Fields must serve the person filling them in
There is a simple diagnostic for the state of your CRM. Take any field and ask: who fills it in, and who benefits? If the answers are “the rep” and “management”, you already know what is in that field. Garbage. Maybe well-groomed garbage, but garbage.
The pattern creeps in slowly. The VP of Sales wants to see forecast categories, so a field appears. Marketing wants to trace lead source, another field. The advisory board asks about competitors, field number three. Each one sounds reasonable, each one costs the rep twenty seconds, and not one of them helps him close a single deal faster. Three years later the opportunity has 60 fields, and the rep has a private ranking of which ones he maintains seriously, which ones he brushes off with the first picklist value in sight, and which ones get “tbd”. Ask around, that ranking really exists, on every team.
Upstairs, nobody notices for a long time, because the dashboards still look pretty. A pie chart does not distinguish between a genuine entry and an annoyed click. The VP of Sales presents a competitor distribution quarter after quarter that is 70 percent “Other” and draws conclusions from it. The data looks like data. It is noise with formatting.
The tax-return logic behind it is always the same: effort at the bottom, benefit at the top, and no flow back in between. People reliably optimize such systems for minimal effort. That is not a character question, that is economics.
Which is why every new field needs to pass a test with exactly one question: what does the person filling it in get out of it? Sometimes there is an honest answer. The “next step” field protects the rep from his own forgetting, the buying committee with roles saves him the deal when his champion resigns. Fields like that get maintained without anyone nagging. For everything else, a hard rule applies: if only reporting needs the field, a machine has to fill it, from enrichment, from activity data, from the call transcript. And if that is not possible, then the price of the insight is garbage in the field, in which case better no field at all and an honest gap in the dashboard.
Because a gap you can see is cheaper than a number you wrongly believe.
Which of your required fields would a rep fill in voluntarily? Cut all the others down and watch what happens to your data quality.
