Configuring custom objects in Sell

Available on all Sell plans

Note: You need a Sunshine license to work with custom objects in Sell.

Sell has three native object types: Leads, Contacts, and Deals. These are valuable ways to organize your business data, but don’t necessarily represent all of your business context. Sell only supports legacy custom objects. Use legacy custom objects if you’d like to adjust your Sell data to better meet your needs.

With legacy custom objects you can define new object types in Sell that are specific to your business, and then associate them with your leads, contacts, and deals. This means you can ensure your users have all the sales context available to them directly from the lead, contact, and deals cards.

To configure this feature you must be an admin in Support.

Taking full advantage of legacy custom objects in Sell takes three steps: Define your custom object, link it to a lead, contact, or a deal, then create records around it.

This article covers the following process:

Defining your legacy custom object
Linking a legacy custom object to a lead, contact, or deal
Creating object records

Defining your legacy custom object

Important: This workflow requires the use of legacy custom objects. However, you might still want to switch to the new custom object experience. See Understanding the new custom objects.

You can use legacy custom objects to represent almost anything in Sell, such as the data of your delivery companies, contract, contractors, or products. For example, if you sell physical goods, and you want to keep information about delivery companies in your system, then you need to define what information to store for each delivery company, defining how your object should be named, and what fields it should store data for.

To define a legacy custom object

Click Zendesk Products () in the top bar, then select Admin Center.
In Admin Center, click Objects and rules in the sidebar, then select Custom objects > Legacy objects.
Click Add object.
In the Object name field, enter a name for your object, for example delivery_company.
Note: For multiple words you must use an underscore between words instead of spaces.
In Add object, click Add property.
In Add property, in the Name field, enter the name of the property, for example display_name.
Note: If you want your object records to have labels, you must define the display_name attribute. In this scenario, if the lead used multiple delivery companies, then you would store the name of the delivery companies in the display_name attribute. Then your sales reps could immediately see the names of the different delivery companies that are associated with that lead.
In the Type field, choose from the drop-down menu or leave it as string if applicable.
(Optional) In the Description field you can add a brief explanation.
(Optional) Select the Required check box if you want to make sure this field is filled in for all of the object records.
Click Add.
Repeat steps 6-9, but in the Name field enter plan and do not select Required.
Specify the order you want the attributes displayed by dragging and dropping the attributes into the order you want your reps to see them.
Click Save.

Linking a legacy custom object to a lead, contact, or deal

Now you have added an object and decided how you want it displayed, you can think about how it relates to objects that already exist in Sell. It is an important step because it defines where the objects will be displayed in the system, for example on Leads, Contacts, or Deals cards.

To link your custom object to a lead, contact, or deal

Click Relationships > Add relationship.
In the field Relationship name, enter a name for your relationship, for example delivery_company.
The relationship name is displayed in the widget of an object card, so ensure your label is something that your reps will understand.

Note: You must define the relationship name using an underscore between words instead of spaces.
In the Source field, choose where you want the objects to be displayed, in this scenario, choose zen:lead.
In the Relationship type drop-down menu, choose either 1:1 or 1:Many.
If your company has multiple delivery companies, add 1:Many so there are multiple object fields, if your company uses just one delivery company, then choose 1:1.
In the Target field, choose your newly created type of object. For example, delivery_company.
Click Save.
After you have created the objects and relationships, they should look similar to the following example in the related objects widget for your sales reps.

Note: The related object widget only supports 10 relationship types. For each relationship type, your rep can add a maximum of 50 related objects. If you need more, then you must implement your own custom app.

Creating objects records

After you have set up your data structure, you must create specific object records for your reps to use. For example, if you want your reps to add multiple delivery companies to their deals, then you must create a separate object record for each company.

There are two ways to create an object record:

Use the Zendesk API (you’ll probably need a developers' help, or use a REST API client )
Use one of the apps available in Zendesk Marketplace (such as the Sunshine Data Editor)

You can create object records via the Zendesk REST API, which is especially handy if you want to use custom objects to integrate with other systems, and to ensure the information is available for your reps on the Leads, Contacts, or Deal cards. By storing information from another system in custom objects, you can have a minimal-code integration.

To create custom objects via the Zendesk REST API

Work with your developer to store and manage customer data (see Getting started with legacy custom objects).

Note: The related object widget only supports 200 custom objects records for a given object type. If you need more, you must write a custom app (see How a custom objects app is built for Sell).