George B. Thomas
What happens when record customization stops being a technical feature and starts becoming a human experience? That is the heartbeat of this episode. George B. Thomas, Max Cohen, and Chad Hohn dig into what it really means to shape HubSpot records around the humans who use them every day.
Yes, they talk about conditional logic, workflow buttons, agents, and customization. But underneath all of that is a bigger truth. Better record design helps teams move faster, stay clearer, and feel more comfortable inside the tool. This episode is for super admins, revenue leaders, operations pros, and any human who wants HubSpot to feel less confusing and more useful.
What You Will Learn
- Record customization works best when it starts with human needs, not admin preferences.
- Workflow buttons on records become far more useful when you rename them in plain language.
- Conditional logic can help the right information show up at the right time.
- Logging in as a user helps you see what your team actually experiences.
- Over-engineering records creates confusion faster than it creates value.
- The future of record customization is getting more flexible, more powerful, and more human.
Make the record work for the human
One of the strongest themes in this episode is simple. Stop building records only for the admin brain.
Max makes the point clearly. What makes sense to the person building HubSpot often makes no sense to the person using it. That is a big deal. A sales rep, service rep, or marketer does not care about your internal naming convention. They care about finding what they need and knowing what to do next.
That shift matters. Record customization is not just about making things look cleaner. It is about making the tool feel more comfortable, more intuitive, and more useful in the flow of work.
A small update that changes a lot
The crew spends time on a feature that might sound minor at first. You can now customize the display names for workflows inside the " Enroll in Workflow " card on a record.
That means the workflow can keep its admin-friendly internal name while the button the user sees can say something much clearer. Instead of a long technical workflow title, the button can say something like assign sales rep or launch nurture.
That is not just cosmetic. It creates trust. It reduces hesitation. It helps the human clicking the button understand what will happen next.
Conditional logic is where things get smart
Another big moment is the reminder that customization should often depend on context.
The conversation highlights how buttons, cards, and sections should not show up just because they can. They should show up when they make sense. Maybe a handoff workflow only appears after a deal reaches the right stage. Maybe certain information only appears when a record meets specific conditions.
That kind of setup helps records tell a better story. It also keeps the experience from feeling cluttered. When humans only see what matters in the moment, the system feels lighter and more helpful.
Walk in your users’ shoes
Chad brings in one of the most practical reminders of the episode. Use the log in as user feature.
That advice has real weight. Permissions, property visibility, and layout choices can all look fine to an admin while breaking the experience for everyone else. Logging in as a real user lets you see what is working, what is missing, and what feels frustrating.
This is where empathy becomes operational. If you want better adoption, better trust, and fewer support questions, spend time seeing HubSpot the way your team sees it.
Practical Next Steps
- Ask three team members what they love, hate, or wish they could change on the records they use most.
- Review any workflow buttons on your records and rename them in language that clearly explains the outcome.
- Audit your record layouts and remove anything that creates noise instead of clarity.
- Add conditional logic where it helps the right information appear at the right stage or moment.
- Use the log in as user feature to test how records look for different roles and permission sets.
- Check whether you have too many team-based views and simplify where possible.
- Before adding anything new, ask one question first: does this help the human using it?
This episode leaves us with a healthy reminder. Good customization is not about doing more. It is about doing what matters.
Talk to your humans. Learn what they need. Build with care. And when you make changes, make them in a way that helps your team move with more clarity, confidence, and momentum.
TRANSCRIPT
George B. Thomas: All right, well, again, we are back. And let me just say welcome to all, all of the humans that use HubSpot and listen to this podcast. We are on episode two, maybe the final episode. We'll see how today goes. On record customization. And if you haven't listened to last episode, we talked about conditional sections everywhere.
We talked about that middle column, tabs, card layout, sort, all sorts of different things. We're gonna get into it here in a minute. But gentlemen, I gotta bring this up. Uh, I was gone on vacation and, uh,
Max Cohen: you were
George B. Thomas: we were, um, we were having fun and HubSpot was having fun as well, and I think they were having some fun that's relevant to this conversation.
Meaning one of the updates that I bumped into when I got back was. Agents in CRM cards. Have you guys seen this yet? Um, Brie's Agent, CRM cards display agent outputs directly within CRM records, auto loading, the latest execution for each record, and enabling users to. Select and run agents from a dropdown.
Uh, HubSpot says why this matters. Users need quick access to agent generated insights and actions within their C RM workflow. Reducing con context switching and ensuring relevant agent outputs are always available at the record level. Uh, from a rating of, eh, to, that's hot. Like what do you, what do you guys give this update?
Max Cohen: I mean, any, any time there is net new cards that go on records, I'll generally be excited about it.
George B. Thomas: Okay.
Chad Hohn: than
Max Cohen: The, yeah, the one, the one thing that kind of makes me go, eh. Is is not in its execution. I just think like the way that you interact with, um, full on agents, right? And how it just outputs everything that's happening in its brain, right?
And it gives you this just massive text dump of everything it's doing. And look at all this work I did and look at all the steps I took to get there and look at all this permission you gave me to do X, y, z, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just don't know if like. The best way to deliver that is like within the context of a CRM card.
Right? Um, I think it'll make a lot more sense when the way people interact with agents gets a lot more streamlined. Right? Because like now, I mean, how do you do it? You have to go into data studio, you gotta go into the agent, you gotta run it in that like message center with the agents or whatever, right?
Chad Hohn: Yeah, and then you get your little inbox of the outputs. 'cause it could take a minute.
George B. Thomas: Mm.
Max Cohen: the most like ergonomic thing to do in HubSpot,
George B. Thomas: Oh, ergonomic.
Max Cohen: Ergonomic. Yeah. Um, you know, I, I'm, I'm more excited about their updates around allowing the tools to run without approval, which is really
George B. Thomas: mm
Max Cohen: because that's what starts to make the stuff in, like workflows make a lot more sense.
Right. So, like, you know, I was, I was talking to Becca about this, who's one of the people that like is, is on that team? Um, one of the product managers and,
George B. Thomas: And let me just make sure. Pause, pause there for a second. Let me just make sure that you're talking about autonomous versus semi-autonomous right now. Like it, it basically can just do it on its own type things. That's what you're talking
Max Cohen: Yeah. Right. With this, there's certain tools that they can get access to that within the context of those tools, you can say, just do the thing without requiring my
George B. Thomas: Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Max Cohen: so like where I was getting like awkwardly stuck, right? Is like I had a workflow. Triggering an agent run where it was taking some inputs from that workflow action, doing some stuff, and then doing some stuff with it after.
Right. But what was tough about that is while the workflow would trigger it, it would just get hung up in that workflow until I then went into the data studio, like app went into the agent and then like approved everything. They just finally released the thing that lets you make all that stuff run without approvals, which is cool.
So now workflows can really do their thing. Right. That being said though, it still outputs like a ton of information. Right. And like I'm just wondering, are CRM cards like the most efficient way to interact with that? I am unsure. Right.
George B. Thomas: Chad, your thoughts.
Max Cohen: regardless.
George B. Thomas: Your, your thoughts on these, uh, agents and CRM cards.
Chad Hohn: Right. It depends on what you're trying to do. Um, like I would love because agents take an amount of time to run and you know, I see a lot of use cases at the deal card, uh, for sales reps. And sales reps are notoriously impatient.
George B. Thomas: Mm.
Chad Hohn: Don't wanna wait for an AI to just, you know, chunk on it for a hot minute.
Um, so I'd love to be able to kick off an agent run that they maybe interact with next time they're at the deal. Or maybe they have a sequence where the agent intends to run on all their open deals, you know, maybe every day, maybe every week, which is like. A deal upkeep, like, hey, feed the agent all of your stage exit criteria.
Go scan all the activities and records and just, you know, see where we're at, like and recommend changes to the deal stage, to the properties we care about X, Y, Z. Um. You know, like I think that could be super helpful. I mean, we could also even have it, like do whatever kind of actions that it's gonna do, but it depends on, on the, like on the agent, like I think the RFP agent, like a request for proposal.
If your company does RFPs could be really helpful to run in the deal card in the middle because you want to give it a structured output of some kind of a proposal. And it, you know, you give it the input of whatever, you know, RFP system that some large company was outputting. Um, that could be really helpful to like speed up somebody's time right there in the record.
So it depends on the use case, some of the things totally not, some of the things, um, you know,
George B. Thomas: what do you think about like a qualification bot or qualification agent? Like, you know what I mean? Looks at certain things, uh, decides certain things, gives output on, you know, not qualified. Qualified and because of this info or something like that. D do you, do you feel people would find that you, again, kind of a sales type thing, but like what, what are your
Max Cohen: that, is it? Isn't that something that like could be a little more lightweight and run through like an assistant though,
George B. Thomas: I mean, we've built it through Bri's assistant. Like a custom one. Yes. But
Max Cohen: Yeah. I don't know. I'm having a
Chad Hohn: 'cause the agent models don't, or they're not really designed to run in a deal necessarily. They run with company information, not deal information, if that makes sense. And like company or contact information. So qualification bot, maybe like contact agent, you know, like look at the contact, look at his company, see if they're a good fit for your ICP, et cetera, et cetera.
This goes back to like all those AI data sources where we were talking about that way back in its infancy and that got like scattered to the four winds. It's all over HubSpot now. All those settings are like everywhere.
George B. Thomas: And you know, those settings have like, there's more. Yeah, they're, they've changed. There's more like, we could probably do a revisit episode on like, did you know, uh, this
Chad Hohn: Oh, totally.
George B. Thomas: Uh, okay, so Max, so you're kind of struggling with it feels like,
Max Cohen: I'm. I'm fully prepared to, for the reality to be, I just don't understand agents well enough
George B. Thomas: Got you. Yeah.
Max Cohen: like I'm, I,
George B. Thomas: I don't think you're any different than a lot of people though.
Max Cohen: Yeah, I don't like, I've been slow to adopt, I've been slow to adopt a lot of this stuff. Right. And um, I'm definitely behind the eight ball on the agent thing. Like I have been able, like, I figured out, the big thing that I wanted to figure out is like, how can I say, Hey agent, you're gonna get some information from a record.
I want you to do something to it and I want you to spit something out on the other side and put it somewhere like I know how to, I figured that piece out. That makes sense to me. Um, I know it goes like way, it can be way more cooler than that, right? Like my automation brain is, brain is very HubSpot coded, right?
Where like, I'm thinking in the dimensions of records going through a workflow, things are happening to them, right? And so like the, the, the, the idea of the agents being like. Way more freeform than that and not as rigidly structured in what you can do with them is something that's taken me a while to like wrap my brain around in terms of what's possible.
Yeah.
George B. Thomas: think What, I hear you well. What I think I hear you saying, and, and I'm gonna ask this as a question, do you think that it is time for many humans who have used HubSpot for a long time to un HubSpot their brain?
Max Cohen: Mm. Probably.
Chad Hohn: need that foundation, I'll tell you that much. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: I, I agree. But like, what I, what I think I heard Max saying is he's used to the constructs of what HubSpot used to be, pre agent, pre assistant, pre ai, and like, how do you un HubSpot those historical limitations or frameworks? Or maybe it's not UNH HubSpot, but like how do you HubSpot
Max Cohen: like un workflow. It's un workflow, which is what it is. It's like this very like vertically linear way of thinking. Uh, like I'm stuck. I'm stuck in that. Right? Uh, and I gotta figure that out. That's for me to, you know, fight my own demons on. Um, but we're talking about record pages, guys. We're quickly spinning this into like an AI
George B. Thomas: well hang on, hang on. 'cause I got one more thing before you guys dive into, so, so there was a second update and it's, it feels minor. But I don't think it's as minor as it feels. Meaning one of the other updates while I was gone was customized workflow names for the enroll in workflow CRM card and, and
Max Cohen: You are welcome by the.
George B. Thomas: oh, oh, was it Max?
Do you have something to do with this?
Max Cohen: I mean, I would like to think so. I would hope so. I only complained about it more than literally anybody else and talked to the team that built it, so I would hope I had something to do with
George B. Thomas: some, some, some power to it. I, I think this is huge, right? Because, um, literally last straw was on earlier this morning, the customer platform, uh, morning show where we were talking about updates and stuff. And you know, Chris referenced the idea of like, if you've ever taken a super admin training from me, you know, one of the big things that I'm like a beast on is naming conventions and ta this kind of tagging for naming conventions.
Well, tagging for naming conventions in the workflow tool might equal confusion to the human who actually needs to enroll from this chord on a record. And so the fact that you can now rename this, like again, from a rating of eh, to, that's hot, like. Where, where do you put this?
Max Cohen: that that is hot
George B. Thomas: there you go. There you go.
Max didn't hesitate.
Max Cohen: Smith would say. Um, yeah, dude, I've been waiting for that for a long time. Um, you know, and it just like makes sense, like what you're gonna call something internally like that workflow action that you've, you've got your wonderful naming convention there. That doesn't mean Jack Didly squat right?
To like whoever's pressing that button and using it right on top of that. You know, workflows can have branches, which means the outcomes can be very different, right? Which means like, depending on where you see that card or the context in which it's showing up, that button might be saying, oh, it's gonna be doing something different.
Right? Because maybe that card doesn't show up. If there isn't a certain conditional piece of information that meets some set of criteria that would then cause that workflow to go on a different branch and do something completely different. Right? Like, so there's, you know, I like that they did that. I don't know how they handled, um, 'cause I remember having conversations with them of like.
Um, does that workflow have the same name across all the different places? Like where the tab, like where that, you know, type of, um, uh, extension shows up? I still gotta like look at that, right? But it's a big step in the next direction. It like, you know, instead of your workflow, that's called, um, you know, uh.
Rep assignment, babababababa, right? You can have the button say assign assign sales rep, right? In very natural English. So like when I hit the button, I know what's happening, right? And that's all I care about is what's the outcome, you know?
George B. Thomas: yeah. Chad, hold your thoughts for a second. Hold your thoughts for a second. 'cause I forgot to do this. Uh, what, what is it, by the way, for listeners? Um, you can now customize the workflow names that display on the enroll in workflow CRM card. This lets you display clear, more user-friendly names without changing the workflow's original name in your automation setup.
Why does this matter? Workflow names are often long. Or built for admins. Amen to that, which can make them confusing for CRM users who just want to understand what's happening in a workflow before they enroll a record into it. By letting you edit how a workflow is labeled on the CRM card users get quick, intuitive context without requiring changes to your existing work.
Flow naming convention. The how it works is in from the enroll in Workflow c RM card. You can now edit the display name to something more meaningful for your team. The update, na updated name appears only on the CRM record name will not be reflected in the workflows app, making it easier for reps to understand.
I would just say humans, by the way, to understand the workflow's purpose at a glance.
Max Cohen: I mean, if you consider sales reps humans, anyway.
George B. Thomas: Oh my God, you did not go there. Wow.
Max Cohen: just kidding, just
George B. Thomas: Hots fired.
Max Cohen: Demons. All right. So, um, I think, just kidding. Love you salespeople.
George B. Thomas: We love all of you salespeople,
Chad Hohn: They
Max Cohen: you so much. They do make the world go around.
George B. Thomas: is human. Just saying.
Max Cohen: Back when I was an implementation specialist.
George B. Thomas: Yeah,
Max Cohen: Didn't love you. Just gonna be honest. Love you now though. It's great. Um, so don't I love you. Stop. Don't, don't be mad at me.
George B. Thomas: hate mail to Max at. I'm just kidding.
Max Cohen: Don't do that. Um, let's, this is one that I think is like worth showing people. George. Uh, would you be able, able to foster a screen share for us for a moment? Um, because I think there's some people that are hearing. This update and going, I didn't even know, I didn't, I didn't even know that you could put workflows on record pages.
What are you talking about?
George B. Thomas: Oh, to that, I say, oh my God. Like,
Chad Hohn: It's really cool to be able to do that.
Max Cohen: It is, it's sick. Um, so let's, let's, let's fire up a little screen share. Right.
George B. Thomas: let me, let me pull up my,
Max Cohen: It's just a very.
George B. Thomas: let's see, let me do this. I'm just trying to get it to a point where, uh, we won't, um.
Max Cohen: We're gonna hide the bad tabs, hide the bad tabs,
George B. Thomas: And what's
Max Cohen: hide the vacation tabs.
George B. Thomas: let me do this real quick,
Chad Hohn: The use case for that too would be a lot of times like a manual enrollment workflow, like one that doesn't have any enrollment triggers, just as a heads up
George B. Thomas: Yep, yep, yep. Okay. So first of all, we're gonna, since we are talking about record customization, I'm going to share my screen and, um,
Max Cohen: This is a very visual topic, George. So the screen share
George B. Thomas: oh my God, is this really happening right now? But yes, it's happening. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go into, uh, record customization.
I'm gonna go into default view, and I'm gonna actually look for, uh, let's see, enroll in workflow, right? So like, I've got this, but I, I just wanna see if, oh no, that's app cards. So
Max Cohen: In the card lot. Oh, it's, yeah. Enroll in
George B. Thomas: Card. Library. Card, library,
Max Cohen: No, you had the right one. You had the right one.
George B. Thomas: But don't they already have Yeah. Workflow.
Max Cohen: No, that's
George B. Thomas: I want to add that card.
That's what I want. No,
Max Cohen: no. Go back to
Chad Hohn: That's the old one. Hit
George B. Thomas: Oh,
Max Cohen: There you go. That's what you want. Create
George B. Thomas: So I want to create this card. Enroll in workflow. See, that's the, that's the first thing that's gonna get people hung up. I'm telling you right there. Oh, George. Is that why you did that? Anyway, uh, so enroll in, so I'm gonna hit no. I think I created that. I think, did I
Chad Hohn: Uh, no. You have to hit the Mr. Save. Yeah. And choose a workflow.
Max Cohen: You gotta pick a workflow boss.
George B. Thomas: Huh?
Max Cohen: Close this. You, you can go back. Yeah, you can go back.
Chad Hohn: Now it's in the card library.
George B. Thomas: Oh, so I wanna go in here.
Max Cohen: On the right hand side.
George B. Thomas: So I wanna
Max Cohen: where it says, nope. Close that
George B. Thomas: Oh, enroll in workflow. You see what I'm doing here? Does anybody see what I'm doing
Max Cohen: doing a bit. He knows what he is doing.
George B. Thomas: yeah. Does anybody see what I'm doing here? So I'm gonna remove this card, uh, and then I'm gonna go ahead and edit this and then I'm gonna add a workflow and let's just say, um, uh, we'll do this one and we'll do, uh, this one right here.
And I'll just hit save. Okay. But, but, but why did I hit save? Oh, I don't really want to hit save, do I? Because I want to come here and I wanna, ah,
Chad Hohn: Baby.
Max Cohen: hold on, hold on. Let's go. Let's go. Just look at the record real quick. Let's, we'll, we're gonna get here. We're gonna get here.
George B. Thomas: hang on. Let
Max Cohen: Let's go look at a
George B. Thomas: me, let me bring it clear up here. 'cause hopefully then it'll be up top. Right? So let me hit save and exit.
Max Cohen: I will start with the
George B. Thomas: a record. I have a record ready here. So we're gonna refresh this and, uh. Oh, it's not at the top. Oh, there it is. Okay.
Max Cohen: hey. Uh, hey George. I just thought of like this big metaconversation we probably need to have. Is it, is it problematic that humans are objects in your database?
George B. Thomas: Oh, wow,
Chad Hohn: Max,
Max Cohen: God.
George B. Thomas: Don't
Chad Hohn: don't need to be starting any
George B. Thomas: Come on. Now let's, let's go ahead and, oh, I guess, wait, am I supposed to hit the settings? Oh,
Max Cohen: Ah,
George B. Thomas: No, let me hit exit.
Chad Hohn: I need the screaming
Max Cohen: ah.
George B. Thomas: So, so, so, so, so here it is, right? Enroll in workflow. Boom.
Max Cohen: Okay, so folks. This is a button you can hit and when you hit that button, what is gonna happen is the record that you are looking at is going to
Chad Hohn: that one.
Max Cohen: Dive headfirst. Yeah, just this one. Dive, dive headfirst.
George B. Thomas: God.
Max Cohen: It's gonna do a little pencil dive, uh, into a workflow. Okay. Um, so usually workflows that you would put in a little sidebar right here are generally gonna be workflows that, uh, are set to have, like a manual enrollment, which means you don't have anything automated.
I don't think that's a hard and fast rule. I think like you could
Chad Hohn: requirement.
George B. Thomas: It's not a requirement, but it's sure is smart. I always
Chad Hohn: depends on what you're trying to do, but
George B. Thomas: library of books you can pull out of a shelf and run. I need to nurture them for 90 days. Let me go ahead and hit this button.
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Blo.
Max Cohen: yeah. I think you also wanna be careful about, um, re-enrollment settings here too, right? There may be some things you only want to happen once, right? There may be some things that it's okay if it happens multiple times, right? Um, you know, so kind of keep that in mind, right? But the problem here is when you take a look at these buttons.
George B. Thomas: yeah.
Max Cohen: Do you really know what's happening? No.
George B. Thomas: No, I mean, as the admin. Yes.
Chad Hohn: articles. I'm just Mr. Rep.
George B. Thomas: yeah,
Max Cohen: you just, you just, you just made a really good point, right, for the admin. Yes. Right. So folks watching at home, that might be admining their HubSpot portal. Here's lesson number one. Just 'cause this makes a ton of sense to you.
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Max Cohen: Probably means it makes no sense to anybody else, right?
Um, that's just kind of always how it is in HubSpot. All right. Um, so anytime you're putting shit on your records like this, sorry.
George B. Thomas: Yeah. My
Max Cohen: Stuff, things, items, um, whenever you're putting items, right? We don't even call these items, cards, whatever.
George B. Thomas: Mm-hmm.
Max Cohen: You wanna make sure you have the proper context and explain what the heck it is, right?
Sometimes that's just the name of the tab, the name of the section, the name of this, the, that, the name of the card, whatever. In this case, it is the name of the card, right? But also we can control what those buttons say. Right. So in this B2B offer, or B2B forum offer, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, right? We might want to change the language here, the verbiage into something that's more action related, outcome related.
What's happening when I hit this button? What is it doing in essence, right? So now what we could do, this is brand new.
George B. Thomas: yeah,
Max Cohen: George roll that big, beautiful bean footage. Hit that, hit that, uh, hit that, uh, gearbox right there.
George B. Thomas: yeah. Yeah.
Max Cohen: And then look at this. Look at this bad Larry. Okay. Uh, button label. You can change this to say, Hey, this is what Button buzz when Hit right.
There you go. Boom. You can save this. And now also remember, this is just kind of good rule of thumb. Whenever you do in cards notice you can change the card title up at the top, right. Another place where you could layer in some additional context on your records and teach people what is all of this stuff?
What does it mean, who is it for? What does it do? All this kinda stuff, right? So we could change this to say, uh, I don't know, maybe you had a bunch of buttons that would enroll them in different marketing campaigns or a bunch of different buttons that would assign them to a sales rep, a CSM, a customer service person, a, this, that, the other thing, an account manager, right?
Go ahead and hit save.
George B. Thomas: because by the way, you might've saw a little bit ago that I could add multiple of these. Uh oh.
Max Cohen: can put as many as you want. Ooh, was that what you were showing this whole time?
George B. Thomas: Oh, because then they have different names and can do different things. Anyway, okay, let
Max Cohen: George is always teaching us something. He's literally playing 40 chess with us right now. Say hit save on the top. Right. Amazing.
George B. Thomas: Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Max Cohen: And there you go. Look. Words that make sense. And hey, you wanna add an additional layer to this? Can we make that conditional? Can we make this conditional?
Chad Hohn: Oh, because it's in the record editor that the whole thing has conditional
George B. Thomas: So if we come back here, you're saying, come here, and then you're saying if we wanted to make this conditional Right. Set conditional logic. Bam.
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm. And it's not just one property anymore too. By the way, remember, our conditional logic used to be enum only in a single property, and you can do multiple properties.
Max Cohen: So why might we wanna make this conditional, folks? Well, sometimes you're only triggering certain automation in certain stages of a journey, right? When it actually makes
George B. Thomas: Yep.
Max Cohen: sense. Why should I have the button?
Chad Hohn: be,
Max Cohen: Why should I have the like assigned, uh, account manager handoff from sales to, you know, service workflow before the deal's even closed or before a contact?
Easement is something, right? So like you can make these automations not only make more sense, but you can make them show up only when they should show up, right?
George B. Thomas: yeah. Which, I mean, come on. Like, like first of all, you're bouncing into kind of a record customization mindset anyway, is like. Um, should the record be customized based off of team? Should the record be customized off of lifecycle stage? Should the record be customized off of X, Y, Z? And the answer might be yes.
Yes and yes. Like it's, we're talking about record customization because it's your business. It's you wrapping your processes into your platform for your people, a, KA, your humans.
Max Cohen: Mm.
George B. Thomas: Alright, right?
Chad Hohn: I got a question, boys. Boys, what
George B. Thomas: Yes. Uh oh.
Chad Hohn: Let's think about this for a
George B. Thomas: uh, oh.
Chad Hohn: Have you ever had as an admin the issue where you have multiple team views on any given object and people will both come up to you and be like, my looks like this and theirs doesn't look like this. But we are on the same
George B. Thomas: Why, why, why, why,
Chad Hohn: Oh, I'll do the Liz
George B. Thomas: a southern
Chad Hohn: Mine looks like this and mine doesn't look like that.
Max Cohen: Well,
Chad Hohn: Why are we over here?
Max Cohen: Why
George B. Thomas: Why are you Gomer pile right now? What is happening?
Chad Hohn: just trying to
Max Cohen: I do declare. I do declare his record looks different than a mine.
Chad Hohn: Yeah.
George B. Thomas: Oh
Chad Hohn: Anyway, uh, funny voices aside, has that ever, like, you know, like I love that we have multiple team views, but sometimes when your teams have an amount of overlap and people are like working kind of together, sometimes somebody will be like, oh, here's a link to this record. And they'll slack it to their buddy in a different department and they'd be like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
I don't see what you're seeing at all.
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Well I've run into that more when people have added like their own properties to cards instead of it being the default properties that are supposed to be
Chad Hohn: nice that you can lock that down now.
George B. Thomas: yes, yes. Um, so I've run into that. Um, the interesting thing is most of the clients that I've worked with are pretty much like.
Remote slash outof office. So I've, I have, I have very rarely run into like somebody working side by side at desks to be able to see that. But I do see even in a virtual world, what you're saying of like, I, hey, it, you should see it on the right hand side. And they're like, hmm.
Chad Hohn: Hmm. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: No, it's
Chad Hohn: you're talking about.
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Um, I haven't run into that a lot, but I can see where that would happen.
Um, is that because you're curious of how big a problem it is? Or Chad, do you have a solution for that?
Chad Hohn: I was just kinda like wanting to throw that out there as a point of consideration. Like it is all well and good to wrap HubSpot around everybody's job position, but sometimes it makes sense to make a middle column card or a write card conditional so that it more things start to show up as they're needed.
Everybody's working off the same playbook unless people truly need things cut down. Like for example, my current company, our finance department has a custom view 'cause they wanna see a lot of date properties, a lot of dollar properties. And the sales reps don't quite care about all that. They know what their line items are and most everybody else is working from a default different default view.
Max Cohen: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think, uh, one, it is interesting. I think I would always opt for, you know, really good. Um. Conditional logic that more so, you know, tells a story and, and centers the record itself versus like the team. Um, because like that is like multiple views per teams are like a hundred percent a really good way that you can over-engineer the shit outta your records and end up with a huge mess.
Um, especially 'cause they don't have like. They don't have any good features to like propagate changes across multiple ones. Like the, the work you do in one, you have to completely duplicate in another. I don't think you can copy a view, right?
Chad Hohn: You can clone a team-based view.
Max Cohen: You can clone a team-based view, but then how do you keep 'em in sync if it's like, oh, there's a change I wanna make to like all five of my team view is like, there isn't really a way to do that,
Chad Hohn: Well, no, when it comes to conditional, well, so here's the thing. If you edit one card on the left, middle, or right, that card, if it's reused in other views, is updated across all views because the card has a unique internal name,
George B. Thomas: Mm
Chad Hohn: And that card's unique. Internal name is the internal id, more or less.
Max Cohen: What, so the, but the, so the, you're saying the conditional rules that get applied are global to the card and not where it's sitting on that view?
George B. Thomas: Uh
Max Cohen: I don't think that's the case. I think this.
Chad Hohn: are for sure, but I don't, I actually haven't verified if the conditional rules are
Max Cohen: I think the conditional rules are, are, are isolated within, no, within the view, yeah. It would be part
George B. Thomas: Per team in this case.
Max Cohen: it's more so within the view itself. Right. Which
George B. Thomas: we know what
Max Cohen: be assigned to a
Chad Hohn: you add a property, yeah. Yeah. If you add a property, that property gets added to all the views.
Max Cohen: If it's, yeah. Yeah. If it's a, yeah, you're correct. If you ha if you made a card right, and then you saved that card, the property would go across everything. But I think the conditional stuff has to do with where it sits, uh, on the, on the view. I'm not a hundred percent sure. We can probably figure it out pretty quick,
Chad Hohn: max, max, max, max, max. You know, the quick actions.
Max Cohen: Um.
Chad Hohn: you know they added a new option for URL?
Max Cohen: What?
Chad Hohn: It's not quite what you wanted, but it's better. It's uh, add a property, URL. So like if you are looking at a record and you have a URL type property, then you could use the workflow or something to keep that URL updated to whatever you need it to be.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: makes sense. And so it's like, oh, Google Drive, URL or whatever, that just lives in the background. And then this button says, open up the Google Drive thing. Right? And as long as that property URL's collected or updated or generated or whatever, then this now can point to a property on the record you're on.
Not quite pathing, like, you know, using dynamic personalization tokens
Max Cohen: That's all I
Chad Hohn: but.
Max Cohen: Well, you, you do that with a workflow.
Chad Hohn: But you do with a workflow.
Max Cohen: Uh, that's, that's the thing that, that is perfect. I can think of about 40 different ways. I'll use that for event. Happily stuff. Right? Whether it's like, oh, you got a button that says, fuck, click the registration
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Max Cohen: that is sick.
Um,
George B. Thomas: sponsored by, no, I'm just kidding. It's
Max Cohen: hey, hey.
George B. Thomas: I mean, it could be, but
Max Cohen: could be,
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: It could be.
Max Cohen: George, I think
George B. Thomas: hint. Win, win.
Max Cohen: we should probably talk about actions.
George B. Thomas: I mean it
Max Cohen: We got 10 minutes. Dude. Do, do, like, should
George B. Thomas: Well here, here was my next question to both of you. My next question literally was this, with nine minutes left in the episode, what's the one thing that we haven't talked about in the one in three quarters episode or one in, uh, what's anyway? What? 17th? I dunno. Uh, episode I'm stupid sometimes I swear to God.
Um. What's the one thing that you would want to tell people that they should check out, look at or think about when it comes to record customization.
Max Cohen: Mm. This is, this is one of those things where,
George B. Thomas: he's torn. He said We should talk about actions now. He's like, Hmm, let me rethink my answer.
Max Cohen: well, I mean, the one thing you should look at is you should go, not, maybe not look at, but more so listen to your coworkers.
George B. Thomas: Oh, oh.
Max Cohen: like you need to fig, like oftentimes it's, it's hard to figure out where to start until you hear what people are usually complaining about, right? I mean, that's a really good place to begin your journey.
Like you shouldn't just be like, I, I have to go customize my records for no reason whatsoever. Right? Like it is, it's really easy for you to go. Have a conversation with someone in sales, someone in customer service, someone in marketing, like whatever it may be, and just be like, Hey, like what records are you working out of a lot?
Right? And when you look at them, what do you love about 'em? What do you hate about 'em? What could be better about them? What's some information you wish you saw, something you wish you could do this, that, or the other thing? Um, because like, the other thing that's like so important about this is like we talk about the whole adoption conversation a whole lot, right?
A huge part of adoption is just making the tool a generally comfortable thing to work in. Right? And when we talk about comfort within the CRM, a lot of that means is like when I go and look at records, which is what I'm spending 90% of my time doing, if I'm in any of those roles, that's using the CRM heavily, right?
Am I comfortable in those spaces? What does comfortable mean? Can I find what I need when I need it? Do I have to, is is there like. Bad, painful patterns that I find myself in. Whether it's like, oh, every time I, every time I go to a record, I have to hit view all properties and then I have to search for it, and then I gotta find it.
I gotta
Chad Hohn: Yeah. 'cause you don't let me add the things to the card anymore, like the custom properties 'cause you locked it down. 'cause we were all seeing different stuff.
Max Cohen: Exactly right. Um, but like, this is one of the best things that, like if you're really, if you are really worried about adoption, this is the easiest low hanging fruit that you can tackle right away. Make it more comfortable to work inside of the tool and record cus customization. Is that like the core of that, right?
Yeah,
George B. Thomas: Max. I love that you basically said care about the humans
Max Cohen: Mm-hmm. I
George B. Thomas: and what they need. Yeah.
Max Cohen: Listen to their desires and wants and needs. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Max Cohen: Yeah.
George B. Thomas: Being on the other side of that, that is kind of hot. Uh, Chad, what are your thoughts?
Max Cohen: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: I think people sometimes forget about the ability as a super admin in your portal to log in as a user because sometimes like permissions are really deeply tied into this, right? And you can have, like when I got to my current portal that I'm working out of now, I didn't realize it for the longest time, but the amount property.
Was, uh, like just restricted and limited view only for certain people for deals. 'cause they wanted the amount to be driven by the associated line items, right? And so they didn't want anybody dorking with the amount property and it kept locking people outta reports until, 'cause I had rearchitected some of the users and teams, which broke people's access to stuff, and I was like, why in the world can people not see these reports?
Right? So log in as user is one of your superpowers to. See exactly how useful is it for the person that you're trying to help and do they have access to what they need to have access to so you can get your permission sets updated. Like this really does tie back into permissions pretty heavily, right?
Um, yeah. Anyway, just a consideration. Login as user is great because you'll have only access to what they have access to.
Max Cohen: Yeah,
George B. Thomas: Oh man.
Max Cohen: it. Live it. Minute in your user's shoes, like I think you'll find, you'll, you'll learn a lot. Right? Um, you know, because, and, and here's the other thing too, is like you can't expect your users to just. Tell you what's wrong with it because like they, you, you, they don't know what can be done. They probably think it's set in stone, just like every other piece of software they've ever used, right?
They don't know that you can customize this thing within three inches of its life. Like you, you can do so much. But like, the thing is, is like you gotta ask them, like, in a perfect world, what would you see here? Right? And like, get their imagination going a little bit of like, what would be ideal? You know?
And, and, and I think it would be rare that you'll find things that you can't. Accomplish with them. Right.
George B. Thomas: Hmm.
Chad Hohn: At least with the workaround. We've had a lot of workarounds over the years, but I mean, man, I'll tell you what, there's less and less workarounds needed, uh, like these days less and less and less.
Max Cohen: also like depending on the resources that you have, like, let's not forget custom UI extensions are a
Chad Hohn: It's getting easier too. It's easier and easier with, with AI assistance, et
George B. Thomas: Well, I mean, you know, let's just use the word hub code. Uh, you know, it's in what, private beta right now?
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Max Cohen: that, and there's also a whole bunch of like declarative app card builder apps out there too, where like you can build these complex, uh, UI extensions, right? Uh, just by drag and dropping stuff and no code building it, right? So
George B. Thomas: Mm.
Max Cohen: what you can do with the interface
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Chad Hohn: Oh yeah,
Max Cohen: the year of our Lord 2026 is like literally endless.
Yeah.
George B. Thomas: I
Chad Hohn: it's like the only thing you can't do is like re-skin it, basically.
Max Cohen: Whoa. I.
George B. Thomas: don't give anybody any ideas. Please,
Max Cohen: you kind of can now too, right? Jack has that app that does the whole like thing. So I mean, of course it breaks to us and, but that's fine. It's, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, but I mean that's, let's be honest, that's coming down the pipeline, right? Like HubSpot's obviously going full bore enterprise and a lot of that means.
White labeling it like I had customers back when I was onboarding. It's like, how do we, how do we put our logo on the top left? And I'm like, what are you doing? Make, make it ebook ya jamoke. Right? Like, like that's what we were, you know, dealing
George B. Thomas: means. So hopefully
Max Cohen: it means either. Yeah. Hopefully that's not bad.
Um, look, I bleep that out.
George B. Thomas: Beep.
Max Cohen: yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know.
George B. Thomas: Attention, Noah. Rewind 15 seconds and beep that out.
Chad Hohn: dead
George B. Thomas: so, so as I close this out, 'cause I do have a, a final thought, um, I do need to ask you guys, um, record customization episode three or are we moving on to something else?
Max Cohen: I think we're ready to move on.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, I mean, I, I could talk about it forever to be honest, but.
Max Cohen: Me too. Yeah.
Chad Hohn: Like, I think we've covered a good amount. You know, if there's any follow ups or whatever like that people have, like that's the thing, you know. But yeah, I mean, like it's, it's insanely useful. There's so much you can do that's not even just in the record editor.
I mean, there's index customization, preview customization we didn't really touch on either, but it's very much the same. Index customization is for views, but preview customization is the same basically.
Max Cohen: Uh, Hey guys, real quick. I looked it up. Don't worry. I did not slur. Uh, interestingly enough, jam Oak has two definitions. One is a dumb guy slash jerk slash loser. That's from Marian
George B. Thomas: I haven't been that guy before.
Max Cohen: Interestingly enough, you know what else it means? It's older slang for a cup of coffee from Java and Mocha,
George B. Thomas: Oh,
Chad Hohn: oh.
George B. Thomas: Note to Noah. You don't need to edit that
Max Cohen: you don't need edit it out. It's fine. Leave this whole thing
George B. Thomas: talking about dumb guys drinking coffee.
Max Cohen: Dumb guys drinking coffee.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, you could be a double jamoke.
George B. Thomas: oh
Max Cohen: I need a double Jamo La Jamo. I needed Jamo latte. Yeah.
George B. Thomas: Go order that and see what happens. So here's, here's my final, uh, thoughts on this episode. Um, because I think it Max, it might have been you, uh, or Chad, it might have been you, I don't remember. But what I would leave people with is just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.
George B. Thomas: And, and what I mean by that is in this episode, you heard the words over-engineering and, and that's what I would say is talk to your humans.
Build what needs to be built, show what needs to be shown. Hide what needs to be hidden. And don't over-engineer your HubSpot portal. There's no need.