$ man properties

Properties

Custom fields in a CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce) that store data about contacts, companies, or deals. "Industry," "Employee Count," "ICP Score," "Last Outreach Date," "Lifecycle Stage."

when I was manually building buying committees in Salesforce, I didn't understand properties. I just filled in the default fields and hoped they were enough. they weren't. CRMs are useless without custom properties. they're just contact lists. properties turn them into databases. I learned this when a sales rep asked "show me everyone we contacted in Q4 who didn't reply" and I had to scroll through 2,000 records because we didn't have a last_outreach_date property.

I create custom properties in HubSpot for every enrichment field that matters. icp_score (0-10), persona_tier (1-5), mx_provider (Google/Microsoft/Other), web_reveal_date, last_clay_sync. I map Clay columns to HubSpot properties in the sync so enriched data flows automatically. I also use properties to build views — "show me all contacts with icp_score >= 8 AND persona_tier <= 2 AND last_outreach_date is unknown." properties are the query language. learn them or drown in your own data.