Most of us stick to the standard HubSpot features like managing contacts, tracking deals, and running email campaigns. But I’m really interested in hearing about times when people got creative with the platform. Have you ever used HubSpot in a way that wasn’t exactly what it was designed for? Maybe you found a workaround for a specific problem or discovered an unexpected feature that saved your business? I’d love to hear about any unconventional solutions you’ve built using HubSpot’s tools. What creative approaches have you tried that ended up working really well for your company?
When we started scaling fast, managing freelancers became a nightmare. Regular project management tools were too rigid and pricey for our scattered contractor network. I set up HubSpot to handle everything by creating custom objects for each freelancer and linking them to project deals with deadlines. The contact scoring ranked freelancers by performance, response times, and quality. We automated payment reminders and contract renewals, while the activity timeline tracked all communications and files. The game-changer was using deal forecasting to predict project completion dates and see who’d be available next. This killed the chaos of juggling dozens of freelancers across projects, cut our admin work by about 40%, and helped us spot our best contractors for priority work.
Our engineering team disliked Jira for its rigidity, so I repurposed HubSpot’s ticketing system for product development. Each feature request became a ticket, complete with custom fields for complexity, priority, and resource requirements. I utilized workflow automation to manage status updates during design review, development, testing, and deployment.
The knowledge base proved invaluable, as we documented all technical specifications and decisions in one place. This approach eliminated duplicated efforts and improved searchability. The reporting provided clear insights into our development velocity, highlighting features that often exceeded estimates. Our release cycles became more predictable, significantly reducing the need for ongoing status update emails. Initially, the engineers were skeptical, but they now prefer this method over conventional project management tools.
we turned hubspot into an event management system when covid hit and we needed to pivot fast. built custom objects for venues, speakers, and attendees - treated each event like a big deal with all the pieces as line items. set up automated emails for speaker confirmations, venue bookings, and catering orders. the timeline view became our event calendar so we could spot conflicts right away. saved us from buying pricy event software when budgets were tight.
We ditched Zendesk for HubSpot when costs got out of hand and turned it into our support knowledge base. Each bug report becomes a deal, and we use custom properties to track how severe it is and who’s affected. The best part? Sequences automatically update users on their bug reports - no manual follow-ups needed. Our dashboard shows which bugs are dragging on so we can prioritize dev work better.
Found a clever hack when we needed to track employee onboarding. We had multiple spreadsheets everywhere and kept losing track of new hires - total mess with delays and confusion. Instead of dropping cash on expensive HR software, I built a custom pipeline in HubSpot. Each new employee became a ‘deal’ moving through onboarding stages. Each stage hit a milestone: paperwork done, IT setup, training modules, manager meetings. Custom properties tracked start dates, departments, completion percentages. Automated workflows pinged HR and managers when someone got stuck too long at any stage. The real game-changer was the reporting dashboard - showed our HR team exactly where bottlenecks happened and typical timeframes for each stage. Cut our average onboarding from three weeks down to eight days. Haven’t lost a single new hire since we rolled this out.