George B. Thomas
What happens when your records in HubSpot still look the way they did months or even years ago?
In this episode, George B. Thomas sits down with Max Cohen and Chad Hohn to unpack a part of HubSpot that too many teams ignore after setup: record customization. This conversation is for HubSpot super admins, marketers, sales leaders, service teams, and business owners who want HubSpot to feel easier, cleaner, and more human.
The big idea is simple. You should shape HubSpot around your business, your people, and your process instead of forcing your team to work inside a messy system that no longer fits.
What You Will Learn
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Why record customization matters more than most teams realize after onboarding is complete.
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How conditional sections can show the right information at the right time.
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Why team-based views and cleaner layouts can reduce confusion across your organization.
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How tabs, sections, and associated record tables can make complex records easier to use.
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Why object naming and layout choices should reflect your culture, not just the software defaults.
Stop treating setup like the finish line
George opens the conversation with a truth a lot of HubSpot teams need to hear. Most people set up their portal during onboarding, then leave it alone.
Maybe they make a few small tweaks. Maybe they add a property here or there. But meanwhile, HubSpot keeps shipping feature after feature. If you have not gone back and looked at record customization lately, there is a good chance your team is working harder than they need to.
That is the heart of this episode. Customization is not about making things look fancy. It is about helping your people see what matters, ignore what does not, and move through their work with more confidence.
Conditional sections changed the game
One of the biggest parts of this episode centers on conditional sections.
The crew explains that record customization used to be much more limited. In the past, conditional logic was tied more tightly to dropdowns, multi-checkboxes, and other property types with set options. Now, teams can build logic around more kinds of data, including numbers and comparisons between values.
That matters because it opens the door to smarter records.
You can show implementation details only when a deal reaches the right stage. You can reveal social profile fields only when a contact is marked as socially connected. You can hide unnecessary information until the team actually needs it.
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That means less clutter.
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Less scrolling.
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Less confusion.
And a much better experience for the humans using the platform every day.
Your record should match your business, your role, and your culture
This part of the conversation hits deep. George shares that he renamed standard HubSpot objects to match the way his business thinks and speaks. Contacts became humans. Companies became organizations. Deals became opportunities.
That is not just cosmetic. It is strategic.
When your data model maps to your culture, your process starts to feel more natural. The words on the screen match the way your team actually talks. That kind of alignment makes adoption easier because people are not mentally translating everything while trying to do their jobs.
Chad pushes that idea even further by talking about wrapping HubSpot around the job role itself. Give each person what they need. Remove what they do not. Make the platform feel like it was built for their day-to-day work.
That is when HubSpot starts to feel less like software and more like support.
Organization inside the record matters more than you think
Max walks listeners through the evolution of record customization in plain language.
At first, most customization lived in the left sidebar. That meant properties piled up into long, messy lists. Over time, HubSpot added more flexibility. Now you can use middle-column tabs, collapsible sections, conditional layouts, and richer cards that include reports, tables, and app functionality.
That gives teams more room to organize information with intention.
Instead of one giant wall of data, you can create cleaner experiences with grouped content and better structure. Different teams can have different views. One dynamic default view can change based on conditions. Associated record tables can surface more useful details than the basic sidebar cards.
The meaning for the listener is clear. Good layout is not extra credit. Good layout is part of usability.
Practical Next Steps
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Audit one core record this week and remove any properties that repeat information already shown at the top.
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Identify one team that struggles with clutter and create a cleaner view based on what they actually need.
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Use conditional logic to hide information until it becomes relevant in the customer journey.
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Rename objects or labels if your current naming does not reflect your culture or process.
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Review associated record cards and ask whether a table would make that information easier to use.
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Look for places where your team scrolls too much, then break that information into sections or tabs.
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Create a separate admin view if you need deeper troubleshooting access without overwhelming the rest of the team.
Who This Episode Is For
This episode is for HubSpot super admins, marketers, sales teams, service leaders, operations pros, and business owners who know their portal works but suspect it could work better. It is especially helpful for teams that feel buried in clutter, frustrated by record layouts, or unsure how to tailor HubSpot to the real way their people work.
TRANSCRIPT
George B. Thomas: I gotta be honest, I'm actually very excited about this conversation as well because gentlemen, you don't get to be on the side of my like typical trainings. But the amount of times that I've said, I help you wrap HubSpot around your business instead of feeling like you're cramming your business into a, so like a, a SaaS software might, might be obnoxious if the human had to hear it every time.
Luckily, I'm usually the only person that is always hearing it. They're hearing it once, twice, three times as we do training. And I feel like today we're going to, we're gonna do like some nerd wrapping. As far as this goes, like to levels that maybe I don't even talk about when it's like customizing HubSpot to your business.
So I'm very excited to be potentially a learner and an educator at the same time. But I have to ask you listeners, viewers. When's the last time you actually customized your CRM records? Like your pages? The like, listen, if, if I sit back and I think about the journey that I've been on since 2013 and helping humans, most teams set it up in onboarding.
Then they, it's just like business as usual. They never really go back to like make it better. Maybe there's some small tweaks here and there, but HubSpot has been shipping feature after feature and if you haven't stopped and purposely like looked at record customization lately, you might be missing some pretty dope things.
Which by the way, for me as a human, I like that's scary. Like. Uh oh. Did HubSpot send an update that you can do something cool that I'm not using in my portal and not teaching people? Which, by the way, you as a listener, viewers should have the same feeling of like, and not teaching our people. Like if you're the HubSpot super admin, the owner, the marketer, like who else is gonna disseminate the information across the organization?
But you might be making your team yourself work harder than we need to. So today this is what we're diving into. We're doing a deep dive. By the way I say today, aren't I cute? Um, we're probably diving in the next couple episodes on things around customization or, uh, conversations that rhyme with things around customization and so. Last week after the show in kind of the green room, I started to ask you guys questions about like, well, what would, what, what would you talk about if we talked about this thing?
Max Cohen: That's exact, that's exactly how you said it too.
George B. Thomas: that's pretty much it. It is pretty much how I said
Max Cohen: we said, Hey, Hey, George. Hey George. Let's, let's talk about record customization and going.
George B. Thomas: All right. All right. I might have sounded something like that, but maybe
Max Cohen: I was like, George, are you having a stroke? What is going on with you? And you're like,
George B. Thomas: Hey, when I think about all the humans that, that aren't doing customization, maybe I am having a HubSpot stroke when I think about this. Okay, so let's, wow. There's never a tom moment when you have Max Cohen and Chad Hahn in the room. I'm gonna say, so let's start here. Okay, let's start with conditional sections everywhere, because you guys kind of started to lose your mind around this idea.
So to give you listeners, viewers, some context conditional sections now work across all three columns. Left sidebar, middle column, right sidebar. Um, and the middle column support, uh, dropped. I think it was like July-ish, maybe. I don't remember. And wa and was one of the, by the way, most requested features on the Ideas forum for HubSpot.
So, Chad, let's start with you. Um, you are pumped about conditional sections everywhere. For people who haven't touched this yet, like, give me a little bit of what it is and what problem does this actually solve on a kind of day-to-day basis.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, well, it's not even conditional sections only, it's actually, it's like it used to basically only be able to be driven by an enum once upon a time. So like a multi-select or a
Max Cohen: Hold on.
George B. Thomas: A wait.
Max Cohen: Don't say e noom because a lot of people aren't gonna know what the hell that means.
George B. Thomas: Yeah,
Chad Hohn: which I was explaining it, uh, a multicheck box and a dropdown. Don't just, you know, let me finish boys. Come on. You think I'm gonna just leave these people hanging?
George B. Thomas: I mean, we don't do that here.
Chad Hohn: we don't do that here. Um, but yeah, like a single select multicheck box dropdown, something like that. Right. It's, it's, it used to only ever be able to be controlled by some sort of distinct options property.
Right. Whereas now you can control it by numbers, by this number is greater than another property. Then show this like, and it's not only the little card sections, but you can actually even conditionally show tabs in the middle column too.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: workspace, if you will, for a certain lifecycle of a deal or a custom object or company that you don't need to see it prior to that.
So it's really amazing. And in addition to that, you also have like, well, I, I'm not gonna get into it, but like, I think that's another question later. Um, but anyway, yeah. So like the conditional sections is great because. You know, let's say you're like in the buying process or the sales process, right? And you're helping a customer through, and maybe you have some like.
Pre-implementation details that you need to collect after you're like, you know, you have pricing approval but you're going through maybe some final, final security thing with a, a larger organization. Well, maybe you can start doing some pre-onboarding or pre-implementation stuff. 'cause you're pretty darn sure you're closing the deal, right?
And so you can get some people in there to fill up some of the time while people are. You know, taking their time, doing whatever that they take forever to do. Because reasons 'cause organizations sometimes get big.
George B. Thomas: Mm.
Chad Hohn: and then show the card at that time, or show it on a team based view to the right team at that time.
Whereas another team might not even care at all. Like the properties exist in the database, in the spreadsheet of the object, if you will. But they don't really need to be shown to everybody and even the people they need to be shown to only at a critical point in time in the lifecycle.
George B. Thomas: I, I like this.
Max Cohen: do you have the ability to share your screen for this, uh, episode because I feel like this is a very visual,
George B. Thomas: I mean, I, I might be able to, yes. Let me, let me get that ready. Um, while I'm getting that ready, uh, 'cause Maxim coming to you here in a hot second. What I think I heard you say, I wanna go back to that enumerator, enumeration, uh, properties conversation. Chad, what I think I heard you say is that it used to be.
That you were, um, harnessed or attached to that. But what you said is now that's not true. And so for folks who might have been feeling like that limitation was holding them back, we would now say, uh, not today, son.
Chad Hohn: Not today. Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: Okay.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: It could be numbers, could be, could be all sorts of different types of properties in HubSpot that you can drive it on.
Max Cohen: and guys, guys, guys, I think you need to remember there's a lot of new HubSpot users that watch this show.
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Max Cohen: what I'm afraid of is there's a lot of those new folks sitting out there that have no, uh, idea what we're talking about. All right? So I think what we need to do first is provide some baseline understanding and some historical context.
George B. Thomas: You think we should do that?
Max Cohen: I think we should do that. Uh uh.
George B. Thomas: can I ask you a question? Do you think that's because that's the
Max Cohen: It is a human way to do it. Absolutely. Right. Um, but it's also for the bots. It's also for the lizard people. Okay. We gotta remember, we're not just talking to humans here. Okay. We gotta broaden our audience a little bit.
George B. Thomas: Now I might age myself. You talk about lizard people, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, just buckle up, hang in there
Max Cohen: Reptilians. Okay.
George B. Thomas: talking about HubSpot in a, in a hot second.
I may be the only old one to know this, but reptilian lizard people. Do you remember the show V back in the day?
Max Cohen: No,
George B. Thomas: I, I am old and if you try to look and see if it's on Netflix or if it's on, uh, Hulu or something.
Max Cohen: it's not. 'cause it's only on silent film reels.
George B. Thomas: Oh man. Do I wanna curse at you, max? Okay, let's move forward. What? What do you wanna show people? I've got my, I've got my, I guess I asked for that one, but I've got my screen up. What do we, what do we wanna show people? And I've gotta be careful
Max Cohen: besides the fact
George B. Thomas: on YouTube and I show an email or something, they're like, nah, demonetize get the, anyway,
Max Cohen: Yeah,
George B. Thomas: what are we showing?
Max Cohen: Well, so what I want, I just wanted to go to like a contact record. Can we
George B. Thomas: I'm gonna go to myself then.
Max Cohen: now? This is probably gonna be an awful example because George B. Thomas has probably customized the ever living
George B. Thomas: no, no, no, no, no. You'd be surprised.
Max Cohen: Oh wow.
George B. Thomas: So, uh, so that's,
Max Cohen: go to a contact. You renamed your contact object humans. You're adorable.
Chad Hohn: And companies as
George B. Thomas: Oh, I did. Oh yeah. Well, so first of all, let me, let me just pause for a second. Uh, if you're new to this, because now we're showing you things, um, which by, we're not showing you amazing stuff 'cause we're showing you my record, which is probably the worst record to actually show you.
But anyway,
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Nice. LTV
George B. Thomas: my, in my ob, in my HubSpot. Dang gone. The shot's hired, uh, in, in my, in my, wow. In my, uh, portal. In your portal you have the ability to customize the names of your objects. And so I changed contacts to humans. I changed, uh, uh, companies to organizations, and I change deals to opportunities because those are the mindsets.
That we have around the people that we serve with sidekick strategies beyond your default spiritual side of leadership.com, those kinds of things. So Max, go
Max Cohen: and George, what you just did is you showed people one of the most fundamental reasons as to why you would want to customize your records in any way. I think the naming convention of the objects is a huge piece of it, right? Because a lot of times customizing your records, it doesn't mean like, oh, just change the way it looks.
It means it, it means get. The shit you see inside HubSpot to actually make sense and, and, and be relevant to who's using it and what it all means to you, right? Like that's a huge piece. So for anyone looking at this and like, they're like, where's the humans object? What George did is he changed the contact object, the standard contact object that you're all gonna have in your portal to humans, because that's how he refers to them and it makes sense for him, his process.
Chad Hohn: When you could literally bake your company culture into the structure of your HubSpot, like I have totally, you know, I've totally taken before from George wrap HubSpot around your business to take wrap HubSpot around your job role. Right? I wanna wrap HubSpot around the thing that you need to do so that you have everything you need in front of you and nothing you don't, and it's all there at the right time.
Max Cohen: Mine was more cringe. I always used to say, wrap your business in a blanket of HubSpot love. That's what I
Chad Hohn: Oh, that's
Max Cohen: Yeah.
George B. Thomas: I, I'm, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with it now. I do wanna, I wanna say one little piece. I wanna say one little piece Max, before you head out on this journey that you're gonna head out on to show and talk to people about this. 'cause I, I feel like, uh, my buddy Chris, Chris, Carolyn will enjoy this.
Like, when you can get your data model to map to your culture. Your organization and the way that your processes and people work, then you have process people, platform, data models, and culture, like you're just in a different place.
Max Cohen: And it feels more like a natural extension of your day-to-day work that you do. And the way Yeah, exactly right. Everything's gonna be more familiar and makes sense. Go to your go to, go to George's, uh, contact record or human record in this
Chad Hohn: He is on it.
George B. Thomas: I'm, I'm on it,
Max Cohen: Oh, you are? Okay. Nevermind. Well wait. You have LLC in your name.
George B. Thomas: Oh, no. Wait. Hang on,
Max Cohen: come on. Come on
George B. Thomas: hang on.
Max Cohen: Come on now. All right.
George B. Thomas: Ah, about this human. There we go. There we go.
Max Cohen: Okay. Alright. Alright. You, you know what, you've got a pretty vanilla contact record from what I've seen. Right. Great. Cool. Uh, do, do me a favor, hide your email activity. That would be a good thing to do on the, on the show. So go ahead and click on activity at the top.
Go unselect everything. Yeah. Get everything. I get 'em all out there. Yeah.
Chad Hohn: box.
George B. Thomas: Yeah,
Max Cohen: Click communications and we won't get sued and Amazing. All right. Wonderful. Very
George B. Thomas: just me, so Yeah. Hey.
Max Cohen: this on YouTube, you dunno. Right. Okay, so let's talk about this real quick. What did customization used to look like on records?
Okay. Um. You know, for the longest time folks that may be new to the HubSpot world, uh, the most you could do is just simply add properties on the left hand side, right? So we're all very familiar with this about this contact section which says about this human on the left. And George, if you go ahead and click on that, you'll see a bunch of properties on what we call the left hand sidebar.
Alright? Uh, for the longest time, this left hand sidebar was the only thing that you could customize and up to buy, and you could customize it. A long time ago, right? Like you could put contact properties in there, you could reorganize 'em, you could do this, you could do that, and that was basically it. The problem is, as a lot more different types of folks started using HubSpot and started holding a lot more different types of data inside of it.
These about sections started to become extremely cumbersome and very messy, and you usually had to go through this exercise of infinitely scrolling down the left hand side in order to find the data that you're looking for,
George B. Thomas: yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you pause there for a second? If I ask you to pause, will you lose your train of thought?
Max Cohen: Maybe who goes, let's find out.
George B. Thomas: okay. Can I tell you something that just pisses the, oh my God. Um, listen, if you can see at the top of your record, my name is George Thomas. My email isGeorge@georgebthomas.com. If you have the name, first name, last name, and the email in about this human dropdown section, can I just ask you?
Why, like it's at the top of the screen. So now you've added three additional pro. By the way, job title is probably up there too. Why? Like, get it out of the about section. If, if there,
Chad Hohn: will give you one reason
George B. Thomas: Oh God. Here we go. Okay.
Chad Hohn: and it's so you can easily see the property change history without having to go through all property history. Like if you go to all View property history, you have to search for the property name in there, but you could just come down there and click on details. So if for some reason you're debugging something, you wanna see the change history, the details, you can't see the dets from up there.
Max Cohen: True. I would. I
George B. Thomas: actions and view history and then
Chad Hohn: how many of your users need to do that besides an admin? So if it's in there for your team, yeah, that's pretty silly. But if you have some reason, you can add it to your personal view for you, that's not in the main view.
George B. Thomas: Which is a good question, which is a good question. Is HubSpot admins out there, do you have your own admin view separate from what you're creating for your team views? Okay, max, hopefully you didn't lose
Max Cohen: Yeah. No, no, no. I'm good. And I think you, you brought up a good point. This is like a good mental exercise that people can do when they're like evaluating the current state of their records and, and how they have their information laid out. Like look and see if you have redundant stuff taking up real estate that could be used by something more valuable, right?
Like this is a good example. First name, company and email address. Always showing that card on the top left. And I think there's even like. Aren't there, like either features that have come or more features that are coming that might even let you show other info? Yeah. Right. Like you can choose what shows up there, which is pretty tight.
Right? Um, but you had these sections on the left, right? This about this human section. For the longest time, that was the only customizable thing that you could do. Right? But then they added the ability to add additional sections. So George. Go and customize this record. Now, when you folks are looking at this, uh, go ahead and hit default view, but real quick here, folks.
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Max Cohen: The default view is just kind of the record that everybody sees. You can customize your record layouts by the teams that people are on, so what that means is you can say, Hey, when the sales team looks at this record, this is what they'll see when the support team looks at this record. This is what they'll see when the marketing team looks at the record, this is what they'll see.
Right. So when you have people that complain, oh, I gotta sift through all this like irrelevant stuff to find what I want. Right? That's one way you can tackle that. Right? There's also the trains of thoughts where maybe it's like one view, but different tabs, and we'll get into tabs in a second. Right. But for the longest time, the only thing you could do.
Yeah, yeah,
George B. Thomas: just hold your train of thought for one second. By the way, everybody's like, gee, George's looks kind of vanilla. And then all of a sudden, as Max brought up, new users might be watching or listening to this, and they're like. Uh, excuse me. Excuse me. Can somebody please tell me why there are three grayed out boxes on the left hand side of George's thing?
Ladies and gentlemen, those are conditional. Areas that show up based on a property that is known. So if you call back, reckon back to one of the top things that was in my, about George B. Thomas record was are we socially connected? And if that is a yes, then the LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook show up on the sidebar so that I have their information so I can go and engage with them on social.
Can anybody see where conditional logic to being connected on social to be able to track and put their information into then have conversations might tie into, oh, I don't know, some kind of strategy. Alright, go ahead, max.
Max Cohen: But you also bring up a good point there too, because I think there are certain times where it's like, Hey, uh, if we don't have this information, don't show this section. Right. Uh, but there's also some times where maybe you do want to show an empty section of properties as a little mental cue, a little mental cue to be like, Hey, you don't have this info.
Fill it the out please. Right. And sometimes you can do subtle stuff like that instead of like, really annoying, uh, you know, uh, process rules or te Yeah.
Chad Hohn: or,
Max Cohen: like that. All
George B. Thomas: Are you saying that HubSpot Super admins can be annoying?
Max Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. Dude. Are you
George B. Thomas: oh
Max Cohen: And sometimes, but hey, hey, it's an art form. Sometimes you need to be a little bit annoying, right? In order to keep your data hygiene, you know? Uh, good. Right. But again, guys, for
Chad Hohn: I have a quick call out too. Sorry, max, we keep
Max Cohen: good. No, you're good. You're good.
Chad Hohn: on, on the
George B. Thomas: I like this show the amount of times that we've like pay Max. Stop for a now. Go
Max Cohen: that's fine.
George B. Thomas: Go ahead.
Chad Hohn: Hey, max. Lose your place. All right, let's go.
George B. Thomas: No, please save your space.
Chad Hohn: yeah, so. On the, on the left hand sidebar, it's de it's, it's designed, or at least it currently only functions with properties of the object type that you're on.
I think that's an important call out because other sections don't have that restriction. Um, but the left hand sidebar is so like, let's say you're on contacts humans, um, that, yeah. Sorry, I stole it. That was just my, yeah. Oh
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: That's
George B. Thomas: that's enough that that got, that got weird. I.
Chad Hohn: Thanks
Max Cohen: Oh, is that all you were saying? Okay.
Chad Hohn: Uh, yeah, just basically that they're on the, on the left hand side.
It's for the object type you're on. So contacts will only show contact properties, companies, company, properties, deals, deal properties. So that can be like, sometimes people wanna see associated object information, but they haven't built the infrastructure like they have for the middle section to handle that.
On the left hand side bar, just a heads up.
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Max Cohen: Yeah. So again, going back to the, the, the biggest level that we had of this, right? You could add another section here and why would you want to add another section here, guys? Right. Well, if you wanna visually or not a tab. Not a tab. Not a tab. Not a tab. We're not even there yet. Just hover under about this human, uh, hover under about this human.
On the left, on the left, on the left. That's the middle hit add
Chad Hohn: the lid.
Max Cohen: And you can add additional property information. Right? And why would you do something as simple as this? Well, sometimes you just want to have different sections of information because it's way easier to see and find information when you have it organized instead of one massive list of stuff.
Right? So that is like record customization 1 0 1. Organize your information. Right? Um, so you can add these sections. Okay? Um, and so once George goes and adds this section, you'll see the section show up on the left hand side. Go, just add any random property here. Cool.
Chad Hohn: And also the user permissions is really nice as well. Like you can give people the ability to add their own additional properties to the section or restrict it to be always the same for all team members.
Max Cohen: Yes. So like if you want people to be able to say, oh, I'd like to see this here, and just have that affect them, you're allowed to do it. You can also lock it down if you wanna avoid any confusion. But what George also just did is George clicked on this section on the left hand side, and you'll notice there's this cute little thing that called set conditional logic.
All right? What conditional logic fundamentally means is you say, if something is true. Or if something equals something, show this thing, right? So the most basic example of this right, is you might have information on a contact record or any record for that matter that is only relevant to show. If that person meets some kind of condition, so like you can say, Hey, there is a section of like, customer information that would have like a, I don't know, historical total sales, uh, customer lifetime value, um, their, uh, their emergency contact info, whatever is relevant to a customer of yours versus someone who is not right.
And you might stick it in that section. Yeah, a little
George B. Thomas: tell Max is from the
Max Cohen: Wait, what? How is that an event? Oh
George B. Thomas: If, if you pass out at the event, who should we call? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Max Cohen: but the whole point is you don't wanna waste giant sections of your records on information that. You don't need on like a bunch of stuff that's not gonna be relevant at that point in whatever lifecycle that record is at, right?
So you can come in here and you can say, Hey, if this property equals something, then show this information, right? That's the basics of a conditional field. And for as long as I can remember, up until very recently, this is all you can really do. When it came to conditional sections, you could add them on the left hand sidebar, right?
More recently with this new beautiful, this editor is like the, the record editor in
Chad Hohn: this is awesome
George B. Thomas: sexy.
Max Cohen: unreal. If you've ever done this in Salesforce, you know that this is a freaking nightmare, especially for new users. Right? Um. But this is, this is a very, very, very easy to use. As soon as you kind of understand, like you gotta hover over a lot of stuff to see different things, right?
Like that's my one gripe with it, right? But that same sort of functionality of being able to create cut like conditional sections is now something you can do in this middle panel. It's also something you can do on the right panel as well. So you now have full conditional control across all three sections.
Chad Hohn: And on the
Max Cohen: things. Yeah. And on the tabs, Chad, why would someone wanna make a D? Talk about tabs.
George B. Thomas: oh.
Chad Hohn: love tabs. I mean, I made a, I ended up making a tab recently for our pre-implementation team to parse through pre-implementation survey data. Right. So they'll go through, yeah. Yeah. It's like all the stuff they ask a question, you know, for us, we're in healthcare, so it's about their, their tech stack, about their setup about, and we made a form to collect the data that's conditional based on whatever products they bought.
And then they turn that into a playbook where they do a live discovery. So they collect simple information from the customer and drill in deeper.
Max Cohen: Mm-hmm.
Chad Hohn: and then they end up going through and running a playbook that also updates those same properties. And we're gonna ultimately be turning that into, with, I think, probably important integration, or maybe do something custom where we create a deliverable out of that survey process.
George B. Thomas: Mm.
Chad Hohn: Make a file into a Google Doc or a spreadsheet or something.
Max Cohen: Yeah. And just so people know, the big fundamental difference between that left hand tab and the middle tab, besides what Chad said earlier about that left hand tab is just gonna have properties or contact properties, it's also only gonna show you properties, right? You'll notice when you hover over and you click add card on the left hand side, George.
So just hit that. Nope, that's all right.
George B. Thomas: Wait, wait the left. My other
Max Cohen: hit that one more time. Hit that one more time. When you click that, you only can do property lists, right, which means we will show these properties. Right. And there's a couple other cards there too that George kind of flashed over, right? These are like some standard HubSpot ones, right?
I would love to see them open up. The UI extension stuff a little bit for the left hand side, that's a different conversation to have the middle panel. However, if you go and hit add card in here, we'll get to sections, George, we'll get to sections. Go ahead and add a card. The middle panel gives you a ton more real estate to play with, right?
You can either have this be the center, third of the well should see more. Third, it's like almost like the center, two thirds of the page, if you will. Um, right. You can, you can have. All sorts of cards that do all these beautiful different things, and there's no way we can handle every single one of these on this, on this
Chad Hohn: Oh, it's so good. Calculations are awesome.
George B. Thomas: later.
Max Cohen: you could put reports on here. You can have all, you can put giant tables of records, everything under the sun you'd ever wanna see. You all should see a lot of apps for HubSpot. Build cards that show up in here too, as well. Right. And this adds a ton of functionality to your records, right?
Beyond just customization. We'll keep it more of a customization thing, right? A big reason you'd want to have tabs is kind of the same reasons why you'd have different sections on the left, right? That middle panel can get so overwhelming, and if you have a lot of cards in there, you're falling into this same trap that you fall into with the left hand sidebar where if you have a ton of stuff in there, you end up in this like infinite scroll to find the stuff that's relevant to you, right?
Whereas. Tabs until we had sections, tabs kind of were the one thing that would help you organize those middle panel cards in, in sort of, you know, a two dimensional or three dimensional way. I'm not sure how to say that. Um, but you can have different tabs that again, are relevant to different, like things you might do for that customer or things about that record or things that different, certain teams may be doing right.
But they weren't conditional. What really sucked is that like when you had a lot of teams using HubSpot, and it's like service
Chad Hohn: like 12 tabs
Max Cohen: marketing has a tab, sales has a tab, this has a tab that has a tab. This type of data has a tab, da, da, da, da. You ended up just having like a billion tabs up at the top, right?
So that was a problem. But now when you build out your tabs, those can also be conditional, right? So tabs only show up under certain circumstances,
Chad Hohn: Oh, don't even pull up this card. Don't
Max Cohen: yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there.
George B. Thomas: oh,
Chad Hohn: one sucks.
Max Cohen: one
George B. Thomas: Sorry.
Max Cohen: the one thing you could do, 'cause keep in mind, the one thing that you could do to get different tabs to show up, however, was creating completely separate views for different teams.
'cause the tabs could be different if you had different teams in there. Right. But you couldn't just have one unified record that was like. You know, just showing everything. I like having one record and just having it be very like dynamic and it changes stuff that it's that way. It's like, oh, did I make these changes here and did I make it on this one?
And then make it on this one and then make it on the other view, right? Like I'm very much a one default view type of guy. That's like very dynamic, right? But as you can see, you can add in different section or cards here. And recently they added this awesome new thing called sections. Okay, so George hit a section.
You can name it. And this will create collapsible sections of tabs. So it's almost like a tab within a tab kind of Right. But it
Chad Hohn: tab section for sure.
Max Cohen: it's tab deception. Yep. But it helps you organize and sort and categorize the information within that tab. Right? So if you have a bunch of different cards, you could put a bunch of different cards in there and organize them within these tabs.
And an even cooler thing you can do. Is, you'll notice you
Chad Hohn: Ooh.
Max Cohen: cards side by side
Chad Hohn: too wide, but still.
Max Cohen: Only too wide. And depending on how the card is designed and how much information's on there, you may want to experiment because I'm sure some cards, if they're got pretty basic info in them, are probably gonna look good stacked side by side.
You could probably always get away with it when it comes to like property cards, right? But like giant report cards, you probably don't want to do that. UI extensions from apps that have a lot of functionality probably aren't gonna translate well to that. They might, right? Um, but you wanna make sure like you kind of play around with the layout that works for you.
And then George, if you go and save this and go back to your record so we can show what it looks like when someone plays with one of these, right. So you've got your new tab, I think it's called My new section on the right top, right?
George B. Thomas: yep, yep. Uh, here we go.
Max Cohen: Yeah. There's a, so there's, here's the conditional section on the left, right?
And the user can move that stuff around. And then you go to my new section on the top, right. This is the new tab you made, right? And you'll notice it's in this section called My Top section, and you can collapse it,
Chad Hohn: How cool is
Max Cohen: So sick, so
George B. Thomas: effects are free.
Max Cohen: There's also this, I think, interesting conversation going on. I don't know how many people are having it, but I'm, I'm kind of thinking about it a lot.
I'm wondering if the right hand tab is gonna go away or the, sorry, the right hand section's gonna go away. Yeah. Um,
George B. Thomas: I don't think so.
Max Cohen: yeah, there used to be a lot of stuff. Hold on. I mean, people can effectively eliminate it now, which is cool. Right.
Chad Hohn: expanded open.
Max Cohen: Yeah. Another fun fact about the right hand sidebar over here, and I think this is the reason it survived for so long, is that for the longest time integrations that built UI extensions, which are like.
Cards that have functionality from whatever app is integrated with HubSpot. This is the only place that they were allowed to live. Right? You would see some card on the right hand side from, I don't know, like MailChimp or SurveyMonkey or Happily, or like whatever other app you have integrated, and they would add other functionality there.
You could also build totally custom ones that you develop on your own and they would live on the right hand side. More recently, in the last like couple years or so. A lot of those UI extensions are now built in the middle panel, which is really cool. Which gives like those, yeah, those apps a lot more control over what they can do.
Yeah. Here we go. Here's a, a bunch of these different app cards. It gives them a lot more space to play with. Right? So more and more stuff is graduating out of that right hand side. Into the middle. The other big thing that always used to live over there were association cards, right? So for example, you got organizations there, right?
Your company card showing the records that are associated to this, this object. Now, me personally, I like that. I think that's cool, but you could easily move this stuff into a middle panel. The reason you may want to do that is you can see more information about those associated records. George, do you have any examples of of middle panel cards you've done for, um, uh, like, uh, like association tables?
George B. Thomas: no,
Max Cohen: Dude, let's do one right now for the people. Let's customize it, right? So why would you wanna have, for example, let's use the company, uh, card as an example. Why would you maybe wanna have it in a middle panel versus having it on the right hand side? Right? Well, let's go add a card here, right? So you can add something maybe outside of your section.
Yep. Uh, that way we can collapse it and show how it stays and blah, blah, blah.
Chad Hohn: Association label lists for like identifying decision makers and things and we haven't even gotten into buying groups and stuff, but
Max Cohen: Yeah. Association label tables need so much work, but I agree. Like they're cool, but they just, they suck.
Chad Hohn: association label lists are interesting just to see the presence. 'cause it shows like a card next to it. So I feel like those can be kind of helpful depending on your use case.
Max Cohen: it's cool, but like it, that needs a lot more functionality, right? Like it needs to show you when you don't have something with that label, it needs to give you a quick, easy button to add it, pick a record, and automatically do, I've given them this feedback a lot, but anyway. So let's go and add a, uh, it should be called an association.
Do they call it cards or tables? Now, can, can you
Chad Hohn: association table. I
Max Cohen: Yeah. There you go. Wait, what's an association card? Go
Chad Hohn: association card. That's what I'm telling you
Max Cohen: new. Right? I thought you were talking about label list.
Chad Hohn: No, no, no. This is like an association label list and an association, uh, or sorry, an association. It's the association card or an association label card. It shows you if that type of record is present and if it's not, you can add one.
It's really great.
Max Cohen: Oh, and oh, great. I I didn't know they did that.
Chad Hohn: were talking about. I was gonna say like, I'm pretty sure I
Max Cohen: Fri okay.
Chad Hohn: whole deal progression buying process in ours.
Max Cohen: let's do a table really quick just so we can show people the table. So like if you wanna see all the records that are associated, and you have a table here, right? Come in, go add an object type. Do that company or organization, call this like organization stuff.
Yep. Save right. Choose an object. Type at the top. Object type. Nope. Down a little bit. Down a little bit. It's bold text. There you go. Right? And then you'd choose your object Here,
the big thing here is you can add up to 12 properties. So instead of being regulated to the three that automatically show, and it's the same for all your records.
You can choose all the information that shows up here. You can filter it, you can add quit filters as well if you wanna filter through a bunch of the different records, right?
Chad Hohn: Yeah, so you giving the quick filters is killer because if you have certain things that you categorize your uh, associated organizations on, then you can really easily give your users the ability to take a hundred associations down to a couple. Right, if you need to.
Max Cohen: Exactly. And you gotta think about who's using this and why they would access this information. Everyone always just skips the quick filters and leaves the default ones,
Chad Hohn: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Max Cohen: right? Like you wanna ask yourself like, Hey, if I am in X role and I'm looking at these and I need to find associated records, what are the most common things that I'm gonna sort them by?
Right? Because leaving the default. Probably isn't gonna be it. Right, and it's just gonna make it look messier.
Chad Hohn: sort is helpful. Like deals is nice because you could do close date and it's associated by close date, newest, you know, most close to now to oldest. You could do, uh, you know, like a lifecycle stage, entrance date, uh, if, if it has one. And then you can even pre-filter the table too, which is also helpful.
So it locks it in to only show you pre-filtered data if you have a lot of associated records.
Max Cohen: So George, save this and let's show people what it looks like. Yeah, save that. Go back to your record. So you'll notice this is outside of the section. So even though he, he can make that section show or not show Right. But this is gonna remain, 'cause it's not within a section, but instead of just seeing, uh, you know, uh, a, a card with like, I think it's still up to three additional properties, right. That it'll show you.
You can have a table that shows you as much as you want. Right. So
Chad Hohn: think it's 12.
Max Cohen: Yeah. Up. Yeah. Sorry. Up to 12,
Chad Hohn: to 12.
Max Cohen: I'm saying it's up to three on the right hand card,
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Max Cohen: thing. Yeah. Um,
Chad Hohn: If you're looking where George was just pointing, right, so that's the same two associated records here and there. Right.
Max Cohen: Mm-hmm. Yep,
Chad Hohn: Um, and another thing that's helpful is when you click filters on associated organizations, then you can dive into the association label only show me ones that are associated decision maker or yeah, team O, you know, owners, whatever.
All sorts of really helpful stuff.
Max Cohen: remember though, is this, is, this is done by the user as they're viewing the record. What stinks is, you can't, you can't hard filter this by
Chad Hohn: Yeah, you can.
Max Cohen: Wait, you can, no, you can't. I don't think you can.
Chad Hohn: yeah, by labels. You go to the association label table,
Max Cohen: Alright, so let's go to
Chad Hohn: then you can pre-filter it by labels.
Max Cohen: to see the label table now because I didn't think this
Chad Hohn: He needs to go back to
Max Cohen: Go add another one. Go add another one. Customize.
Chad Hohn: Come on screen.
George B. Thomas: I am working on it. I'm working
Max Cohen: just getting joysticked by his boys right now. This is so funny. Um,
George B. Thomas: Hey, it's all good. It's all good.
Max Cohen: so he show,
Chad Hohn: add a new card? No. No, you can't do this one. It's a new card. Yeah. And
George B. Thomas: so what do you want me to add?
Chad Hohn: type in. Label in search cards. Oh, that's the label list. Okay. So it's the label list. That'll do it.
Max Cohen: Mm-hmm.
Chad Hohn: is what I was telling you about
Max Cohen: Yeah, this, this sucks. I'll show you why. I'll show you why I hate this. Go choose the label. So yeah, choose opportunities or organizations and then add your label here.
Chad Hohn: So it shows you one or more labels. So let's say, I think you have decision maker on there as well. On one of your associated, yeah.
Max Cohen: Hit
Chad Hohn: And then it shows you the same structure as your default properties, I think, right?
Max Cohen: So hit save.
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know how I've gotten around what you're talking about. Uh, and now you can add them, right?
Max Cohen: Oh, can you customize the, can you customize the properties here?
Chad Hohn: I don't think so.
Max Cohen: Hold on,
Chad Hohn: It just shows you the
Max Cohen: on. Yeah, it stinks.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, it does. But
Max Cohen: That's what I, I want, I want a table that is hard filtered by labels.
Chad Hohn: Right. So do you know how you can get around that or how you can do that? No. So create a cal, uh, a rollup property that is a count of the number of associated whatever labeled records, and then that's how you do it with a pre-filter.
George B. Thomas: ding, ding, ding, ding. Okay, that's, we just, there was a TKO, right there you went. Absolutely
Max Cohen: no, no, no. Stop. Wait, what? I don't, I didn't understand that. Say that again. Say that again.
Chad Hohn: Alright, so you go to the object that you're on and you create a rollup property that is a
Max Cohen: records,
Chad Hohn: count of the associated records of records that have that label and have a record id.
Max Cohen: Uhhuh.
Chad Hohn: And then you use the association table, table and filter it. Pre-filter it by that number is greater than zero. It'll show you.
George B. Thomas: Max's Max's
Chad Hohn: No, but it's a way to get or did.
Max Cohen: So wait, wait, wait. So you filter the table,
Chad Hohn: Yeah, pre-filter. So go to the settings on associated organizations,
Max Cohen: a minute, what I don't get?
Chad Hohn: Yeah, yeah,
Max Cohen: I don't see how that gets,
George B. Thomas: right
Chad Hohn: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
George B. Thomas: by the way, by the
Max Cohen: you're so
George B. Thomas: know that, know that. We have one minute left. Okay. Okay, so I'm going settings here.
Chad Hohn: Oh yeah. Okay, so sorry. right. Now where it says manage filters, go down, manage filters, scroll
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. And then you pre-filter the table for the user by number of associated contacts is greater than zero. That will get you. But if your calculated property that you create that's a rollup, is a rollup of only associated record types with that label,
Max Cohen: On the other
Chad Hohn: get you to the, well, no, no, on, on this side.
It's on the, the record you're on. So like if I wanted number of associated decision makers.
Max Cohen: Doesn't this break If you have multiple labels?
Chad Hohn: Well, no, I mean, if you have, you do this, this would only work for one association label type.
Max Cohen: Yeah. But 'cause you're looking this, this is a property on the record you're looking at.
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Max Cohen: How would that filter out different objects that are associated to it that have different labels, though? Maybe I just don't get it.
George B. Thomas: Mm.
Chad Hohn: So like if you are looking for a number of associated con, uh, like if you wanted to filter this card, this would functionally be the same as being able to filter that table by decision maker, for example.
George B. Thomas: Ladies and gentlemen, tune in next week as Chad continues. Tune in next week as Chad continues to explain. Maybe next week, Chad, you show your screen and walk through what you just said.
Chad Hohn: sure. Yeah. Yeah. We could talk
George B. Thomas: the way.
Chad Hohn: that.
Max Cohen: maybe, maybe a product manager is listening to this and just builds a association table that has labels that you can filter with. That's all we
Chad Hohn: filterable labels.
Max Cohen: So crazy. Avoid me getting cancer from whatever Chad's gonna show me next week. Please, please, geez.
George B. Thomas: ladies and gentlemen, can you believe it? We only really talked about like one little area. Uh, if you haven't customized your records, that's your call to action for this week is go. Think about your teams. Think about what they need to see, think about what they don't need to see. Because all of this conversation, by the way, for this week, next week, and who knows how long it's about making HubSpot easier for them to use, showing them what they need to see and hiding what they don't to remove confusion, and we'll see you in the next episode of the Hub Heroes Podcast, not next week.
Because I'll be on a cruise ship celebrating my 25th anniversary with my wife, but the week after that, we'll see you back here.