Car dealers let you search for vehicles using filters. Menus for year, price, make, model, color, and trim lead you to your desired car.
Imagine trying to buy a car and the drop-down menu presents “V6, Yellow, Premium, Blue, 6-Speed Manual, Green, Bose Soundsystem”? It would be difficult, or impossible to narrow down to the right car.
Sounds aggravating, right?
Almost all early-stage startups do this with their CRM.
Huh?
Most startups are mixing variables. I’ll highlight what the issues are, why they’re a problem, and how to fix it.
Data entry is for detail, not stories, which come later. Don’t story tell with your data entry. Instead, tell stories with filters, views, and lists.
Car analogy: Don’t put “green with a six speed and 2-year warranty” into one field. That’s storytelling. The color, “Green,” doesn’t tell a story. It’s not supposed to. It’s meant to be an ingredient that can be filtered and cross-sectioned along with all of the other attributes of the vehicle, which should also be stored in single-variable fields.
Often, people are trying to predict how data will be interpreted when entering it. They enter data or create fields to make quick lists for a temporary use case.
The most common examples of it I see are:
Lifecycle Stage includes both Customer and “Former Customer.” Solution ⬇️Lead Status “unresponsive.” (This is now a Hubspot default. Don’t get me started on this. If anyone at Hubspot wants to make a case for this, my DMs are open). Solution ⬇️Deal Stage for “Try again later.” Solution ⬇️Your data as a “source of truth” is foundational to a RevOps system.
Like our car example, each field should contain a specific, tightly defined expectation. Even one small deviation is enough to break the trust of the user.
In our auto dealer example, would you continue shopping on a site with mixed responses in a menu? If so, would you trust that your query was accurately searching their full inventory?
If you identify customer status, engagement activity, and contact type in multiple fields; you’re giving your team the same experience as our frustrated auto shopper above.
Static lists are often overlooked. If you use Hubspot, your Contacts object has a List option. You can add Contacts or Companies to a List by selecting them and choosing the option in the menu. Temporary statuses, reminders, and grouping Contacts are all best done in Lists, not fields.
If you’re trying to capture a specific piece of data like attending a conference, create a List and keep that data out of fields.