How can custom field sections help you?

If you’re a current LACRM user, you’re probably familiar with creating custom fields. (If not, you can always learn about the custom field basics here!)

If you’ve used the CRM for years now, you might have quite the collection of custom fields tailored to your business’s needs. That’s great, but it can lead to a lot of searching and scrolling for that one particular field you need when adding a new company, contact, or pipeline item. We recently launched a custom field section feature that will make wasting time searching for a custom field a thing of the past.

As a current LACRM user, you might be wondering how you can use our brand new custom field sections.

While the possibilities are endless, I’ve created some example use cases below to give you ideas. As always, feel free to reach out if you have questions about how to make this new feature work for you.

I’ve made up four example customers below to give you an idea of how you can incorporate this feature into your workflow.

1. Abbie runs a small business and has three different types of contacts she stores in the CRM...

She has a group of vendors, a group of customers, and a group of personal contacts within the CRM.

Up to this point, when Abbie added a contact for a new vendor to her CRM, she had to scroll by all sorts of fields that didn’t apply to vendors. She had to scroll past her fields about revenue generated, which are useful for customers but not for vendors she pays. She had to scroll past some fields she added just for her personal contacts, like “kid’s birthday.” She wasted time hunting for the particular fields she needed.

Not anymore - now Abbie has created a custom field section for her vendors, a different section for customers, and another for personal contacts. She has basic information she collects on all three and then collapses or opens a particular section depending on the type of contact she is creating.

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2. Natasha is an admin on an LACRM account with seven other users. She works on the sales team. But there are custom fields on the account used by her colleagues in marketing, as well as the legal department.

In the past, she had to scroll past a lot of custom fields on contact records that she never used. Now, Natasha has organized her company’s CRM so that there are custom field sections for the marketing, sales, and legal teams. She collapses the sales and legal team field sections and stays focused on her sales work. Less clutter means a more productive workday for the whole team.

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3.  John is someone who likes to take copious notes and record every piece of information about his clients that he thinks may be useful one day.

That’s wonderful - his CRM is a treasure trove of information. But he has created so many different and obscure custom fields that he gets overwhelmed by the onslaught of custom fields when he adds a new company. Now John can easily section off and collapse those fields that aren’t as common or important - like the names of all the company’s pets - and keep focused on what really matters to him.

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4. Mabel is an architect who works on a wide variety of projects. She uses the pipeline feature to keep track of all of her ongoing architectural work.

For simplicity, Mabel likes using just one pipeline to track all of her projects, so that she can do reporting on all of her architectural work at once. This is useful for the most part, but it means that she ends up scrolling past a lot of unnecessary fields at times.

Now, Mabel can organize her pipeline fields into common building types she works on: homes, offices, and stores. When she’s adding a pipeline item for her new project to design a family’s home in St. Louis, she doesn’t have to look through all of her fields about number of elevators and number of employees that are relevant only to the big office buildings she helps design. Now she can be more efficient with her work.

These are just a few hypothetical examples of how to use custom field sections. The possibilities are endless. Definitely reach out if any questions come up about this new feature, or anything else!