What Can You Customize in the HubSpot CRM?

You took the plunge and got HubSpot CRM.

Now you’re asking yourself: “Can HubSpot adapt to our workflow, or will we have to adapt our workflow to HubSpot?”

Just like you shouldn’t have to change who you are for a relationship, your workflow shouldn’t have to change for this (customer) relationship (management) either.

Customization is especially important for industrial companies managing long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, technical products, and complex quoting. Be assured that HubSpot CRM can bring it all together.

Below we’ll dive into how HubSpot CRM can be customized to fit your business. From organizing your data and building workflows around your processes to personalizing customer-facing content, tracking performance, and adding tools to your tech stack, let’s make life a little easier.

Can HubSpot CRM Be Customized?

HubSpot should adapt to you. This is achievable through customization.

You could use HubSpot right out of the box, so to speak. At its most basic, it gives your teams a central place to store customer information, much like a modern-day Rolodex.

But the standard setup may not reflect how your team works or highlight the key information you need to collect. Your CRM should organize information in a way that matches your processes, so anyone viewing a record can quickly understand what they’re looking at. This makes your HubSpot CRM your whole team’s source of truth.

Thoughtful customization can also improve reporting. When your CRM follows your sales process, reps know which questions to ask and what information to capture. This provides a clearer picture of each customer, their needs, and where they are in the sales process.

Customize How HubSpot Stores and Organizes Your Data

A flexible data model can accommodate custom products, accounts, relationships, and sales cycles without piecing everything into a generic CRM structure. You can make your CRM your own by using custom properties and objects in HubSpot.

• Custom property: Adds information to an existing category. These are extra fields you add to an existing contact record to capture information that matters to your business.
  
  Example: An industrial company can create custom properties for equipment type, application, distributor, product line, facility, and specifications.

• Custom object: Creates a new category of information. Custom objects allow you to create and track additional buying factors specific to your business.
  
  Example: A manufacturing equipment company could create a custom object in HubSpot to track each machine by its serial number. Weeks, months, or even years later, if a customer contacts the company with a maintenance request or question, the team can quickly find that specific machine. Then the team can instantly see when it was sold, which business owns it, which salesperson handled the sale, and any other relevant details.

Too much customization can become overwhelming if you don’t organize it properly. That’s where customized views can help. Each team member can see the properties and dashboard information most relevant to their role without sorting through everything at once.

 For example, a marketer may not need to see every piece of sales data. All 100 properties don’t have to appear on every contact record. The right information can be displayed for the right person.  

Customize Your Sales Process and Workflows

Manufacturing sales processes can be complex and lengthy. Still, HubSpot CRM’s deal pipelines and stages can make them easier for your team to manage while keeping customer data connected across the team rather than creating silos of pertinent customer information.

You can customize the CRM to record updates automatically and move the lead from one funnel stage to the next. It can also automate follow-up emails and really any other repetitive process that’s needed throughout the sales cycle. This keeps customer information connected and reduces mundane work without forcing everyone involved to follow every step of every workflow.

You can start with the basics in HubSpot CRM and continue to customize your sales process as you learn what works best for your team. If your process includes complex scenarios or frequent handoffs, customization can help, but you don’t need to account for every minor possibility. Too much customization can create unnecessary layers of friction and make the CRM confusing for the team to use.

Customize Quotes, Forms, and Customer-Facing Experiences

We’ve covered how you can customize HubSpot behind the scenes. You can also tailor the experiences prospects and customers interact with:

• Custom quotes and quote templates: Tailor HubSpot quotes to your products, pricing, branding, and sales requirements, including more advanced custom quote templates where needed
  
  
• Custom forms: Collect the specific prospect, application, or project information your sales process requires
  
  
• Custom modules: Build customized website and content experiences that go beyond HubSpot’s standard website modules. A developer builds them once, and marketers can update as needed with simple drag-and-drop content blocks.
  

These HubSpot features allow you to track how prospects and current customers engage with your business while keeping that activity connected to their contact records in HubSpot CRM.

Customize Tracking With HubSpot Custom Events

Custom events in the HubSpot CRM can capture meaningful actions beyond standard activity. These are user-defined objects that track specific online or offline actions unique to your business. For example, they can track if the prospect attended a webinar or logged into your app.

Custom events are most commonly used in workflows, reporting, and segmentation.