Customise your CRM views

A CRM is only useful if people use it. And people only use a CRM if they can find what they need without hunting through dozens of irrelevant fields.

That's why view customisation matters more than most teams realise. HubSpot's default layout is designed for a generic business. Your business isn't generic. Your sales reps need to see different information than your marketers. Your account managers care about different data points than your SDRs. And if everyone sees the same cluttered view with fields they don't recognise, they'll stop looking at the CRM and go back to their spreadsheets.

On every implementation I do, I spend time on view customisation before rolling HubSpot out to the team. It's one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort improvements. When a rep opens a contact record and sees exactly the five or six properties they need for their job (not the forty that HubSpot shows by default), two things happen: adoption goes up because the tool feels useful, and data quality improves because people are more likely to fill in the fields they can see and understand.

The three panels of a record

Every record in HubSpot (contact, company, deal, ticket) has three panels:

Left sidebar. The "About this [object]" section. This shows the most important properties for the record. It's the quick-reference view, the first thing a user sees when they open any record. This is where your customisation effort pays off the most.

Middle column. The activity timeline. Shows emails, calls, meetings, notes, tasks, and any other interactions. A detail worth knowing: activities on associated records show up here too. If someone sends an email from the company record, that email also appears on the linked contact's timeline. You can filter by activity type (emails only, calls only) and by which associated records to include.

Right sidebar. Shows associations (linked companies, deals, tickets) and attachments. Also displays any custom cards you've added.

All three panels are customisable, but the left sidebar is where you get the most return on effort.

Customising the "About this" section

The default "About this contact" section shows every property HubSpot thinks is important. For most teams, half of those are irrelevant. The fix takes two minutes:

Open any contact record. Click the settings icon (the gear) on the left sidebar. This opens the record customisation panel. From here you can add, remove, and reorder properties. You can also create entirely new sections with their own groupings.

One important distinction: if you customise through the gear icon on a record, the change applies to your entire team (or to specific teams you select). If you customise through the "Actions > Customise properties" dropdown, the change applies only to your personal view. For most implementations, you want the team-wide version so everyone starts with the same baseline.

Creating custom sections

Beyond editing the default section, you can add new sections to the left sidebar. This is where things get useful for teams with specific workflows:

A "Qualification" section with properties like ICP match, buyer role, and BANT criteria. An "Onboarding" section with properties like onboarding stage, assigned CSM, and kickoff date. A "Contract" section with properties like contract value, renewal date, and payment terms.

Each section acts as a logical grouping. When a sales rep opens a contact, they see the "Qualification" section with just the three fields they need to update after a discovery call. They don't have to scroll past twenty irrelevant fields to find them. That reduction in friction is what turns a CRM from something people tolerate into something they use.

Saved views in the CRM index

Beyond record-level customisation, you can customise the list view (the index page where you see all contacts, companies, or deals).

Saved views let you create filtered, sorted views that anyone on your team can access. For example:

"My open deals": filtered by deal owner = me, deal stage not equal to Closed Won or Closed Lost. "Stale leads": filtered by last activity date older than 30 days, lifecycle stage = Lead. "Enterprise accounts": filtered by company revenue above a threshold.

You can also choose which columns appear in the table view. Remove columns nobody uses and add the ones your team needs.

Board views for deals and tickets

Deals and tickets can be viewed as a Kanban board (pipeline view) or as a table. The board view shows cards moving through stages, which is intuitive for sales reps and service agents.

Customise what appears on each card: the default shows deal name, amount, and close date, but you can add any property. Some teams add "Next activity date" to quickly spot deals that need attention, or "Deal source" to see which channel is driving pipeline.

Make views part of your onboarding

When a new team member joins, one of their first tasks should be setting up their personal CRM views. Show them how to create saved views, how to customise their record panels, and which sections to focus on for their role.

I typically create a "starter view set" for each role during implementation, then let individuals fine-tune from there. This balances consistency with personal preference.

View customisation is one of those features that takes five minutes to set up and saves hours of frustration. A well-configured CRM view means your team sees the right data at the right time without digging through irrelevant fields.

Do this before you roll out the CRM to your team. It directly impacts adoption and data quality.