What is the difference between a default and a custom property?

Default properties ship with the CRM and are used by its built-in features and reports. Custom properties are yours: fully flexible, and fully your responsibility to define, populate and maintain.

How many custom properties is too many?

There is no fixed limit, but if a new team member cannot find the right field without asking, or if more than a third are mostly empty, you are past it.

What is a calculated property?

A property whose value is derived from others by formula rather than entered — days since last contact, or margin from amount and cost. It cannot go stale through neglect, which makes it preferable wherever the value is derivable.

Property

A single field on a CRM record. The unit of everything a CRM knows — and the unit of everything it gets wrong, because each one is a promise that somebody will maintain it.

Also called: Custom Property, Attribute, Field

What it is

A property — field, attribute, depending on the vendor — is one piece of information on a record: industry, deal amount, lifecycle stage, renewal date. Default properties ship with the CRM; custom properties are the ones you create.

The cost nobody budgets for

Creating a property takes ten seconds. Maintaining it is permanent. Every property is a question somebody must answer on every record, a column in every import, a field in every integration mapping, and an option in every report builder. A portal with 400 properties is not richer than one with 80; it is one where nobody can find the right field and half are empty.

The test before creating one

Will a decision change based on this value? If not, it is a note, not a property.
Who fills it in, and what do they get back for doing so?
Is it already expressible with an existing property, or a combination of two?
What is the constrained set of values? Free text where a picklist belongs is how reporting dies.

Validation is the cheap part

Required-on-stage-change, unique values, character limits and constrained picklists cost nothing at creation and are almost impossible to retrofit once thousands of records carry inconsistent values.

RELATED TERMS

CRM

The system of record for customer relationships — the accounts, people, deals and interactions a revenue team works from. Its value is decided by what is entered into it, not by which vendor supplies it.

Data Governance

The rules determining who may change what, how changes are reviewed, and how they are recorded. The control that stops a designed system from drifting back to whatever it was before.

Data Hygiene

The continuous practice of keeping records accurate, complete and current — as distinct from data quality, which is the state that practice produces.

Field Governance

The rules controlling who may create, alter or retire fields, and the review that applies before they do.

COMMON QUESTIONS

What is the difference between a default and a custom property?: Default properties ship with the CRM and are used by its built-in features and reports. Custom properties are yours: fully flexible, and fully your responsibility to define, populate and maintain.
How many custom properties is too many?: There is no fixed limit, but if a new team member cannot find the right field without asking, or if more than a third are mostly empty, you are past it.
What is a calculated property?: A property whose value is derived from others by formula rather than entered — days since last contact, or margin from amount and cost. It cannot go stale through neglect, which makes it preferable wherever the value is derivable.

WHERE THIS HAS BEEN APPLIED

Client work and research from RevOps HQ, our consulting practice.

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