manipulate the entire recordrather than like, oh, let's
manipulate the left sidebar,then we'll do
George B. Thomas (06:46):
the right sidebar. That
Chad Hohn (06:48):
was yeah. Because you just had to, like, dive all you
know, clicking your brains outleft, right, and center to try
and, you know, get the and youhad 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 solet's So many improvements even
before
George B. Thomas (07:04):
this one has So let's let's into that. Let's
dive into, like, if if you goback in the way back machine,
right? That you hop in yourDelorean, go back to however far
you want to go. Let's startwhere we've been. For YouTube,
what have been historically thebiggest frustrations or
limitations with customizingrecords in HubSpot.
Max Cohen (07:27):
George, let me ask you this. Yeah. You know how on
the left hand sidebar, whichtypically houses the about
section. Yeah. Right?
How long ago do you rememberhaving the ability to make that
thing conditional?
George B. Thomas (07:42):
Oh, well, conditional, not long. Maybe, I
don't know.
Max Cohen (07:47):
Wait, really?
George B. Thomas (07:47):
Has it been like a couple years?
Max Cohen (07:50):
Brother, that thing's been conditional since I was
still an implementationspecialist.
George B. Thomas (07:57):
Really?
Max Cohen (07:58):
Yes, sir. Yeah. That dude, I remember when that came
out. I was like, this is thecoolest thing ever. Which by the
way,
George B. Thomas (08:09):
how how long ago was that? I
Max Cohen (08:13):
started being a product trainer in 2018.
Chad Hohn (08:16):
Oh. Yeah. And as long as
Max Cohen (08:19):
Brother, I can remember 2026. And we
George B. Thomas (08:21):
joke, no, no, it's not 2026 yet. Don't do
that.
Max Cohen (08:24):
2025. Sorry. It's 2025. Good God. It's 2025.
Chad Hohn (08:28):
Where did
George B. Thomas (08:29):
that go?
Max Cohen (08:30):
Seriously. So I was an implementation specialist
somewhere between December 2015and 2000 in March 2018 Okay. I
believe.
George B. Thomas (08:41):
Okay.
Max Cohen (08:41):
And the conditional left hand panel came out then to
put things in perspective on howlong Wow. We could make stuff on
the record conditional.
George B. Thomas (08:55):
Yeah.
Max Cohen (08:56):
Yeah. Right? But it was only there. Right? So for
anyone who like doesn't knowwhat I'm saying when I say
conditional stuff.
Okay? On HubSpot, there threecolumns on your records. There's
the left side
Chad Hohn (09:10):
Within a record. Yeah.
Max Cohen (09:11):
Yeah. Within a record. Correct. When you're
within a record. Not we're nottalking about the marketing
tools or anything else.
But you've got the left column,the middle column, and the right
column. Typically, on the leftcolumn is where you see just
properties, and it's like aboutthis record, whatever.
Chad Hohn (09:25):
Whatever that object type is. Whatever that object
is. Contacts, it's contactproperties, deals,
Max Cohen (09:30):
details, last name, email, whatever. Company, got
your middle panel, whichhistorically has just been
activity stuff.
George B. Thomas (09:37):
Right? For the really long longest time.
Max Cohen (09:39):
Longest time.
Chad Hohn (09:40):
Yeah. It was only a timeline forever.
Max Cohen (09:42):
Upgrade for a couple of years, we've had like custom
cards in the overview tab andlike some new stuff.
George B. Thomas (09:47):
Right? Yeah.
Max Cohen (09:48):
And then on the right hand panel, historically, again,
most of this stuff, I'm notgonna say all of it, but most of
the stuff is associations andrelationships to other objects.
Right? So if I was on a contactrecord on the right, I might see
deals, the company I'massociated to, this, that, and
the other thing.
George B. Thomas (10:09):
I to say on that sidebar, it's associations,
apps, and attachments.
Max Cohen (10:14):
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, yeah. You see, yeah.
For a long time, apps that hadUI extensions, right, were also
shoved on that right sidebarpanel and had no
Chad Hohn (10:32):
other real estate would get real cluttered real
quick, especially
Max Cohen (10:36):
if in you didn't modify the
George B. Thomas (10:39):
the tooth for sure, yeah.
Max Cohen (10:41):
Long in the tooth, right? The teeth were so long.
Chad Hohn (10:45):
Sabre tooth.
George B. Thomas (10:45):
So that's what
Max Cohen (10:46):
we've kind of had. Now, the big thing, the big
reason why I'm freaking outtoday and I'm super excited, or
actually wait, we didn't explainwhat conditional stuff is. So
what conditional actually meansand like why it's important,
right, is again, if we go backto that left sidebar that
(11:07):
usually shows a bunch ofproperties. Right? Yeah.
One, you could break them upinto sections, which is cool.
Right? So you can have likecustomer information, location
information, supportinformation, whatever. And you
can have these, like, differentblocks, and those different
blocks will show differentproperties. You can collapse
them.
You can do whatever. Right? Theability to make them
(11:32):
conditional, what that means isyou can say, only show this
section of properties if acertain property equals a
certain thing. So one of themore popular examples of doing
this is showing differentinformation based on life cycle
(11:53):
stage. Yeah.
Right? So for example, you mighthave like a basic about section
that's always there. It says,first name, last name, email,
phone number, right? No matterwho you are, you got or you
should have that information ifa contact record exists, right?
Maybe less so phone number, butlike at least first name, last
name, email, right?
(12:13):
But then you might have a wholebunch of other properties.
Right? It could be, you know,last support ticket date or
level of customer. Right? Maybeyou're you're you're you have a
gold customer or silver customerdepending on the products you
sell, whatever it may be.
Right? You have properties thatmay only be relevant in certain
(12:36):
circumstances. Yeah. Right? Forexample, maybe there's like some
special European tax number thatyour European customers have.
Right? But that that propertywouldn't be relevant for any US
based customers.
George B. Thomas (12:49):
That was oddly specific by
Max Cohen (12:51):
the Yeah, I'm trying to find something really
specific, right? So the wholepoint is what you can do is you
can have these sections on theleft hand side and you can say,
if property X equals something,show the section, right? So a
good example would be iflifecycle stage equals customer,
(13:11):
show a section called customerinformation. And it would have a
bunch of properties in it thatwould only be relevant if that
person was actually a customer.Right?
And the point of doing this isso you can reduce the amount of
noise, right, unnecessarilyblank and empty information that
(13:34):
sits on your record.
Chad Hohn (13:35):
I like to call it doom scrolling. The unnecessary
doom scrolling that you do onMr. Left Hand Sidebar.
Max Cohen (13:42):
And you kind of alluded to this when you were
talking about why you love doingrecord customization. You said
something about like, you lovecreating good experiences for
people or say It's like
Chad Hohn (13:53):
the customer experience is important, but the
user who's serving the customerneeds to equally have as good of
Max Cohen (14:00):
an Yeah, as an admin, that's your customer.
Chad Hohn (14:03):
Yes, exactly.
Max Cohen (14:03):
Right, as the user. So the reason this is important
is because, again, one of thebest possible, HubSpot has,
like, a lot of cool features.Right? Like, when we think
about, like, oh, it's good, youknow, the calendar link thing.
It's got the the, you know,sequences and meeting links and
all of that.
Like, it's got all these cooltools. Sure. It's got all these
(14:24):
cool functional things. But likeyou gotta remember, it's like,
there's a lot of people who whenwe think about what makes your
CRM useful. Right?
Yeah. It means the information Ineed is right there and I can
find it instantly. Don't have tospend a lot of time looking for
it. Right? Yeah.
And my God, record customizationis one of the best, best, best,
best, best tools you canleverage to make that super easy
(14:47):
for people. Because you gottaremember, people are gonna go
into their CRM to go findinformation if it is a giant
pain in the butt to find it.Right? I have to go to
Chad Hohn (14:56):
all properties every time I need to figure out a
flippity flop about somebody'swhatever. Yeah. Like, ain't
nobody got time for that.
Max Cohen (15:03):
So it's a double edged sword though. Right? Mhmm.
Because it's like, alright. Idon't wanna make my records
super messy.
So I'm gonna have people go tothe record and there's a button
you can hit called view allproperties, which will literally
just show you all properties youhave for that record, right, in
a full list view.
Chad Hohn (15:20):
Including, like, hundreds of properties that
HubSpot has by default that manyof our blank frequently.
Max Cohen (15:26):
Literally every single one.
Chad Hohn (15:27):
Right? But you can
George B. Thomas (15:28):
hide those there you go.
Max Cohen (15:29):
You can
George B. Thomas (15:30):
hide the blanks.
Max Cohen (15:30):
That's true. You can hide the blank ones. Right? But
what you gotta remember isyou're functionally leaving the
record to go look at that.Right.
Right? Like The user. Leavingthe record. You're going like a
super deep level into it. Right?
And you can't see all your otherstuff. Right? You're you're
going to it like a you're you'reessentially not on the record
anymore.
George B. Thomas (15:48):
It's a single page without promise. Yeah.
Max Cohen (15:50):
Right? Exactly. So that sucks because you're
getting people to have to kindof click in and then go through
this scrolling and searchingjourney to find what they want
and they go, oh, there's novalue and then leave. So so then
you may go, oh, I don't wantpeople doing that. So I'm just
gonna put all the information Ipossibly can on the record page
itself.
Well, then what sucks about thatis that yeah. You're then
(16:14):
entering this world of just thisinfinite doom scroll Yeah. On
the left hand side, right? Tokind of like view stuff. So then
you go, okay, well, that's toughthat it's like an infinite
amount of like stuff I got toscroll on the left to go find
something, right?
So then you go, all right, well,then maybe what I'll do is I'll
(16:35):
take advantage of some of thesenewer cards, right? And I'll put
some stuff in the middle panel,right? And like one the really,
like, I think one of the bestthings that happened you know,
in the in the past, what? Idon't know. What is this?
Like, going on three maybe?
Chad Hohn (16:51):
It's been about three years for the middle column.
Right? I mean, that's that'swhat I would I would remember.
Well, Antti TubeVal, Before wedive into the middle column, I
do wanna highlight thatconditionality used to be
required that you utilize anenumerative property. So
something that's like a multicheckbox or a drop down
Max Cohen (17:13):
Yep.
Chad Hohn (17:13):
Prior to this awesome update. One of these this new
newest, most awesome update.
Max Cohen (17:21):
We'll talk about that. Oh, okay.
George B. Thomas (17:24):
Because can I also before we get into the
middle, by the way, this waslike we the question was and I'm
just going to let it go becausewe're having a great
conversation? Conversation waslike, what did you historically
hate about it? But I will saythis.
Max Cohen (17:37):
Still getting that.
George B. Thomas (17:37):
Yeah. Here's what I do want to say before I
forget about this. I needeverybody to go into, let's just
say the contact, a contactrecord, and go into the about
this contact, or for us, it'sabout this human. All right?
Because we call our humansinstead of contacts, but go into
(17:58):
your about this contact.
And if first name, last name,and email are in that actual
area under the about or jobtitle.
Max Cohen (18:13):
What's the matter with What's the matter with you?
George B. Thomas (18:16):
You're showing the information that is already
above the communication central.Yeah. First name, last name,
email, and job title is abovenotes, email, calls, test. Get
it out of there. That's fourproperties.
First name, last name, email,and job title that don't need to
be in about this contact record.
Chad Hohn (18:36):
Yeah.
George B. Thomas (18:36):
Like, slim it down. Don't show duplicates.
Okay. I'll I'll shut up. Goahead, Max.
Max Cohen (18:42):
Because you can let it also pay attention to that
too. Yeah. Also pay attention tothat too when you're doing,
like, custom objects and you'rechoosing, like, your primary and
your multiple secondary displayproperties. Right? It's like
some of that stuff's alreadygonna show up on the top left.
Chad Hohn (18:56):
That's what is important when you're creating
those custom objects is choosingthose thoughtfully. Right?
Max Cohen (19:03):
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 sortof like pre curated sort of like
cards situation kind of explodedonto the record scene where like
you could basically builddeclaratively these custom cards
(19:25):
that would show up in themiddle, but as long as they,
like, took on sort of like apredefined structure. And
that's, I think, that's stillthe case today, right, where
we're not in a place where wehave, like, completely
declarative totally custom cardsunless you're coding them, which
is a different story.
Right? But that's also that'salso like a whole other UI
extensions are a whole
Chad Hohn (19:46):
other their own thing. Yeah.
Max Cohen (19:47):
Yeah. That is a that that is that that is like that's
the the Thor the the Thanoshammer of record customization.
Right? Or Thanos hammer. That'snot right.
Thanos hammer. Thanos glove.Whatever that is.
George B. Thomas (20:01):
I was wondering if I was in a
different universe right now.Max has so multiverse over
there.
Max Cohen (20:07):
But see, here's what got tough, right? It created an
issue where that middle panelgot super messy. Right? Because
you're like, I can't make itconditional. I can't only have
certain cards or certain tabsshow up under certain
(20:30):
circumstances.
And I also can't do that on theright sidebar. So what we what
what kind of happened is nowwe've created this problem where
like, sure, our left sidebarthat just shows properties can
be conditional till the world'send.
George B. Thomas (20:48):
Yeah.
Max Cohen (20:49):
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 onetab, the next best option you
had was put it on multiple tabs,right, which allow you to have
like different groups of cards.
Right? Mhmm. But then it justgot busy horizontally. Yeah.
(21:10):
Right?
Instead of vertically.
Chad Hohn (21:12):
Only way to dimensionalize it before was
based on team. You had to likethen go, all right, what is your
user and team structure? Becausewe need to make sure we hammer
out your org chart and get yourorg chart into HubSpot first.
George B. Thomas (21:26):
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 (21:36):
Exactly. Right. Because then you then you're
you're not even talking aboutjust editing one section. You're
rebuilding the whole damn recordat that point.
Chad Hohn (21:45):
I mean, luckily, they gave you in the unified record
editor the ability to clonethose bad boys so you could
start from a good defaultfoundation. But
George B. Thomas (21:53):
But still, you're making a
Max Cohen (21:54):
whole separate record. And when you edit one,
it's not editing the other. They
Chad Hohn (21:57):
didn't used to have the ability, like the card
library thing now, which isamazing, because you used to be
like, oh, hey. I wanna clone,you know, like, I wanna add a
new section. I, add the newsection manually every time
wherever it was, especiallybefore the unified record
editor. Like, that's just a bigquality of life improvement.
Max Cohen (22:15):
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 (22:23):
Oh, yeah.
Max Cohen (22:23):
Right? Like, unless you just got rid of everything
and only had maybe a couple ofassociation tables and, like, no
apps installed. Yeah. Right? Ifthat wasn't the case, you were
screwed.
Chad Hohn (22:32):
Which which people are looking for for invoices and
line items, you know? Yeah. Wellis it over here?
George B. Thomas (22:39):
Yeah. But let's be honest. That's one of
the first things I teach, by theway. If you don't have Commerce
Hub, go remove these four cards.Yeah.
Chad Hohn (22:47):
Yeah. You don't If you're not using it, get them
out of there.
Max Cohen (22:49):
Yeah. If if
Chad Hohn (22:50):
if Simplify your life.
George B. Thomas (22:51):
Yeah. Simplify your life. Simplify their life,
you know, without a doubt. So
Max Cohen (22:56):
Yeah. So what dropped right before I said, hey, we
should
George B. Thomas (23:01):
do this Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hang on. Hang on.
So let me do my job. Max and Maxand Chad, what recent updates or
features have made the biggestdifference in how teams can
personalize record layouts. Oh,thanks
Chad Hohn (23:15):
for asking that question,
Max Cohen (23:16):
George. We definitely were I mean, I am here for a
reason. Right?
George B. Thomas (23:20):
I'm I'm I'm playing Liz today,
Max Cohen (23:22):
so I'm trying to hurt
George B. Thomas (23:23):
cats and I'm not really good at it. But so
like, what are the updates?
Max Cohen (23:27):
Are the Amazing question, George. I'll tell you.
Okay? I will tell you how goodof a update
George B. Thomas (23:35):
this Thank you.
Max Cohen (23:36):
Thank So what they did, okay, is they made it so
the middle panel, individualcards themselves are now
conditional. In that, you couldsay, oh, I only want this middle
card of, like, associations toshow up
Chad Hohn (23:55):
the whole tab property, the entire tab.
Max Cohen (23:59):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tabs themselves. Yeah. Right.
So it's like, yeah, tab one, tabtwo, tab three, tab four. You
can say this tab isn't evengoing to show up unless this
property equals something. Andthen they did it for the right
sidebar as well. Did
George B. Thomas (24:14):
that did that excite
Chad Hohn (24:17):
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 (24:29):
So it's like exclusionary filter type thing.
Chad Hohn (24:31):
Circumstances. And not only for the tabs, but also
for the middle column cardsthemselves as well.
George B. Thomas (24:41):
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 activecustomer and inactive customer,
you said to inactive, of suddenyou could make things just
disappear. Yes. Correct.
Oh, yeah.
Chad Hohn (24:59):
Yeah. And and it's not only for enumerative
properties anymore. Meaning youcould do a date is greater than
a certain number of days ago orwhatever. Right? And there's
operators.
So it's not just is, it could beis unknown is one that works. So
you could do certain data pointsare missing, bring things in.
(25:22):
Like, I mean, they really nowthe one thing you can't do is
multiple conditions. So there'sit's not like filters yet. But
Max Cohen (25:32):
Got it.
Chad Hohn (25:33):
We're like, I think they're on the way to getting
there. Like, I would love to docross object association filters
in there down the road. Right?
Max Cohen (25:41):
If if associated object x equals whatever.
Chad Hohn (25:44):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If or number of records associated
or whatever, you know, somethinglike that. But this is, like,
insanely more powerful becauselight years.
Yeah. Able as an admin,especially as a fractional
admin, to deliver to somebodysome very useful user interface
(26:04):
update without having to go downthe user and team discussion and
build, like, eight differentviews and then try and explain
that to somebody. Like that's
George B. Thomas (26:15):
So what I heard is, you can now have
conditional left side,conditional center, conditional
right. And so basically you canmake this thing layout any way
you want by showing or hiding,and it doesn't have to be based
off of Teams. If I wrapeverything up into a nice Is is
there anything else on thisupdate that you're, like, need
(26:38):
to talk about, wanna talk about,or the user should should know
about?
Max Cohen (26:42):
Well, this specific one? Oh. Okay. Like, it's just
it's just it's it's so it's justso much better that, like, you
you now have the ability toliterally make what needs to
show up show up and what doesn'tneed to show up not show up Did
you know? Granular level now.
George B. Thomas (27:01):
Oh, boy. Boy. Chad, Chad, Did you know?
Chad Hohn (27:04):
Did you know that you can also do it in the sales
workspace?
Max Cohen (27:09):
What are you talking about?
Chad Hohn (27:10):
You can conditionally customize the sales workspace
record editor for when you're inthe sales workspace and you open
up one of like, you're in a dealview, for example. You know how
they have their custom thingwith the deal score and the AI
and everything? All theconditional functions work there
as well. And that right hand orthat deal bar is both like a
(27:34):
mixture of the left and righthand sidebar functions,
George B. Thomas (27:37):
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 Igo into a workspace and
therefore see It records
Chad Hohn (27:49):
has its own customization
George B. Thomas (27:51):
Oh.
Chad Hohn (27:52):
Beyond deal configuration. Oh, that's And
same with help desk.
George B. Thomas (27:57):
Okay. Okay. So this leads me to the next
question, because we're quicklyrunning out of time. Like now
that we can do this in, well,just records in general, but
also in workspaces. Workspaces.
What are some creative or highimpact ways that super admins or
teams should be using recordcustomization to, I don't know,
(28:19):
improve internal efficiency orcreate a better user experience?
Where does your mind go of like,Hey, here's the top one, two,
three, seventeen things that youtalk to people or do for people
when you think about this?
Chad Hohn (28:32):
Yeah. For for me, it's get the like, get an
understanding of the roles andthe things that people need to
perform or the actions that theyneed to perform. Like Mhmm. If
it's necessary, like, I do liketo get into at least a couple
teams, maybe not the whole orgchart at that point point, but,
like, you know, sometimes it'snice to have things configured
(28:53):
for you know? But but as much asI can, I try and make it a
default view?
And if we have to branch off, wehave to and we do. Right? But
with the amount of flexibilitywe have now because, like,
here's one of the hardest thingsis, like, you're trying to say,
work with a team, and they have,like, a sales team and a finance
team and, like, a marketingteam. And you have three
(29:16):
different sets of views, andthey're like, how come their
screen ain't looking like myscreen? You know?
Like and, it doesn't look thesame. And, like, they're like,
well, they got the propertiesfor the deal, whatever, and I
don't. You know? Like, which I'mnot knocking on anybody or
whatever. It's just like that'show it goes.
You
George B. Thomas (29:33):
know? Sometimes, you know.
Chad Hohn (29:35):
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 thennow you're able to show people
relevant lifecycle of thecustomer, where the customer is
at, give whoever is looking atit relevant information. The
(29:57):
only thing you need to consideris is, like sensitive
information at that point.
So just watch out for sensitiveinformation that not every team
needs to see. That's a greatreason to separate teams. But at
this point now, I think you'rereally able to like put the
right information about thecustomer. Whereas my previous, I
(30:17):
think, recommendation would bedo the team discovery and show
people the right stuff based onteam. Right?
But now I'm thinking only branchout if you absolutely have to.
Max Cohen (30:28):
Yeah. I think the other thing too to think about
is like, this is like awonderfully subtle way to be
able to communicate to peoplewhat information do we need that
we don't have. Right? You know,there should be a situation
where like the only time you'reseeing blank properties is when
that customer, that person, thatwhatever has progressed to a
(30:49):
place where you need thisinformation now. Right?
And it's kind of subtly tellingyou like, hey, dude, here's some
here's some information we doneed that we don't have. Yeah.
Right? You know, instead of itcould be because here's the
thing. If someone just sees agigantic ocean of blank
properties, none of them aregonna seem important.
Chad Hohn (31:10):
No.
Max Cohen (31:10):
Yeah. Right? But when they're when they see like, oh,
Chad Hohn (31:13):
that's not lot Right? It's like, oh They're blank.
Max Cohen (31:17):
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'spertinent for whatever the
situation is. So we shouldprobably, like, make sure it's
in there. Right? Instead ofjust, oh, you just see
everything and it's all blankand that's fine. Yeah.
Right?
Chad Hohn (31:33):
You know?
Max Cohen (31:33):
So it's just it's just much better. And and again,
like, part of I know we've had alot of conversations around
adoption, right? People aren'tgonna adopt the CRM and use the
CRM if it just seems like thisbig, messy, confusing thing. And
I think now more than ever,admins have the ability to dial
back the confusion, simplify theinformation, get everything
(31:57):
someone needs right at theirfingertips. Right?
Don't don't make it a wild goosechase to go find it. Right? And
just make the experience a lotmore enjoyable. Right? It's just
like the the place that you'resitting in to do your work
should have everything that youneed at your fingertips and not
a bunch of distractions orbloat.
Yeah. Right. And people canreally do that now,
George B. Thomas (32:18):
which is So let's put we all in this digital
virtual room, we've all been inHubSpot for a long time. Years,
multiple years. Over a decadefor some of us. Let's put our
day one hats on. Somebody'sdriving down the road, they're
headed to work, they're going toget a coffee to come back to
(32:40):
their office, whatever it is.
They're listening to thispodcast episode. They haven't
even scratched the surface orthought about customizing
records. Before this episode,didn't even know it was
possible. Now we're tellingthem, hey, there's this crazy
wild world out there. What'swhat's the low hanging fruit?
Where do they start? Like, whatwhat are some easy wins?
Max Cohen (33:00):
Yeah. True. So you don't wanna, like, you don't
wanna, like, accidentallycreate, like, a massive project
for yourself and disrupt a bunchof people and just go in there
and start, like, do do doingshit, like, without telling
anybody first. Right? But Ithink you do wanna, like, go
experiment a little bit.
Mhmm. Right? So something youshould probably do is go pick a
(33:20):
record that people use a lot.Okay? Go go clone that view.
Right? So instead of the defaultone, go, like, make a new one,
you know, to kinda play aroundwith
Chad Hohn (33:30):
For me, I always call it the Chadman view.
Max Cohen (33:32):
The Chadman view. Oh, wow. Chad view.
Chad Hohn (33:34):
You've actually named test view.
George B. Thomas (33:36):
Yeah. Okay.
Max Cohen (33:36):
Go make a test view. Right? A Chadman view. Call it
Chadman view. Right?
And go zero that thing out. Gozero it out. Go go delete
everything. Right? And startfrom absolute zero.
And just say, what where juststart adding properties that you
(34:00):
know are important to people.Right? And as you do this one by
one, you will start to comeacross properties where you're
like, oh, this would be reallyrelevant for these people, but
not for these people. Thisshould be really relevant in
this situation, but not thatsituation. Yeah.
(34:20):
And start documenting it, startwriting it down, start thinking
of groupings of this informationand situations in which it would
appear or wouldn't appear or forwhom it could appear or not
appear to. Right? And startbuilding out like, hey, if I
could totally customize thisthing from the ground up, right,
(34:41):
and only include what it needsto include and build in those
special conditional situations,right, what could my records
look like? Build that testrecord and then go show it to
someone that uses it. Right?
And say, hey, here's an idea wehad 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
(35:04):
different tab. They may justwant it in the same tab, but a
different car.
They might want this one abovethat 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 thatare like most, most, mostly,
most important Yeah. To getfeedback from the people who are
(35:25):
actually using it because recordcustomization affects lots of
people. Right? Yeah. So you dowanna get a lot of good feedback
and then you wanna document theprocess, especially if you have
conditional stuff happening.
Right? Because you don't want aton of people coming to you
saying like, oh, I can't seethis information anymore. Well,
all of its walls because youdon't have this property flip to
this property or like whateverit may be. Right. Right.
(35:47):
It takes a lot of delicatethinking and planning and, like,
communications of changes andstuff to, like, pull that off,
you know, unless you can buildit in a way where, like, you
know, it's gonna work onautopilot, which you can do for
sure. Like, there are certainsituations where you're gonna be
like, oh, well, I know becauseof this, you know,
demonstratively, you know,factual way that our process
works that I'm gonna have thisinformation set to this. So I
(36:10):
know this is gonna show up.Yeah. You can make those
judgment calls.
Right? But like, would highlyimplore you to also like
communicate those changes topeople in case the process
doesn't always go the way asplanned.
Chad Hohn (36:23):
Yeah. That's why you definitely wanna mess around in
that test view. But to make thetest view work, just one side
note too for newbie coming in,know, like your first time in
the record editor, or early onin your journey with this level
of customization is you want toadd a test team and assign that
(36:43):
record, that unified recordeditor test view to your test
team and temporarily putyourself on that test team. And
also remember that like you'remessing with it and you gotta
put yourself back to whereeverybody else is, if relevant,
when you're, like, not testingbecause then you're gonna start
(37:05):
to, like, be off on your ownbranch of working on things.
But, like, also the middlecolumn also has so many cool
cards in the card library.
You can have, like, differenttypes of activities, activity
totals, association label listcards, associated pipeline stage
(37:33):
tracker cards, which will showyou like, let's say you're in a
contact, it'll show you theassociated deals pipeline stages
in the middle column with somerelevant properties. And if
there's multiple, you can seethat there's like property date
tracker cards, which are new,property history tracking cards,
(37:55):
which are new, there'sassociation tables where you can
put associated object customproperties in the middle card,
which is like things that peoplehave been asking for for a long
time. I wish the quick actionswere better. They kinda still
suck, but those I'm sure willget a facelift at some point.
Max Cohen (38:14):
Dude, quick actions are the biggest low hanging
fruit, I think.
Chad Hohn (38:17):
Oh, dude. For HubSpot.
Max Cohen (38:18):
Those could be so good. They could be amazing.
They are so useless.
Chad Hohn (38:24):
They're useless, yeah.
Max Cohen (38:25):
So useless.
Intro (38:25):
Here,
George B. Thomas (38:26):
So can I ask you guys a real granular
question too? Yeah. So obviouslypart of this record
customization is even theunderstanding of creating custom
properties. And the reason I'mbringing up custom properties or
even just properties in general,because I'm super curious, you
two, when you think aboutcustom, know, record
(38:46):
customization or customizing theinterface, Have you guys been
using the, like, text insidecolor tags or, like Yes. Colored
thoughts?
Like, talk talk
Max Cohen (38:55):
Yeah. Yeah.
George B. Thomas (38:56):
Just talk to the audience about, like, being
able to add colors to the recordand what that can mean for
people.
Max Cohen (39:03):
I forgot about that one, dude. That that one slid in
out of nowhere.
Chad Hohn (39:07):
Yeah. That just put that sucker right into your DMs
and said, howdy.
Max Cohen (39:11):
Yeah. Dude. So when you have dropdown properties or
multi is it on the selecteddropdown? Uncheckbox properties?
Yes.
So more like tagging typesituation. Right? You can go in
and you can edit the field sothat when you see it on a
record, the options have like
Chad Hohn (39:28):
color Color around around them. Yeah.
Max Cohen (39:31):
And they're pretty, right? Now here's the thing.
There's a reason to do it otherthan, oh, it looks nice. Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's reallyall about like how quickly
people can absorb informationwhen they're looking at a sea of
information on a page. As muchcustomization that you do, your
(39:51):
records are gonna get inherentlya little bit busy because
there's some situations wherepeople just need a lot of
information at their fingertipsquickly. Right? So like
Chad Hohn (39:59):
There's a lot of information
Max Cohen (40:00):
about people
Chad Hohn (40:00):
in your system.
Max Cohen (40:01):
Yeah. Like, you know, just because you can customize
like crazy, it doesn't meanyou're not gonna have situations
where you got a lot of datapoints 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. Italso is like a gives people a
quick way to, like, find andlocate information because,
(40:23):
like, the color thing stands outon that, like, you know, white
Chad Hohn (40:27):
page indexing pages, it's very helpful too. Yes.
Right? On index pages, it's verynice. Like, when you're looking
at a list view, it's really niceto be able to see those colors.
It's one one other thing that'sreally helpful about the colors
too, feel like is even somebodywho has no true context for
maybe what your KPIs are or whatyour good or bad situations
(40:49):
might be. Like, maybe there'swords in those drop downs that
don't mean anything to a newperson. But when it's green,
yellow, and red, they reallyknow that that's a good thingy
and not a good thingy, or it's amedium thingy. Right? Or a good
score or a bad score.
So I think that's particularlyhelpful for just new hires.
(41:09):
Right?
Max Cohen (41:10):
Yeah. Very, very helpful. Yeah. It it
communicates what does it meanwhen a property is set to this
value. Right?
Maybe you might see green andgo, oh, that's inherently
positive. Maybe it's red andyou're like, uh-oh, that does
not mean something good, right?
Chad Hohn (41:26):
Right,
Max Cohen (41:26):
yeah. So it's a great way to like, it almost like
helps you like heat map stuff onan index page. Right? But also
kinda communicates the situationof, all right, if it's set to
this value, like that's good,bad, or maybe it's just
something to help you kinda likedifferentiate it. Right?
Yeah. Yeah,
George B. Thomas (41:45):
man. Let's let's land this plane. Where do
each of you see opportunitiesfor HubSpot record customization
to get better? Like, is therestill like a wish list Yeah.
Item for you
Max Cohen (41:57):
Yeah. Yeah. I want to see I don't know exactly what it
is, but like, well, actually onequick 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 likemore native stuff with the URL
(42:19):
properties that just came out.
Right? Like, if anyone was like,you can now there's like a
property called URL field, whichwill just make it look like a
URL even though you couldalready do this with single line
text fields anyway. But sincethey are their own property, I
think it would be super cool if,like, we, you know, just made
(42:39):
them a little bit moreaesthetic. Right? Like, for
example, when it has a value,I'd love for it to just show
like a button with a labelinstead of just like
Chad Hohn (42:48):
The link
Max Cohen (42:48):
URL value itself. Right? You know, and and just to
like kind of like clean up thelook and the feel of of those
properties when you're viewingthem. Yeah. The quick action
stuff is definitely huge.
But I think also like, I wouldlove to see some kind of like I
really want them to like doubledown on the customization of,
(43:12):
like, the cards in the cardlibrary. Right? Like,
association cards need acomplete revamp in terms of the
way of how they, like, utilizeassociation labels, for example.
Right? That's a big thing.
You know, like because I can'tmake association tables that
work like the association labellists cards, which is, like,
(43:34):
really stupid. You know? Like, Iwish I could just have an
association table that would, bydefault, just lock in to showing
records that have a specificlabel. Mhmm. Right?
Problem that does that onlyshows your name and email.
Right? It's so stupid. Just letme add the damn, you know, label
filter. So that's that's that'sthat's a big one.
(43:57):
But again, I'd love to see,like, some kind of like and this
is like, I think, kind of like awhole this is taking cars to, a
different level. I'd love to seesome sort of like process
builder that brings in like thenew HubSpot forms builder in
some case. Right? Like imagine aworld when and it's like we can
sort of kind of do this withplaybooks a little bit. But I'd
(44:22):
love to see something where likeyou could create like a process,
like a process card.
I think in Salesforce, they callthese like flows, I wanna say.
Chad Hohn (44:32):
You guide a user through a predetermined set of
action sequences. You build
Max Cohen (44:36):
the whole visual flow. It's like it's the
automation behind it.
Chad Hohn (44:40):
Or whatever. It's almost like you could use a form
that pre fills information fromthe record you're on so it knows
where to put the form data andwhat data to link to or
whatever. Right? So you havedifferent IDs are required, but
it's basically a multistep form.And you could just embed that
sucker.
Max Cohen (44:58):
And the process has different steps, and you can
say, take the information theyfilled out on the form and do X
with it, right? Maybe it's likestuff it into this other
property or stuff it into anassociated property or go create
a new record or something,right? I think that would be a
really, really cool direction togo to kind of like build these
(45:22):
processes because what peopleare only left with is like, all
you can do is custom dev a UIextension for something like
that. Right? And that's out of,frankly, that's out of the realm
of affordability and possibilityand technical expertise for most
people.
Right? Right. It's gettingbetter. I'd love to see some
sort of declarative process flowguided action, like, builder
(45:44):
type thing. That would be Yeah.
Super neat.
Chad Hohn (45:48):
Have some thoughts. Yeah. I mean, on the left hand
sidebar, I think people havealways wanted to have associated
object properties. I think thatwould be nice to have over
there.
Max Cohen (45:59):
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 wehave that?
George B. Thomas (46:07):
No. No. Stop. Hit hit the brakes. I mean What?
I mean, I guess. But part of
Chad Hohn (46:13):
me goes Associated object properties,
Max Cohen (46:15):
I think.
George B. Thomas (46:15):
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, theyshouldn't. Yes, they should. No,
they shouldn't.
Like, some things just belonghow they are and where they
anyway, let's go ahead and landthis plane. Listen. Here's
here's my my action or takeaway
Max Cohen (46:34):
for this one. Weirdest objection, George.
George B. Thomas (46:37):
Here's here's my takeaway. If you are sitting
here and you haven't messedaround with record
customization, if you haven'tlooked at the inside of your
CRM, like it's creatingexperience for the people that
you are, your customers, yourinternal team, then my takeaway
is go look at recordcustomization, think of all the
things that you can do, and makethe inside of your CRM as dope
(47:00):
as what you're trying to do forthe customers on the outside.
Okay, hub heroes. We've reachedthe end of another episode. Will
Lord Lack continue to loom overthe community, or will we be
able to defeat him in the nextepisode of the hub heroes
podcast?
Make sure you tune in and findout in the next episode. Make
(47:22):
sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest
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(47:43):
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listen into next.
Until next time, when we meetand combine our forces, remember
to be a happy, helpful, humblehuman, and of course, always be
looking for a way to besomeone's hero.
Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are
you plagued by siloedapartments? Are your lackluster
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you held captive by the evilmenace, lord lack, lack of time,
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(00:22):
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(00:46):
Heroes, it's time to unite andactivate your powers.
George B. Thomas (00:51):
Yeah. Activate those powers. Well, obviously,
you can tell I am not Liz, but Iguess they had storms and
internet outages and all sortsof fun stuff like that. So first
of all, if you're in that area,you know, where there were
storms, which there's stormseverywhere and all over the
places. But if you happen tolive, I think Annapolis, I think
(01:14):
that's where she's back to now.
Hey, we're throwing up someprayers for you. Hopefully life
isn't too crazy, but we're stillgoing to talk about HubSpot
today, even though we're onewoman down. So I've been having
fun because the last coupleepisodes we've been doing a
(01:35):
round robin scenario of like,hey, what do you want to talk
about? And people are gettingnerdy on things that they're
passionate about. Max, youpicked record customization.
Max Cohen (01:47):
Yes, sir.
George B. Thomas (01:47):
So I'm interested in that because I've
always been a big fan of talkingto people about wrapping HubSpot
around their business, right?Customizing it to their needs.
And for a long, long, long, longtime, we really didn't have what
I would call any type ofcustomization. Like it just
HubSpot was Hub Spot and youjust use it how it was. We got
(02:08):
to the point where we couldchange some properties and move
some things around and add a fewthings here and there.
But a lot has been changing asof lately, maybe due to AI,
maybe due to more humans, maybedue to inbound coming up,
whatever. And so in thisepisode, we're going to kind of
(02:28):
unchain you, Max, and Chad, you,and I'm sure I'll have some
thoughts along the way aroundwhat is record customization.
But let's start there, Max.Let's start with like, when you
just threw that out, hey, let'stalk about record customization.
What are we talking about here?
Like, for you is recordcustomization in your mind?
Max Cohen (02:50):
So many things. I mean, for anyone who doesn't
know, you got records inHubSpot, your contacts, your
companies, your deals, yourtickets, your custom objects,
your I guess nowadays, we've gotwhat? Listings, appointments,
services, and like all theseother additional objects you can
get either way. Records,records, records, records,
(03:11):
record. When we talk aboutrecord customization, we're
talking about how you cancustomize the layout and the
behavior of the layout and theinformation that is provided to
you and shown to you indifferent circumstances.
Because let's be honest, you gota lot of different teams. You
got a lot of different peopleusing HubSpot. They wanna see a
(03:33):
lot of different data points.They you know, in in those
screens, those places where yousee properties, those places
where you see relationships toother records, those places
where you see any informationyou can imagine about the
record. They can get extremelybusy and unorganized and nasty.
And we don't wanna be nasty. No.Don't be nasty. Yeah. Right?
(03:57):
We don't want our records to bedirty and nasty. No. We want
them to be clean. Right? Anyway.
So record customization hasalways been something that I've
been extremely passionate aboutbecause I like making HubSpot
look cool. But I also likemaking it, like, functional and
very easy to get the rightinformation in front of people
(04:19):
at the right time so they canget their sticky little thingy
tappets on it. Right? Mhmm.Yeah.
And so that's what we're talkingabout today, George. And the
reason I wanted to bring it upis that we we had a massive,
massive, massive update torecord customization. Don't go
there yet. We're gonna get that.I know what just saying.
George B. Thomas (04:36):
Don't go there yet.
Max Cohen (04:37):
It's a big one we're gonna talk about.
George B. Thomas (04:38):
Yeah. Yeah.
Max Cohen (04:39):
And that's what I think kind of got me on the
let's talk about recordcustomization.
George B. Thomas (04:44):
Chad, are you in the same camp? Do you think
of different things? Like, talktalk me through it.
Chad Hohn (04:49):
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 gonnaget to that's not a secret, but
later that we're gonna talkabout, was that had that already
dropped, or did that drop afteryou had mentioned you wanted to
(05:10):
talk about record customization?
Max Cohen (05:11):
No. It had dropped before.
Chad Hohn (05:13):
It had dropped prior? Okay.
Max Cohen (05:14):
I I don't to say.
Chad Hohn (05:16):
Because I I had no inside knowledge.
Max Cohen (05:18):
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 anidiot. Okay.
Because I'm dumb and I've got abig mouth and I say stuff. And
then sometimes I say that getsme to have to publicly make good
(05:40):
on a promise to get a tattoo Soof a corporation on my
Chad Hohn (05:46):
that's
Max Cohen (05:47):
That's why we're here, if I'm being so honest.
George B. Thomas (05:49):
Yeah. So no. It's time for training on this
one.
Max Cohen (05:52):
Yeah.
Chad Hohn (05:53):
Alright. Well, for me, yeah. I mean, I I I
definitely echo a lot of whatMax was talking about. I mean,
there's we'll dive intospecifics, but, like, making
HubSpot delightful for people touse is one of my favorite parts
about it. Like, can reallytailor it either to teams, you
can tailor it to specific rolesso that people only see what's
(06:14):
relevant to them.
You can tailor it to, you know,conditionally showing things,
and there's, like, you know, allsorts of different improvements
that have been made over theyears that I've been using it,
you know, which is, you know,it's always been customizable
since I've been using it to someextent. But, man, it's gotten
better. There's been more added.They added the middle card a
(06:36):
while back. They added theunified record editor where you
can manipulate the entire recordrather than like, oh, let's
manipulate the left sidebar,then we'll do
George B. Thomas (06:46):
the right sidebar. That
Chad Hohn (06:48):
was yeah. Because you just had to, like, dive all you
know, clicking your brains outleft, right, and center to try
and, you know, get the and youhad 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 solet's So many improvements even
before
George B. Thomas (07:04):
this one has So let's let's into that. Let's
dive into, like, if if you goback in the way back machine,
right? That you hop in yourDelorean, go back to however far
you want to go. Let's startwhere we've been. For YouTube,
what have been historically thebiggest frustrations or
limitations with customizingrecords in HubSpot.
Max Cohen (07:27):
George, let me ask you this. Yeah. You know how on
the left hand sidebar, whichtypically houses the about
section. Yeah. Right?
How long ago do you rememberhaving the ability to make that
thing conditional?
George B. Thomas (07:42):
Oh, well, conditional, not long. Maybe, I
don't know.
Max Cohen (07:47):
Wait, really?
George B. Thomas (07:47):
Has it been like a couple years?
Max Cohen (07:50):
Brother, that thing's been conditional since I was
still an implementationspecialist.
George B. Thomas (07:57):
Really?
Max Cohen (07:58):
Yes, sir. Yeah. That dude, I remember when that came
out. I was like, this is thecoolest thing ever. Which by the
way,
George B. Thomas (08:09):
how how long ago was that? I
Max Cohen (08:13):
started being a product trainer in 2018.
Chad Hohn (08:16):
Oh. Yeah. And as long as
Max Cohen (08:19):
Brother, I can remember 2026. And we
George B. Thomas (08:21):
joke, no, no, it's not 2026 yet. Don't do
that.
Max Cohen (08:24):
2025. Sorry. It's 2025. Good God. It's 2025.
Chad Hohn (08:28):
Where did
George B. Thomas (08:29):
that go?
Max Cohen (08:30):
Seriously. So I was an implementation specialist
somewhere between December 2015and 2000 in March 2018 Okay. I
believe.
George B. Thomas (08:41):
Okay.
Max Cohen (08:41):
And the conditional left hand panel came out then to
put things in perspective on howlong Wow. We could make stuff on
the record conditional.
George B. Thomas (08:55):
Yeah.
Max Cohen (08:56):
Yeah. Right? But it was only there. Right? So for
anyone who like doesn't knowwhat I'm saying when I say
conditional stuff.
Okay? On HubSpot, there threecolumns on your records. There's
the left side
Chad Hohn (09:10):
Within a record. Yeah.
Max Cohen (09:11):
Yeah. Within a record. Correct. When you're
within a record. Not we're nottalking about the marketing
tools or anything else.
But you've got the left column,the middle column, and the right
column. Typically, on the leftcolumn is where you see just
properties, and it's like aboutthis record, whatever.
Chad Hohn (09:25):
Whatever that object type is. Whatever that object
is. Contacts, it's contactproperties, deals,
Max Cohen (09:30):
details, last name, email, whatever. Company, got
your middle panel, whichhistorically has just been
activity stuff.
George B. Thomas (09:37):
Right? For the really long longest time.
Max Cohen (09:39):
Longest time.
Chad Hohn (09:40):
Yeah. It was only a timeline forever.
Max Cohen (09:42):
Upgrade for a couple of years, we've had like custom
cards in the overview tab andlike some new stuff.
George B. Thomas (09:47):
Right? Yeah.
Max Cohen (09:48):
And then on the right hand panel, historically, again,
most of this stuff, I'm notgonna say all of it, but most of
the stuff is associations andrelationships to other objects.
Right? So if I was on a contactrecord on the right, I might see
deals, the company I'massociated to, this, that, and
the other thing.
George B. Thomas (10:09):
I to say on that sidebar, it's associations,
apps, and attachments.
Max Cohen (10:14):
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, yeah. You see, yeah.
For a long time, apps that hadUI extensions, right, were also
shoved on that right sidebarpanel and had no
Chad Hohn (10:32):
other real estate would get real cluttered real
quick, especially
Max Cohen (10:36):
if in you didn't modify the
George B. Thomas (10:39):
the tooth for sure, yeah.
Max Cohen (10:41):
Long in the tooth, right? The teeth were so long.
Chad Hohn (10:45):
Sabre tooth.
George B. Thomas (10:45):
So that's what
Max Cohen (10:46):
we've kind of had. Now, the big thing, the big
reason why I'm freaking outtoday and I'm super excited, or
actually wait, we didn't explainwhat conditional stuff is. So
what conditional actually meansand like why it's important,
right, is again, if we go backto that left sidebar that
(11:07):
usually shows a bunch ofproperties. Right? Yeah.
One, you could break them upinto sections, which is cool.
Right? So you can have likecustomer information, location
information, supportinformation, whatever. And you
can have these, like, differentblocks, and those different
blocks will show differentproperties. You can collapse
them.
You can do whatever. Right? Theability to make them
(11:32):
conditional, what that means isyou can say, only show this
section of properties if acertain property equals a
certain thing. So one of themore popular examples of doing
this is showing differentinformation based on life cycle
(11:53):
stage. Yeah.
Right? So for example, you mighthave like a basic about section
that's always there. It says,first name, last name, email,
phone number, right? No matterwho you are, you got or you
should have that information ifa contact record exists, right?
Maybe less so phone number, butlike at least first name, last
name, email, right?
(12:13):
But then you might have a wholebunch of other properties.
Right? It could be, you know,last support ticket date or
level of customer. Right? Maybeyou're you're you're you have a
gold customer or silver customerdepending on the products you
sell, whatever it may be.
Right? You have properties thatmay only be relevant in certain
(12:36):
circumstances. Yeah. Right? Forexample, maybe there's like some
special European tax number thatyour European customers have.
Right? But that that propertywouldn't be relevant for any US
based customers.
George B. Thomas (12:49):
That was oddly specific by
Max Cohen (12:51):
the Yeah, I'm trying to find something really
specific, right? So the wholepoint is what you can do is you
can have these sections on theleft hand side and you can say,
if property X equals something,show the section, right? So a
good example would be iflifecycle stage equals customer,
(13:11):
show a section called customerinformation. And it would have a
bunch of properties in it thatwould only be relevant if that
person was actually a customer.Right?
And the point of doing this isso you can reduce the amount of
noise, right, unnecessarilyblank and empty information that
(13:34):
sits on your record.
Chad Hohn (13:35):
I like to call it doom scrolling. The unnecessary
doom scrolling that you do onMr. Left Hand Sidebar.
Max Cohen (13:42):
And you kind of alluded to this when you were
talking about why you love doingrecord customization. You said
something about like, you lovecreating good experiences for
people or say It's like
Chad Hohn (13:53):
the customer experience is important, but the
user who's serving the customerneeds to equally have as good of
Max Cohen (14:00):
an Yeah, as an admin, that's your customer.
Chad Hohn (14:03):
Yes, exactly.
Max Cohen (14:03):
Right, as the user. So the reason this is important
is because, again, one of thebest possible, HubSpot has,
like, a lot of cool features.Right? Like, when we think
about, like, oh, it's good, youknow, the calendar link thing.
It's got the the, you know,sequences and meeting links and
all of that.
Like, it's got all these cooltools. Sure. It's got all these
(14:24):
cool functional things. But likeyou gotta remember, it's like,
there's a lot of people who whenwe think about what makes your
CRM useful. Right?
Yeah. It means the information Ineed is right there and I can
find it instantly. Don't have tospend a lot of time looking for
it. Right? Yeah.
And my God, record customizationis one of the best, best, best,
best, best tools you canleverage to make that super easy
(14:47):
for people. Because you gottaremember, people are gonna go
into their CRM to go findinformation if it is a giant
pain in the butt to find it.Right? I have to go to
Chad Hohn (14:56):
all properties every time I need to figure out a
flippity flop about somebody'swhatever. Yeah. Like, ain't
nobody got time for that.
Max Cohen (15:03):
So it's a double edged sword though. Right? Mhmm.
Because it's like, alright. Idon't wanna make my records
super messy.
So I'm gonna have people go tothe record and there's a button
you can hit called view allproperties, which will literally
just show you all properties youhave for that record, right, in
a full list view.
Chad Hohn (15:20):
Including, like, hundreds of properties that
HubSpot has by default that manyof our blank frequently.
Max Cohen (15:26):
Literally every single one.
Chad Hohn (15:27):
Right? But you can
George B. Thomas (15:28):
hide those there you go.
Max Cohen (15:29):
You can
George B. Thomas (15:30):
hide the blanks.
Max Cohen (15:30):
That's true. You can hide the blank ones. Right? But
what you gotta remember isyou're functionally leaving the
record to go look at that.Right.
Right? Like The user. Leavingthe record. You're going like a
super deep level into it. Right?
And you can't see all your otherstuff. Right? You're you're
going to it like a you're you'reessentially not on the record
anymore.
George B. Thomas (15:48):
It's a single page without promise. Yeah.
Max Cohen (15:50):
Right? Exactly. So that sucks because you're
getting people to have to kindof click in and then go through
this scrolling and searchingjourney to find what they want
and they go, oh, there's novalue and then leave. So so then
you may go, oh, I don't wantpeople doing that. So I'm just
gonna put all the information Ipossibly can on the record page
itself.
Well, then what sucks about thatis that yeah. You're then
(16:14):
entering this world of just thisinfinite doom scroll Yeah. On
the left hand side, right? Tokind of like view stuff. So then
you go, okay, well, that's toughthat it's like an infinite
amount of like stuff I got toscroll on the left to go find
something, right?
So then you go, all right, well,then maybe what I'll do is I'll
(16:35):
take advantage of some of thesenewer cards, right? And I'll put
some stuff in the middle panel,right? And like one the really,
like, I think one of the bestthings that happened you know,
in the in the past, what? Idon't know. What is this?
Like, going on three maybe?
Chad Hohn (16:51):
It's been about three years for the middle column.
Right? I mean, that's that'swhat I would I would remember.
Well, Antti TubeVal, Before wedive into the middle column, I
do wanna highlight thatconditionality used to be
required that you utilize anenumerative property. So
something that's like a multicheckbox or a drop down
Max Cohen (17:13):
Yep.
Chad Hohn (17:13):
Prior to this awesome update. One of these this new
newest, most awesome update.
Max Cohen (17:21):
We'll talk about that. Oh, okay.
George B. Thomas (17:24):
Because can I also before we get into the
middle, by the way, this waslike we the question was and I'm
just going to let it go becausewe're having a great
conversation? Conversation waslike, what did you historically
hate about it? But I will saythis.
Max Cohen (17:37):
Still getting that.
George B. Thomas (17:37):
Yeah. Here's what I do want to say before I
forget about this. I needeverybody to go into, let's just
say the contact, a contactrecord, and go into the about
this contact, or for us, it'sabout this human. All right?
Because we call our humansinstead of contacts, but go into
(17:58):
your about this contact.
And if first name, last name,and email are in that actual
area under the about or jobtitle.
Max Cohen (18:13):
What's the matter with What's the matter with you?
George B. Thomas (18:16):
You're showing the information that is already
above the communication central.Yeah. First name, last name,
email, and job title is abovenotes, email, calls, test. Get
it out of there. That's fourproperties.
First name, last name, email,and job title that don't need to
be in about this contact record.
Chad Hohn (18:36):
Yeah.
George B. Thomas (18:36):
Like, slim it down. Don't show duplicates.
Okay. I'll I'll shut up. Goahead, Max.
Max Cohen (18:42):
Because you can let it also pay attention to that
too. Yeah. Also pay attention tothat too when you're doing,
like, custom objects and you'rechoosing, like, your primary and
your multiple secondary displayproperties. Right? It's like
some of that stuff's alreadygonna show up on the top left.
Chad Hohn (18:56):
That's what is important when you're creating
those custom objects is choosingthose thoughtfully. Right?
Max Cohen (19:03):
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 sortof like pre curated sort of like
cards situation kind of explodedonto the record scene where like
you could basically builddeclaratively these custom cards
(19:25):
that would show up in themiddle, but as long as they,
like, took on sort of like apredefined structure. And
that's, I think, that's stillthe case today, right, where
we're not in a place where wehave, like, completely
declarative totally custom cardsunless you're coding them, which
is a different story.
Right? But that's also that'salso like a whole other UI
extensions are a whole
Chad Hohn (19:46):
other their own thing. Yeah.
Max Cohen (19:47):
Yeah. That is a that that is that that is like that's
the the Thor the the Thanoshammer of record customization.
Right? Or Thanos hammer. That'snot right.
Thanos hammer. Thanos glove.Whatever that is.
George B. Thomas (20:01):
I was wondering if I was in a
different universe right now.Max has so multiverse over
there.
Max Cohen (20:07):
But see, here's what got tough, right? It created an
issue where that middle panelgot super messy. Right? Because
you're like, I can't make itconditional. I can't only have
certain cards or certain tabsshow up under certain
(20:30):
circumstances.
And I also can't do that on theright sidebar. So what we what
what kind of happened is nowwe've created this problem where
like, sure, our left sidebarthat just shows properties can
be conditional till the world'send.
George B. Thomas (20:48):
Yeah.
Max Cohen (20:49):
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 onetab, the next best option you
had was put it on multiple tabs,right, which allow you to have
like different groups of cards.
Right? Mhmm. But then it justgot busy horizontally. Yeah.
(21:10):
Right?
Instead of vertically.
Chad Hohn (21:12):
Only way to dimensionalize it before was
based on team. You had to likethen go, all right, what is your
user and team structure? Becausewe need to make sure we hammer
out your org chart and get yourorg chart into HubSpot first.
George B. Thomas (21:26):
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 (21:36):
Exactly. Right. Because then you then you're
you're not even talking aboutjust editing one section. You're
rebuilding the whole damn recordat that point.
Chad Hohn (21:45):
I mean, luckily, they gave you in the unified record
editor the ability to clonethose bad boys so you could
start from a good defaultfoundation. But
George B. Thomas (21:53):
But still, you're making a
Max Cohen (21:54):
whole separate record. And when you edit one,
it's not editing the other. They
Chad Hohn (21:57):
didn't used to have the ability, like the card
library thing now, which isamazing, because you used to be
like, oh, hey. I wanna clone,you know, like, I wanna add a
new section. I, add the newsection manually every time
wherever it was, especiallybefore the unified record
editor. Like, that's just a bigquality of life improvement.
Max Cohen (22:15):
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 (22:23):
Oh, yeah.
Max Cohen (22:23):
Right? Like, unless you just got rid of everything
and only had maybe a couple ofassociation tables and, like, no
apps installed. Yeah. Right? Ifthat wasn't the case, you were
screwed.
Chad Hohn (22:32):
Which which people are looking for for invoices and
line items, you know? Yeah. Wellis it over here?
George B. Thomas (22:39):
Yeah. But let's be honest. That's one of
the first things I teach, by theway. If you don't have Commerce
Hub, go remove these four cards.Yeah.
Chad Hohn (22:47):
Yeah. You don't If you're not using it, get them
out of there.
Max Cohen (22:49):
Yeah. If if
Chad Hohn (22:50):
if Simplify your life.
George B. Thomas (22:51):
Yeah. Simplify your life. Simplify their life,
you know, without a doubt. So
Max Cohen (22:56):
Yeah. So what dropped right before I said, hey, we
should
George B. Thomas (23:01):
do this Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hang on. Hang on.
So let me do my job. Max and Maxand Chad, what recent updates or
features have made the biggestdifference in how teams can
personalize record layouts. Oh,thanks
Chad Hohn (23:15):
for asking that question,
Max Cohen (23:16):
George. We definitely were I mean, I am here for a
reason. Right?
George B. Thomas (23:20):
I'm I'm I'm playing Liz today,
Max Cohen (23:22):
so I'm trying to hurt
George B. Thomas (23:23):
cats and I'm not really good at it. But so
like, what are the updates?
Max Cohen (23:27):
Are the Amazing question, George. I'll tell you.
Okay? I will tell you how goodof a update
George B. Thomas (23:35):
this Thank you.
Max Cohen (23:36):
Thank So what they did, okay, is they made it so
the middle panel, individualcards themselves are now
conditional. In that, you couldsay, oh, I only want this middle
card of, like, associations toshow up
Chad Hohn (23:55):
the whole tab property, the entire tab.
Max Cohen (23:59):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tabs themselves. Yeah. Right.
So it's like, yeah, tab one, tabtwo, tab three, tab four. You
can say this tab isn't evengoing to show up unless this
property equals something. Andthen they did it for the right
sidebar as well. Did
George B. Thomas (24:14):
that did that excite
Chad Hohn (24:17):
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 (24:29):
So it's like exclusionary filter type thing.
Chad Hohn (24:31):
Circumstances. And not only for the tabs, but also
for the middle column cardsthemselves as well.
George B. Thomas (24:41):
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 activecustomer and inactive customer,
you said to inactive, of suddenyou could make things just
disappear. Yes. Correct.
Oh, yeah.
Chad Hohn (24:59):
Yeah. And and it's not only for enumerative
properties anymore. Meaning youcould do a date is greater than
a certain number of days ago orwhatever. Right? And there's
operators.
So it's not just is, it could beis unknown is one that works. So
you could do certain data pointsare missing, bring things in.
(25:22):
Like, I mean, they really nowthe one thing you can't do is
multiple conditions. So there'sit's not like filters yet. But
Max Cohen (25:32):
Got it.
Chad Hohn (25:33):
We're like, I think they're on the way to getting
there. Like, I would love to docross object association filters
in there down the road. Right?
Max Cohen (25:41):
If if associated object x equals whatever.
Chad Hohn (25:44):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If or number of records associated
or whatever, you know, somethinglike that. But this is, like,
insanely more powerful becauselight years.
Yeah. Able as an admin,especially as a fractional
admin, to deliver to somebodysome very useful user interface
(26:04):
update without having to go downthe user and team discussion and
build, like, eight differentviews and then try and explain
that to somebody. Like that's
George B. Thomas (26:15):
So what I heard is, you can now have
conditional left side,conditional center, conditional
right. And so basically you canmake this thing layout any way
you want by showing or hiding,and it doesn't have to be based
off of Teams. If I wrapeverything up into a nice Is is
there anything else on thisupdate that you're, like, need
(26:38):
to talk about, wanna talk about,or the user should should know
about?
Max Cohen (26:42):
Well, this specific one? Oh. Okay. Like, it's just
it's just it's it's so it's justso much better that, like, you
you now have the ability toliterally make what needs to
show up show up and what doesn'tneed to show up not show up Did
you know? Granular level now.
George B. Thomas (27:01):
Oh, boy. Boy. Chad, Chad, Did you know?
Chad Hohn (27:04):
Did you know that you can also do it in the sales
workspace?
Max Cohen (27:09):
What are you talking about?
Chad Hohn (27:10):
You can conditionally customize the sales workspace
record editor for when you're inthe sales workspace and you open
up one of like, you're in a dealview, for example. You know how
they have their custom thingwith the deal score and the AI
and everything? All theconditional functions work there
as well. And that right hand orthat deal bar is both like a
(27:34):
mixture of the left and righthand sidebar functions,
George B. Thomas (27:37):
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 Igo into a workspace and
therefore see It records
Chad Hohn (27:49):
has its own customization
George B. Thomas (27:51):
Oh.
Chad Hohn (27:52):
Beyond deal configuration. Oh, that's And
same with help desk.
George B. Thomas (27:57):
Okay. Okay. So this leads me to the next
question, because we're quicklyrunning out of time. Like now
that we can do this in, well,just records in general, but
also in workspaces. Workspaces.
What are some creative or highimpact ways that super admins or
teams should be using recordcustomization to, I don't know,
(28:19):
improve internal efficiency orcreate a better user experience?
Where does your mind go of like,Hey, here's the top one, two,
three, seventeen things that youtalk to people or do for people
when you think about this?
Chad Hohn (28:32):
Yeah. For for me, it's get the like, get an
understanding of the roles andthe things that people need to
perform or the actions that theyneed to perform. Like Mhmm. If
it's necessary, like, I do liketo get into at least a couple
teams, maybe not the whole orgchart at that point point, but,
like, you know, sometimes it'snice to have things configured
(28:53):
for you know? But but as much asI can, I try and make it a
default view?
And if we have to branch off, wehave to and we do. Right? But
with the amount of flexibilitywe have now because, like,
here's one of the hardest thingsis, like, you're trying to say,
work with a team, and they have,like, a sales team and a finance
team and, like, a marketingteam. And you have three
(29:16):
different sets of views, andthey're like, how come their
screen ain't looking like myscreen? You know?
Like and, it doesn't look thesame. And, like, they're like,
well, they got the propertiesfor the deal, whatever, and I
don't. You know? Like, which I'mnot knocking on anybody or
whatever. It's just like that'show it goes.
You
George B. Thomas (29:33):
know? Sometimes, you know.
Chad Hohn (29:35):
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 thennow you're able to show people
relevant lifecycle of thecustomer, where the customer is
at, give whoever is looking atit relevant information. The
(29:57):
only thing you need to consideris is, like sensitive
information at that point.
So just watch out for sensitiveinformation that not every team
needs to see. That's a greatreason to separate teams. But at
this point now, I think you'rereally able to like put the
right information about thecustomer. Whereas my previous, I
(30:17):
think, recommendation would bedo the team discovery and show
people the right stuff based onteam. Right?
But now I'm thinking only branchout if you absolutely have to.
Max Cohen (30:28):
Yeah. I think the other thing too to think about
is like, this is like awonderfully subtle way to be
able to communicate to peoplewhat information do we need that
we don't have. Right? You know,there should be a situation
where like the only time you'reseeing blank properties is when
that customer, that person, thatwhatever has progressed to a
(30:49):
place where you need thisinformation now. Right?
And it's kind of subtly tellingyou like, hey, dude, here's some
here's some information we doneed that we don't have. Yeah.
Right? You know, instead of itcould be because here's the
thing. If someone just sees agigantic ocean of blank
properties, none of them aregonna seem important.
Chad Hohn (31:10):
No.
Max Cohen (31:10):
Yeah. Right? But when they're when they see like, oh,
Chad Hohn (31:13):
that's not lot Right? It's like, oh They're blank.
Max Cohen (31:17):
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'spertinent for whatever the
situation is. So we shouldprobably, like, make sure it's
in there. Right? Instead ofjust, oh, you just see
everything and it's all blankand that's fine. Yeah.
Right?
Chad Hohn (31:33):
You know?
Max Cohen (31:33):
So it's just it's just much better. And and again,
like, part of I know we've had alot of conversations around
adoption, right? People aren'tgonna adopt the CRM and use the
CRM if it just seems like thisbig, messy, confusing thing. And
I think now more than ever,admins have the ability to dial
back the confusion, simplify theinformation, get everything
(31:57):
someone needs right at theirfingertips. Right?
Don't don't make it a wild goosechase to go find it. Right? And
just make the experience a lotmore enjoyable. Right? It's just
like the the place that you'resitting in to do your work
should have everything that youneed at your fingertips and not
a bunch of distractions orbloat.
Yeah. Right. And people canreally do that now,
George B. Thomas (32:18):
which is So let's put we all in this digital
virtual room, we've all been inHubSpot for a long time. Years,
multiple years. Over a decadefor some of us. Let's put our
day one hats on. Somebody'sdriving down the road, they're
headed to work, they're going toget a coffee to come back to
(32:40):
their office, whatever it is.
They're listening to thispodcast episode. They haven't
even scratched the surface orthought about customizing
records. Before this episode,didn't even know it was
possible. Now we're tellingthem, hey, there's this crazy
wild world out there. What'swhat's the low hanging fruit?
Where do they start? Like, whatwhat are some easy wins?
Max Cohen (33:00):
Yeah. True. So you don't wanna, like, you don't
wanna, like, accidentallycreate, like, a massive project
for yourself and disrupt a bunchof people and just go in there
and start, like, do do doingshit, like, without telling
anybody first. Right? But Ithink you do wanna, like, go
experiment a little bit.
Mhmm. Right? So something youshould probably do is go pick a
(33:20):
record that people use a lot.Okay? Go go clone that view.
Right? So instead of the defaultone, go, like, make a new one,
you know, to kinda play aroundwith
Chad Hohn (33:30):
For me, I always call it the Chadman view.
Max Cohen (33:32):
The Chadman view. Oh, wow. Chad view.
Chad Hohn (33:34):
You've actually named test view.
George B. Thomas (33:36):
Yeah. Okay.
Max Cohen (33:36):
Go make a test view. Right? A Chadman view. Call it
Chadman view. Right?
And go zero that thing out. Gozero it out. Go go delete
everything. Right? And startfrom absolute zero.
And just say, what where juststart adding properties that you
(34:00):
know are important to people.Right? And as you do this one by
one, you will start to comeacross properties where you're
like, oh, this would be reallyrelevant for these people, but
not for these people. Thisshould be really relevant in
this situation, but not thatsituation. Yeah.
(34:20):
And start documenting it, startwriting it down, start thinking
of groupings of this informationand situations in which it would
appear or wouldn't appear or forwhom it could appear or not
appear to. Right? And startbuilding out like, hey, if I
could totally customize thisthing from the ground up, right,
(34:41):
and only include what it needsto include and build in those
special conditional situations,right, what could my records
look like? Build that testrecord and then go show it to
someone that uses it. Right?
And say, hey, here's an idea wehad 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
(35:04):
different tab. They may justwant it in the same tab, but a
different car.
They might want this one abovethat 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 thatare like most, most, mostly,
most important Yeah. To getfeedback from the people who are
(35:25):
actually using it because recordcustomization affects lots of
people. Right? Yeah. So you dowanna get a lot of good feedback
and then you wanna document theprocess, especially if you have
conditional stuff happening.
Right? Because you don't want aton of people coming to you
saying like, oh, I can't seethis information anymore. Well,
all of its walls because youdon't have this property flip to
this property or like whateverit may be. Right. Right.
(35:47):
It takes a lot of delicatethinking and planning and, like,
communications of changes andstuff to, like, pull that off,
you know, unless you can buildit in a way where, like, you
know, it's gonna work onautopilot, which you can do for
sure. Like, there are certainsituations where you're gonna be
like, oh, well, I know becauseof this, you know,
demonstratively, you know,factual way that our process
works that I'm gonna have thisinformation set to this. So I
(36:10):
know this is gonna show up.Yeah. You can make those
judgment calls.
Right? But like, would highlyimplore you to also like
communicate those changes topeople in case the process
doesn't always go the way asplanned.
Chad Hohn (36:23):
Yeah. That's why you definitely wanna mess around in
that test view. But to make thetest view work, just one side
note too for newbie coming in,know, like your first time in
the record editor, or early onin your journey with this level
of customization is you want toadd a test team and assign that
(36:43):
record, that unified recordeditor test view to your test
team and temporarily putyourself on that test team. And
also remember that like you'remessing with it and you gotta
put yourself back to whereeverybody else is, if relevant,
when you're, like, not testingbecause then you're gonna start
(37:05):
to, like, be off on your ownbranch of working on things.
But, like, also the middlecolumn also has so many cool
cards in the card library.
You can have, like, differenttypes of activities, activity
totals, association label listcards, associated pipeline stage
(37:33):
tracker cards, which will showyou like, let's say you're in a
contact, it'll show you theassociated deals pipeline stages
in the middle column with somerelevant properties. And if
there's multiple, you can seethat there's like property date
tracker cards, which are new,property history tracking cards,
(37:55):
which are new, there'sassociation tables where you can
put associated object customproperties in the middle card,
which is like things that peoplehave been asking for for a long
time. I wish the quick actionswere better. They kinda still
suck, but those I'm sure willget a facelift at some point.
Max Cohen (38:14):
Dude, quick actions are the biggest low hanging
fruit, I think.
Chad Hohn (38:17):
Oh, dude. For HubSpot.
Max Cohen (38:18):
Those could be so good. They could be amazing.
They are so useless.
Chad Hohn (38:24):
They're useless, yeah.
Max Cohen (38:25):
So useless.
Intro (38:25):
Here,
George B. Thomas (38:26):
So can I ask you guys a real granular
question too? Yeah. So obviouslypart of this record
customization is even theunderstanding of creating custom
properties. And the reason I'mbringing up custom properties or
even just properties in general,because I'm super curious, you
two, when you think aboutcustom, know, record
(38:46):
customization or customizing theinterface, Have you guys been
using the, like, text insidecolor tags or, like Yes. Colored
thoughts?
Like, talk talk
Max Cohen (38:55):
Yeah. Yeah.
George B. Thomas (38:56):
Just talk to the audience about, like, being
able to add colors to the recordand what that can mean for
people.
Max Cohen (39:03):
I forgot about that one, dude. That that one slid in
out of nowhere.
Chad Hohn (39:07):
Yeah. That just put that sucker right into your DMs
and said, howdy.
Max Cohen (39:11):
Yeah. Dude. So when you have dropdown properties or
multi is it on the selecteddropdown? Uncheckbox properties?
Yes.
So more like tagging typesituation. Right? You can go in
and you can edit the field sothat when you see it on a
record, the options have like
Chad Hohn (39:28):
color Color around around them. Yeah.
Max Cohen (39:31):
And they're pretty, right? Now here's the thing.
There's a reason to do it otherthan, oh, it looks nice. Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's reallyall about like how quickly
people can absorb informationwhen they're looking at a sea of
information on a page. As muchcustomization that you do, your
(39:51):
records are gonna get inherentlya little bit busy because
there's some situations wherepeople just need a lot of
information at their fingertipsquickly. Right? So like
Chad Hohn (39:59):
There's a lot of information
Max Cohen (40:00):
about people
Chad Hohn (40:00):
in your system.
Max Cohen (40:01):
Yeah. Like, you know, just because you can customize
like crazy, it doesn't meanyou're not gonna have situations
where you got a lot of datapoints 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. Italso is like a gives people a
quick way to, like, find andlocate information because,
(40:23):
like, the color thing stands outon that, like, you know, white
Chad Hohn (40:27):
page indexing pages, it's very helpful too. Yes.
Right? On index pages, it's verynice. Like, when you're looking
at a list view, it's really niceto be able to see those colors.
It's one one other thing that'sreally helpful about the colors
too, feel like is even somebodywho has no true context for
maybe what your KPIs are or whatyour good or bad situations
(40:49):
might be. Like, maybe there'swords in those drop downs that
don't mean anything to a newperson. But when it's green,
yellow, and red, they reallyknow that that's a good thingy
and not a good thingy, or it's amedium thingy. Right? Or a good
score or a bad score.
So I think that's particularlyhelpful for just new hires.
(41:09):
Right?
Max Cohen (41:10):
Yeah. Very, very helpful. Yeah. It it
communicates what does it meanwhen a property is set to this
value. Right?
Maybe you might see green andgo, oh, that's inherently
positive. Maybe it's red andyou're like, uh-oh, that does
not mean something good, right?
Chad Hohn (41:26):
Right,
Max Cohen (41:26):
yeah. So it's a great way to like, it almost like
helps you like heat map stuff onan index page. Right? But also
kinda communicates the situationof, all right, if it's set to
this value, like that's good,bad, or maybe it's just
something to help you kinda likedifferentiate it. Right?
Yeah. Yeah,
George B. Thomas (41:45):
man. Let's let's land this plane. Where do
each of you see opportunitiesfor HubSpot record customization
to get better? Like, is therestill like a wish list Yeah.
Item for you
Max Cohen (41:57):
Yeah. Yeah. I want to see I don't know exactly what it
is, but like, well, actually onequick 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 likemore native stuff with the URL
(42:19):
properties that just came out.
Right? Like, if anyone was like,you can now there's like a
property called URL field, whichwill just make it look like a
URL even though you couldalready do this with single line
text fields anyway. But sincethey are their own property, I
think it would be super cool if,like, we, you know, just made
(42:39):
them a little bit moreaesthetic. Right? Like, for
example, when it has a value,I'd love for it to just show
like a button with a labelinstead of just like
Chad Hohn (42:48):
The link
Max Cohen (42:48):
URL value itself. Right? You know, and and just to
like kind of like clean up thelook and the feel of of those
properties when you're viewingthem. Yeah. The quick action
stuff is definitely huge.
But I think also like, I wouldlove to see some kind of like I
really want them to like doubledown on the customization of,
(43:12):
like, the cards in the cardlibrary. Right? Like,
association cards need acomplete revamp in terms of the
way of how they, like, utilizeassociation labels, for example.
Right? That's a big thing.
You know, like because I can'tmake association tables that
work like the association labellists cards, which is, like,
(43:34):
really stupid. You know? Like, Iwish I could just have an
association table that would, bydefault, just lock in to showing
records that have a specificlabel. Mhmm. Right?
Problem that does that onlyshows your name and email.
Right? It's so stupid. Just letme add the damn, you know, label
filter. So that's that's that'sthat's a big one.
(43:57):
But again, I'd love to see,like, some kind of like and this
is like, I think, kind of like awhole this is taking cars to, a
different level. I'd love to seesome sort of like process
builder that brings in like thenew HubSpot forms builder in
some case. Right? Like imagine aworld when and it's like we can
sort of kind of do this withplaybooks a little bit. But I'd
(44:22):
love to see something where likeyou could create like a process,
like a process card.
I think in Salesforce, they callthese like flows, I wanna say.
Chad Hohn (44:32):
You guide a user through a predetermined set of
action sequences. You build
Max Cohen (44:36):
the whole visual flow. It's like it's the
automation behind it.
Chad Hohn (44:40):
Or whatever. It's almost like you could use a form
that pre fills information fromthe record you're on so it knows
where to put the form data andwhat data to link to or
whatever. Right? So you havedifferent IDs are required, but
it's basically a multistep form.And you could just embed that
sucker.
Max Cohen (44:58):
And the process has different steps, and you can
say, take the information theyfilled out on the form and do X
with it, right? Maybe it's likestuff it into this other
property or stuff it into anassociated property or go create
a new record or something,right? I think that would be a
really, really cool direction togo to kind of like build these
(45:22):
processes because what peopleare only left with is like, all
you can do is custom dev a UIextension for something like
that. Right? And that's out of,frankly, that's out of the realm
of affordability and possibilityand technical expertise for most
people.
Right? Right. It's gettingbetter. I'd love to see some
sort of declarative process flowguided action, like, builder
(45:44):
type thing. That would be Yeah.
Super neat.
Chad Hohn (45:48):
Have some thoughts. Yeah. I mean, on the left hand
sidebar, I think people havealways wanted to have associated
object properties. I think thatwould be nice to have over
there.
Max Cohen (45:59):
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 wehave that?
George B. Thomas (46:07):
No. No. Stop. Hit hit the brakes. I mean What?
I mean, I guess. But part of
Chad Hohn (46:13):
me goes Associated object properties,
Max Cohen (46:15):
I think.
George B. Thomas (46:15):
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, theyshouldn't. Yes, they should. No,
they shouldn't.
Like, some things just belonghow they are and where they
anyway, let's go ahead and landthis plane. Listen. Here's
here's my my action or takeaway
Max Cohen (46:34):
for this one. Weirdest objection, George.
George B. Thomas (46:37):
Here's here's my takeaway. If you are sitting
here and you haven't messedaround with record
customization, if you haven'tlooked at the inside of your
CRM, like it's creatingexperience for the people that
you are, your customers, yourinternal team, then my takeaway
is go look at recordcustomization, think of all the
things that you can do, and makethe inside of your CRM as dope
(47:00):
as what you're trying to do forthe customers on the outside.
Okay, hub heroes. We've reachedthe end of another episode. Will
Lord Lack continue to loom overthe community, or will we be
able to defeat him in the nextepisode of the hub heroes
podcast?
Make sure you tune in and findout in the next episode. Make
(47:22):
sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest
episodes and become part of theleague 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 withsome hidden power up potential
as well. Make sure you sharethis podcast with a friend.
Leave a review if you like whatyou're listening to and use the
(47:43):
hashtag hashtag hub heroespodcast on any of the socials
and let us know what strategyconversation you'd like to
listen into next.
Until next time, when we meetand combine our forces, remember
to be a happy, helpful, humblehuman, and of course, always be
looking for a way to besomeone's hero.
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