CRM Inquiry Fields: The 10 Data Points That Actually Matter

BOTrento Team9 November 20267 min read

The test every field must pass

Before adding a field, ask one question: what decision or action will this field change? If you cannot name one, do not create it.

Every useful inquiry field does one of three jobs:

• Routing: it tells you who should handle the enquiry and how urgently.
• Follow-up: it tells you what happens next and when.
• Learning: it lets you review, a few months later, which enquiries turned into work and which did not.

Fields that do none of these are usually curiosity, and curiosity can live in a notes box.

The 10 fields to track

Routing fields (who and what)

1. Contact and company. Name, email and company name. Use the built-in person and organisation records in your CRM rather than free text, so repeat enquiries attach to the same company.
2. Source. A short dropdown: website form, email, phone, referral, event, repeat customer. Keep the list short. You will use it to see where good enquiries come from.
3. Request type. A dropdown matching how you actually work. An equipment rental firm might use hire, hire with delivery, or technical advice. An agency might use new project, extension, or ad-hoc support.
4. Owner. One named person. Not a team, not a shared inbox. If you are unsure how to assign, see shared inbox vs assigning enquiries for a hybrid model with ownership rules.

Follow-up fields (what happens next)

1. Required-by date. When the customer needs the work done, the event date or the delivery date. It drives priority far better than the date the enquiry arrived.
2. Stage. A handful of stages is enough: new, qualifying, quote sent, negotiating, won, lost. More stages mean more arguments about where a deal sits.
3. Next step and its date. The single most valuable pair of fields. Every open enquiry should have one action and one date. Anything without them is effectively forgotten. For setting this up with reminders, see tracking follow-ups with email tasks and CRM reminders.

Learning fields (what you review later)

1. Estimated value. A rough figure excluding VAT is enough. You are comparing enquiries, not forecasting to the euro.
2. Outcome. Won, lost or declined by you. Most CRMs have this built in.
3. Reason for outcome. A short dropdown: price, timing, scope mismatch, went silent, chose competitor, we declined. This is the field most teams skip, and the one that teaches you the most.

The first-contact date and the quote-sent date are timestamps your CRM can record automatically, so you do not need to enter them.

What to leave out (for now)

These fields tend to appear early and rarely pay off:

• Long free-text qualification boxes. The original email already holds this. Link or log the email instead.
• Detailed budget bands, decision-maker maps, competitor lists. Add them only when you have a clear process that uses them.
• Scores built from many inputs. A lead score needs data you do not yet have. Start with request type, required-by date and value, and look at the results first.
• Duplicates of data held elsewhere. Invoice details belong in your accounting tool such as Xero or QuickBooks, not in the CRM.

You can always add a field later. Removing one that the team has been filling in badly for a year is much harder.

Set it up in an afternoon: step-by-step

1. List your recent enquiries from your inbox or spreadsheet, enough to cover a typical month. Mark which became work.
2. Check each of the ten fields against them. Can you fill them in from what you have? If a field is hard to fill in for most, the wording or the options need work.
3. Create dropdown options for source, request type and reason for outcome, using the real categories from step 1.
4. Make the essential ones required when moving to the next stage: owner, next step and date at the first stage; value before a quote; reason before closing as lost.
5. Create one saved view showing open enquiries sorted by next-step date. This is your daily working list.
6. Run it for two weeks, then prune. Delete or hide any field nobody used.

In Pipedrive these are custom fields and activities; in HubSpot they are properties and tasks. The names differ, the logic does not.

Keep the data clean once it is in

Good fields still fail if the same enquiry is logged twice. Decide how email gets into the CRM, and check for duplicates by company and contact before creating a new record. Our guide to logging enquiries from email without duplicates has a setup checklist and a duplicate-check routine.

If you are not sure a CRM is the right tool yet, this comparison of spreadsheets, CRMs and AI assistants matches each to enquiry volume. The same fields work as spreadsheet columns too. If forgotten follow-ups are your main problem, our short answer on how to stop forgetting quote follow-ups covers the basics.

Where BOTrento fits

A CRM stores fields, but someone still has to read the email, fill them in and remember the follow-up. BOTrento Chief of Staff is a managed process for that part. It watches enquiries and quotes in your mailbox and in uploaded data, then gives you a daily overview each working day. It drafts replies, quotes and follow-ups in four languages, and it catches promises such as “I'll get back to you by Friday” and reminds you of them.

Nothing is sent without a person approving it, and AI use is included in the plan within a monthly usage limit (see plans and pricing). BOTrento does not replace your CRM or accounting software, and it does not read attachments, only the text of the email. You can import CRM or spreadsheet data as CSV or XLSX, so your fields come with you. See the process walkthrough for how it looks in practice.

The 14-day free trial needs no card and no API key of your own. It starts at your first successful data upload, and you have 7 days to prepare. Someone from our team contacts you within 24 hours on working days to help connect your mailbox.