When teams first adopt HubSpot, one of the most overlooked yet transformative tools at their disposal is custom views. They might sound simple but, the way you structure, filter, and share these views can make or break your team's daily efficiency. Whether you’re managing a busy sales pipeline, tracking MQLs, or supporting customer requests, the right views keep everyone aligned and focused on what really matters.
This guide explores how to build and manage custom views that streamline workflows, increase adoption, and ultimately help teams spend less time searching for data and more time acting on it. From advanced filtering techniques to department-specific examples, you’ll learn how to turn your HubSpot CRM into a productivity engine and why working with an expert agency accelerates success.
Setting up custom views is the foundation for effective HubSpot adoption. These aren’t just visual preferences, they’re strategic dashboards for daily execution. When configured correctly, custom views help every team member focus on the right data, at the right time, in the right format.
It’s easy to confuse views, lists, and reports but, each serves a different purpose.
Views are user-level displays of CRM data, ideal for day-to-day use. They let you filter and sort records like contacts, deals, or tickets.
Lists are dynamic or static groupings typically used for marketing automation or segmentation.
Reports aggregate data trends across time which are perfect for measuring performance, not managing tasks.
For onboarding teams, clarifying this distinction early prevents misuse and ensures users know where to work and where to analyse.
Custom views shine when teams need quick, operational insight without switching modules or exporting data. Examples include:
Sales: seeing deals closing this week or opportunities missing next steps.
Marketing: reviewing new MQLs generated in the past seven days.
Service: checking open tickets by SLA or agent workload.
By aligning each team’s daily workflow around pre-configured views, you reduce CRM friction and drive faster adoption.
Treat your views like living assets, not static setups. Establish naming conventions (e.g., “Pipeline – Closing This Month”), review filters quarterly, and declutter outdated ones. Encourage each department lead to maintain shared views that reflect current business priorities.
A well-governed set of views ensures teams aren’t working from inconsistent datasets which tends to be a common issue that leads to duplicated effort and reporting gaps.
HubSpot’s permission settings let you control visibility and prevent data chaos. Not everyone needs to see everything.
Private views help individuals tailor their workspace.
Shared views ensure alignment across teams.
Restricted views protect sensitive pipelines or accounts.
For enterprises or scaling businesses, this structure supports compliance and data security, especially when combined with a solid CRM governance model.
Each department uses HubSpot differently. Building tailored views ensures every team member operates with purpose, visibility, and speed. This section outlines how to optimise views for sales, marketing, service, and leadership.
Sales teams thrive on clarity. Create pipeline views that filter deals by stage, owner, and close date, so reps know exactly what’s next. Add filters for “No next activity” or “Stale for X days” to surface deals at risk.
Managers can use summary views to track team performance, while reps focus on daily priorities, eliminating the noise of irrelevant deals.
For marketing teams, custom views simplify lead qualification and handover. Use filters such as Lifecycle Stage = MQL, Source = Paid, or Recent Form Submission = True to highlight leads that need immediate nurturing or sales follow-up.
These views help marketing and sales stay in sync ensuring no hot lead slips through the cracks.
In Service Hub, efficiency is everything. Set up views to surface open tickets by priority, SLA breach risk, or agent. Automating these through workflow triggers ensures support teams never lose sight of urgent cases.
This structure also helps leaders measure workload distribution and spot recurring issues faster, improving overall customer experience.
Executives need top-level visibility, not granular data. Build summary views for high-value deals, major accounts, or pipeline health. Combining these with dashboards allows leadership to monitor performance in real-time, supporting data-driven decisions without operational overload.
Once the basics are mastered, it’s time to turn views into powerful strategic tools. Advanced filtering allows you to surface exactly what matters; using logic, timing, and custom properties to cut through the noise.
HubSpot’s strength lies in flexibility. Integrate custom properties; like product category, deal complexity, or region, into your views to align them with your business model. This ensures your CRM reflects the real structure of your organisation, not a generic sales framework.
Combine multiple filters using AND/OR logic to refine datasets precisely. For example:
Deals in progress AND over £20k AND owned by Enterprise team.
Contacts with no activity in 30 days OR open deal in negotiation stage.
These compound filters save teams from endless sorting, letting them act immediately.
Time filters like “Close date within 30 days” or “Created this quarter” help teams forecast workloads and track progress. Marketing can filter campaigns launched last week; sales can focus on deals closing soon. Temporal logic ensures everyone’s eyes are on the most relevant tasks.
For the most advanced teams, behaviour-based filters (page visits, email clicks, meeting bookings) elevate personalisation and responsiveness. Sales can follow up faster, marketing can retarget effectively, and service teams can identify at-risk accounts before issues escalate.
Even the most sophisticated setup fails without strong adoption. This final section focuses on how to embed your new custom views into daily operations, turning great setup into lasting productivity.
Training is critical to onboarding success. Document each view’s purpose, owner, and update schedule. Run team workshops that walk users through how to create, filter, and save their own. The goal: make custom views feel like time-saving allies, not admin tasks.
Monitor engagement with custom views using HubSpot activity logs. Which views are opened most? Which are ignored? These insights reveal adoption blockers and help you refine setups continuously, ensuring your CRM evolves with your business.
Productivity is the ultimate KPI. Measure the time saved on admin tasks, the increase in closed deals, or the drop in overdue tickets since deploying custom views. Linking these improvements to tangible ROI helps justify further investment in HubSpot optimisation.
Working with a certified HubSpot partner like Forbidden Marketing accelerates setup and adoption. Agencies bring deep knowledge of governance frameworks, role-based permissions, and view logic that fits complex business models. Beyond implementation, they help ensure your CRM isn’t just functional, it’s built for scale, adoption, and commercial impact.
When set up strategically, custom views do far more than tidy up data, they shape how teams work. They bring clarity, accountability, and focus to everyday activity, helping sales, marketing, and service teams prioritise what matters most. Instead of navigating endless records, users get instant visibility into high-value tasks and opportunities, driving both productivity and adoption across the business.
Ultimately, effective view management turns HubSpot from a simple CRM into a system of alignment and action. Every view becomes a window into performance, every user works from the same source of truth, and every department pulls in the same direction. Done right and supported by an experienced onboarding partner, it’s one of the simplest ways to turn HubSpot setup into sustained commercial impact.