Create your custom properties

HubSpot comes with hundreds of default properties: first name, last name, email, lifecycle stage, deal amount. But no two businesses are identical, and at some point you'll need properties that don't exist out of the box. Custom properties are how you make HubSpot fit your business instead of forcing your business to fit HubSpot.

The trick is ruthlessness: create properties when there's a clear use case (segmentation, reporting, automation, or personalisation) and resist the urge to build for hypothetical future needs. Every property you create is one more field someone has to fill in. That's why answering the question "what data actually matters to us?" is harder than the technical work of creating the property itself.

Objects and properties: the structure of your CRM

Before creating custom properties, you need to understand HubSpot's data model. There are four primary objects: Contacts (records of people), Companies (records of organisations), Deals (records of potential or closed sales), and Tickets (records of service inquiries).

Think of an object as a bucket and the properties as the golf balls inside it. The Contacts bucket holds golf balls like first name, last name, email, phone number. The Deals bucket holds golf balls like amount, close date, deal stage. Every property belongs to exactly one bucket. "Annual Revenue" is a company property. "Email" is a contact property. "Deal Stage" is a deal property.

When you create a custom property, the first decision is which object it belongs to. Get this wrong and you'll have deal data on contacts or contact data on companies, which breaks your reporting and confuses your team.

Default properties versus custom properties

Default properties are created by HubSpot and exist in every account. They cover universal data points: names, emails, dates, amounts. You can't delete most default properties, but you can choose not to use them.

Custom properties are the ones you create to capture what makes your business different. A recruitment agency needs "Years of experience" on contacts. A SaaS company needs "Contract end date" on deals. A consultancy needs "Project type" on companies. These are the data points that separate a generic CRM from one that actually reflects how your business operates.

The key question before creating any custom property: will someone use this data for segmentation, reporting, automation, or personalisation? If the answer is "not right now, but maybe later", wait. Empty properties are noise. Full properties are signal.

Property types and when to use each

HubSpot offers several property types. The choice matters because it determines how you can filter, report, and automate:

Dropdown select. A predefined list of options where the user picks one. This is your workhorse for clean data. Use it for anything with a finite set of values: industry, region, product interest, lead source category. Dropdowns are easy to report on, easy to segment by, and impossible to misspell. This should be your default choice.

Multiple checkboxes. Like dropdown but allows multiple selections. Good for things like "Interested products" where a contact might care about more than one offering.

Number. Numeric values you can calculate and report on. Use for "Number of employees", "Contract value", "Lead score". Anything you might want to sum, average, or set a threshold on.

Date picker. A date field. Use for "Contract renewal date", "Last review date", "Event date". Dates enable time-based automation: "30 days before contract renewal, create a task for the account manager."

Single checkbox (boolean). A yes/no toggle. Use for flags like "Is partner", "Opted into beta", "Has completed onboarding".

Single-line text. Free-form short text. Use this sparingly, and only as a last resort. Free text is hard to report on and impossible to segment reliably. You'll end up with "UK", "United Kingdom", "GB", and "England" all representing the same thing. If you can define the options in advance, use a dropdown instead.

My rule of thumb: default to dropdown selects. Reserve free text for genuinely unique values like "Referral source name" where no predefined list makes sense.

Organising properties with groups

As you create custom properties, organise them into property groups. Groups don't affect how properties function, but they make the CRM easier to use by keeping related properties together.

Create groups that match your business concepts: "Qualification data", "Contract details", "Marketing preferences", "Onboarding status". When a sales rep opens a contact record, they can see your custom section with just the properties that matter for their workflow.

Naming conventions that prevent chaos

Agree on naming conventions before you create your first custom property. Without them, you'll end up with "Lead Source", "lead_source", "Source of Lead", and "Where did they come from?" all capturing the same data.

My recommendations:

Use sentence case, no abbreviations. "Contract renewal date" not "CRD" or "contract_renewal_date".

Prefix properties by use case if helpful: "Sales: qualification score", "Marketing: campaign source". This makes properties easy to find in the search.

Write a help text description for every property. HubSpot shows this as a tooltip when users hover over the field. A property called "Tier" means nothing without context. "Tier: client classification based on annual contract value (Bronze, Silver, Gold)" tells users exactly what to enter.

Common custom properties for B2B

Based on the implementations I've done, these are the custom properties most B2B companies end up needing:

On contacts: ICP match (dropdown), buyer role (dropdown: champion, decision maker, influencer, blocker), lead scoring category (dropdown or number), preferred language.

On companies: client tier (dropdown), industry vertical (dropdown, more specific than HubSpot's default), account manager (HubSpot owner), contract start and end dates.

On deals: deal source (dropdown: inbound, outbound, referral, partner), product line (dropdown), implementation complexity (dropdown: standard, custom, enterprise).

You won't need all of these on day one. But having a reference list helps you plan ahead.

Custom properties are one of the most powerful features in HubSpot because they let you capture the data that makes your business unique. But power creates responsibility. Every property you create is one more field someone has to fill in, one more data point to maintain, and one more potential source of inconsistency.

Create properties with intention. Start with what you need for your immediate workflows, and add new ones only when there's a clear use case.