Creating Custom Fields and Data Forms in Your CRM

Customizing fields and data forms ensures you get the information you need into your CRM system so your team can make informed decisions about your leads and customers. That said, it’s critical to follow certain best practices for managing that data to make sure your team always has the most accurate customer information available.

Read on to learn why custom fields and data forms are so helpful and how to implement them with your CRM!

In this guide:

• CRM custom fields explained
• CRM data forms explained
• Data validation explained

What are CRM custom fields?

Custom fields are fields you create to collect and record customer data based on your specific business needs and objectives. They allow you to capture more than just the standard customer contact details, letting you create fields to gather the information most important to your company.

Although your CRM likely comes with an extensive list of fields out of the box for managing different processes, your organization may need to input, track, and search for more customized information. Using custom fields in your CRM is the solution.

Creating custom fields in your CRM allows you to tailor your CRM to your organization’s needs. Custom fields ensure your team keeps track of important information about your leads and customers and appropriately records their sales activities within your CRM.

You can generally create custom CRM fields for a wide range of information, including:

• Companies, people, and leads
• Activity types
• Company types

The standard types of fields you can expect to find in your CRM include the following:

• Short text field (typically up to 225 characters)
• Long text field
• Currency field
• Date field
• Email address field
• Dropdown list field
• Address field
• Phone number field
• Website URL field

How to create custom fields

The exact steps for creating custom fields in your CRM depend on which CRM you’re using and your customization options. Here are a few general tips about how to create a custom field and place that field on the appropriate page in your CRM:

How to create custom fields

• Take a look at your CRM’s default fields
• Decide what custom CRM fields you want
• Create custom fields in your CRM before importing data

• Take a look at your CRM’s default fields: Your CRM already comes with several default fields for entering and organizing contact information. Consider what fields already exist in your software and what others to create to get the capabilities you need.
• Decide what custom CRM fields you want: The purpose of creating custom fields is to allow your team to keep track of the data that matters most to your business. Consider what information you want to gather in your custom fields, such as customer demographics, the sales activities your team completes as part of their process, company classifications, and engagement metrics.
• Create custom fields in your CRM before importing data: It’s generally a good idea to create any custom fields you may need in your CRM before importing new data. The extra step ensures all your data imports smoothly and minimizes the data cleaning you have to perform after the import.

Custom field use cases

There are plenty of reasons to implement custom fields. Here are a few CRM custom field ideas to help you enrich customer data, optimize business processes, and develop stronger relationships:

• Product interest: Improve targeted marketing efforts by tracking specific products or services your prospects and customers are interested in.
• Preferred method of communication: Keep a record of your customer’s or prospect’s preferred communication channels, such as email, phone, SMS, or face-to-face meetings.
• Purchase frequency: Optimize your loyalty programs by tracking when and how often your customers purchase your products or services.
• Industry: Segment prospects and customers by different industries to develop more relevant marketing messaging and sales offers.
• Event RSVP: Make a note of whether your prospects or customers will be attending your next event.
• Customer sentiment: Gather feedback from prospects and customers to gauge satisfaction and assign each a score.
• Target market segment: Group your customers based on different factors, including demographics, behavior, preferences, etc.
• Social media handles: Collect as many social media handles as possible for multi-channel communication if it makes sense for your business.
• Priority level: Assign a level of priority to each customer or prospect based on your organizational goals and processes.
• Contract renewal date: Note the date of expiration of your customer’s contract to ensure your team reaches out to them for renewal before it lapses.

What are CRM data forms?

CRM data forms are web forms embedded on your website that allow you to collect customer data and generate leads. Data forms convert more leads into customers by prompting website visitors to reach out to your team so you can learn how to meet their needs.

With the right tools, you can easily create custom data forms and embed them in your website to gather the data you want from your customers and leads. Data forms are fully customizable to fit your company’s brand and ask the questions that matter most, whether that’s the size of your lead’s company or the problem they’re struggling to solve.

Some of the key data points you can collect through data forms includes:

• People’s names
• Company names
• Email addresses
• Phone numbers
• Communication preferences
• And much more!

How to create data forms

Designing and implementing data forms on your site is easy if you use the right tools. Follow these steps for creating data forms for your organization’s website:

How to create data forms

• Set goals for your forms
• Decide where to embed your forms
• Choose the right form builder
• Embed the data forms on your site
• Track your form’s effectiveness

1. Set goals for your forms

It may be tempting to gather as much information as possible from your leads with each form. However, without specific goals, your data forms could become too long and complex, discouraging leads from filling them out. Your team could also gather information that doesn’t help your company meet its objectives and instead clutters your CRM.

Create a short list of goals you want your data form to achieve to ensure you’re gathering relevant and helpful information from your leads. For example, you may want your forms to encourage leads to upload files, answer a multiple-choice question, provide their email addresses, or describe in detail what’s interesting or bothering them.

2. Decide where to embed your forms

Online forms live on specific pages on your website, so you can easily gather the information you need from leads depending on their needs.

Decide where to place each form based on where it will most likely reach its goals. Some of the best places to embed data forms on a website include your customer support page, about page, and website footer.

3. Choose the right form builder

When it comes to actually designing your data forms, selecting the right tools is critical. Research the form builders available to see which ones provide the capabilities your business needs.

Look for a form builder that makes it easy to customize the form’s design and what information you gather through it. It’s also a great idea to use a form builder that connects with and automatically creates new leads in your CRM when someone submits their information.

4. Embed the data forms on your site

Once you’ve designed your data forms, it’s time to set them live on your site. If you don’t have a developer on your team, use a form builder that makes it easy to start collecting customer data. A form builder that connects to your website via an embeddable code can be easily copied and pasted wherever you need it to live.

5. Track your form’s effectiveness

Is your form’s wording or design leading to more or less form submissions? With a form builder that tracks page visits, submissions, and conversion rates, you can see what’s working and improve what isn’t.

CRM form use cases

Custom CRM data forms are an excellent way to engage prospects and customers and are also ideal tools for collecting critical information about customers’ needs.

Not sure how to maximize this incredible tool? Take a look at these examples of CRM form use cases for inspiration:

• Inquiry form: Give website visitors the opportunity to contact your team and submit an inquiry to gather more information about your products and services.
• Newsletter signup form: Build your newsletter mailing list through a subscription form that lets you collect customer and prospect names and email addresses.
• Gated content form: Ask your landing page or website visitors to complete a short form for access to high-value content, such as an industry-related report or ebook.
• Customer support form: Develop a form specifically for capturing customer support requests, with fields that allow them to describe the type of issue and provide more information.
• Customer feedback: Let your customers send you feedback or a review regarding their experience with your brand, product, and services.
• Event registration: Allow website visitors an opportunity to sign up for your upcoming event or webinar through a tailored form.

What is data validation?

Data validation is the process of reviewing your data to ensure it’s up-to-date, complete, and correct after data cleaning is complete. When your team validates your CRM data, they make sure it follows your business’s rules so they can trust it and the insights it provides.

Once you create custom fields and data forms for your CRM, you need to set up data validation. Validating the data your teams collect through forms and fields ensures that your information is usable and is critical to keeping your CRM data accurate.

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How to set up data validation

Your CRM may be able to complete some aspects of data validation for your team, but your team should manually handle what it can’t. Here are a few tips for setting up data validation:

• Create custom data checks: Data validation is all about fixing or removing dirty data. Set up data checks that search for incomplete or inaccurate data in your CRM system. Ensure that data types, ranges, and patterns are all accurate and complete.
• Require the important information in your data forms: To ensure your team receives complete information from leads when they fill out a form, make specific fields in your forms required. Requiring data like a visitor’s company name or email address ensures the new leads you create from your form submissions contain all the relevant information.
• Create a data validation schedule: Data validation should be a regular practice to help your team catch any issues before they use inaccurate data in analytics or decision-making. Decide how frequently you should validate your data and create a schedule to make sure no information falls behind.
• Prevent duplicated data from entering your CRM: When it comes to data validation, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. To reduce the chance of inputting incomplete data in your CRM, take steps to prevent duplicates from being created.

Benefits of CRM data validation

Following data validation best practices offers numerous benefits to your organization as a whole. But the core advantages include:

Improved data accuracy

Setting up a data validation process for your business can go a long way toward preventing data errors, which typically occur due to human error. With a solid system in place, you can reduce incorrect and inconsistent data instances and improve data reliability and integrity.

Enhanced data quality

Accurate and up to date data improves data quality, providing leadership with reliable data. This typically leads to better business reporting, analytics, decision-making, and overall outcomes.

Better data compliance

Data validation plays a key role in ensuring companies comply with requirements related to data collection and use. With improved data integrity comes an increase in security and privacy, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive information.

Choose a CRM that makes it easy to gather and validate the data you need

Implementing best practices for managing your CRM data will make your CRM data more useful for your whole team. Using custom fields and data forms enables you to gather the customer and lead information your sales and marketing teams need to make top-notch decisions and transform more leads into customers.

Having the right CRM is also important for making the most of your data, and Nutshell is the perfect tool for organizing and managing your customer information.

Nutshell makes it easy for your team to input data into custom fields within the platform and ensure data is up to date. And with Nutshell Forms, you can easily create beautiful and functional forms that collect lead information and give you actionable insights into your site’s visitors. Plus, other powerful features like sales automation, pipeline management, performance tracking, and built-in email marketing tools make Nutshell the best option for companies needing a high-powered CRM system.

Wondering exactly how Nutshell can help your company? Sign up for a free trial to see our features in action, or reach out to our team with any questions!

Frequently asked questions

1. Can I edit or delete custom fields after I’ve created them?

Yes, you can edit custom field names and settings anytime in Nutshell. However, deleting a custom field permanently removes all data stored in that field. We recommend hiding unused fields instead of deleting them to preserve your historical data.

2. How many custom fields should I create in my CRM?

Create only the custom fields you’ll actually use for reporting, segmentation, or automation. Start with 5-10 essential fields, then add more as needed. Too many fields clutter your CRM and slow down your team’s workflow.

3. What’s the difference between custom fields and tags in a CRM?

Custom fields store structured data (like dropdown selections, dates, or numbers) that’s great for reporting and filtering. Tags are flexible labels for quick categorization and bulk actions. Use custom fields for standardized information and tags for dynamic grouping.

4. Can I make custom fields required for my team?

Yes, Nutshell lets you make custom fields required during setup. Required fields ensure your team captures essential information before saving records. This helps maintain complete, high-quality data across your CRM for better reporting and decision-making.

5. Do custom fields work with CRM integrations and imports?

Absolutely. Nutshell custom fields integrate seamlessly with third-party apps and can be mapped during data imports. When importing, you can match your existing data columns to Nutshell custom fields, ensuring all your information transfers smoothly into your CRM.

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