How to Set Up a Prospecting Database with Custom Fields
Most of the sales records we see start the same way. There’s a name, an email address and a note that says “interested”. Interested in what, though? And when did that conversation happen? You might remember it as a promising call, but the other person may simply have wanted to get back to their lunch. The details are probably in your inbox somewhere, between a supplier invoice and an email about parking. A prospecting database with a few sensible custom fields means you no longer have to go looking.
What Should a Prospecting Database Actually Do?
A prospecting database is where you keep details on potential customers and your sales notes, together. Custom fields let you record what’s specific to your business, so it becomes clear who to call, when, and why.
Why a basic contact list isn’t enough
A phone number tells you how to get hold of someone. It doesn’t tell you if this morning is a good time to try, or whether there’s any point calling at all.
What you need to know depends heavily on the type of business you run. An IT support firm will want to know when a prospect’s current contract is up for renewal. For a commercial cleaning company, the number of sites a client has matters a great deal, along with when they normally review their suppliers. An accountant, on the other hand, mainly needs to know whether the enquiry is about payroll, bookkeeping or a tax return.
Custom fields are simply extra boxes that sit alongside the standard name and email, so these details have somewhere obvious to live. Not every detail deserves its own box, mind you. If knowing something wouldn’t change who you call next or what you say to them, a short note will do. Sometimes it doesn’t need recording at all.
A real-world example: the cleaning contract
Let’s say the owner of a small cleaning company gets talking to a building manager at a networking event. The manager is unhappy with their current cleaners, who keep missing weekend shifts. They’re responsible for three sites, their contract runs until March, and they’ve said they won’t look at quotes before January.
If the owner gets back to the office and types “interested in cleaning” into the system, almost all of that is lost. Calling the following week would be too early. Remembering in April would be too late, because by then someone else will have signed the contract.
A record that would actually help looks more like this:
Field | What’s recorded |
Service required | Commercial cleaning |
Number of sites | 3 |
Current agreement ends | March |
Review date | January |
Next step | Call building manager to share proposal |
Owner | Sarah |
Notes | Current cleaners keep missing weekend shifts |
Sarah, or anyone else in the team, can read that in a few seconds and know exactly where things stand. Nobody has to interrupt the owner to ask what was said.
Why So Many Prospecting Databases Get Ignored
We’ve seen plenty of databases that were set up with real care and still brought in very little work. In most of those cases, the software was fine. The trouble was that nobody kept it updated once the business got busy, and in a small business that happens most weeks.
What people say versus what they actually do
If you ask your team whether they’ll log every sales call, they’ll almost certainly say yes, and they’ll mean it. Then a customer rings with a burst pipe, or a job overruns by half a day, or two people are off sick at the same time. The note about the sales call gets pushed further and further down the list until it’s forgotten.
This is what we mean by behaviour-led. Owners rarely fail to follow up because they don’t care about new business. They fail to follow up because something more urgent landed on their desk. When a system asks for twelve boxes to be completed after every call, people stop using it fairly quickly. The information ends up on the back of an envelope, in a flagged email, or in someone’s memory (more often than not, the owner’s).
A better approach is to build the database around how your team works when things are hectic. In practice, that means fewer fields, and each one there for a clear reason. It also means every prospect has a named person responsible for them and a date for the next contact.
The owner’s memory as the company filing system
Going back to the cleaning company for a moment. The owner knows about the January call. They know about the missed weekend shifts, and they could probably name all three buildings. For as long as the owner is in the office, nothing goes wrong.
Then they take a week off in Cornwall. On the second morning, a message arrives from the office asking “who was the woman from the property company, and did we promise to send her something?” Nobody can answer, because none of it was ever written down where anyone else could see it.
The owner’s memory wasn’t really the problem. The problem was that the business had no way to share what one person knew. A good database moves the important facts out of your head and into a place where a colleague can find them and act on them. It doesn’t need a transcript of every conversation, only the details someone would need to take the next step.
Setting Up Your Prospecting Database: Four Steps
Don’t start with the software. Start with a normal week in your business and the calls you have to make in it: who gets chased, who gets a quote, who gets left until next month. Your fields should exist to help with those calls and nothing else. We’d take a scrappy little database that gets opened every morning over an impressive one that hasn’t been touched since March.
Step 1: Choose a tool that suits how your team already works
Before you sign up for anything, have a look at what you’re already paying for. You may well have something that will do the job.
Where does your team actually spend its day? If the answer is Notion, because that’s where the meeting notes and project plans already live, put your leads in there too. One less tab to forget about. Airtable is worth a look for people who think visually. You get cards, tidy tables and the option to hang several contacts (or several properties) off one client record, which suits property managers and multi-site businesses rather well.
A proper CRM earns its keep later on, usually once you want email tracking, pipeline stages and reminders in one place instead of spread across three apps and a notebook. Until then, if your current setup can store a date and a bit of custom information, sort out how you’re using it first. New software rarely fixes old habits.
Step 2: Choose fields that help you make decisions
Pull up your last five enquiries. Not a sample of your best ones, just the last five, whatever they were.
For each, ask yourself what you had to find out before you could quote or book a call. Then ask the slightly more uncomfortable question: what should you have asked and didn’t?
Your answers will probably include a few of these. The service they wanted. Where they’re based, or the area you’d need to cover. How many sites or staff they have. Who they use now, when that contract runs out and how quickly they want to make a decision. How they heard about you is worth knowing too, if only so you can stop spending money on the things that don’t bring anyone in.
Choose three to five of them for now. A bookkeeper cares about year ends and VAT quarters. An IT firm cares about user numbers and when a support contract renews. Copying someone else’s template means recording things you’ll never use.
One last check. Most systems already come with a task owner and a reminder date built in, so use those rather than inventing your own text boxes to do the same thing.
Step 3: Use the right field types
This part isn’t exciting, but it makes a big difference to whether you can sort and filter your data later.
Dropdown lists work best for fixed categories such as service type. Without them, you’ll find “Bookkeeping”, “book-keeping” and “accounts” all recorded as if they were separate services. Renewal and review dates should go in proper date fields, because that’s what allows you to filter for every contract ending next month. A note that says “sometime in spring” can’t be filtered at all. Number fields are useful for things like how many sites, user licences or vans a client has. Free text is best kept for short pieces of context, for example “wants to discuss pricing after their board meeting in May”.
It’s also worth adding an “Unknown” option to each dropdown. An honest “Unknown” is much more useful than an answer someone made up just to get past a compulsory field.
Step 4: Set up views and a weekly review
Once your fields are in place, create a few filtered views that answer practical questions. You might want a view showing which leads need a call this week, another for contracts ending in the next 60 days, and one for prospects with no next step recorded.
After that, set aside around fifteen minutes each week to go through those views and see what’s overdue, what’s coming up and what has stalled. Over time, updating the record should become part of finishing a call, rather than a job left until Friday afternoon. However well the system is set up, it still relies on someone in the team making the call.
What to Do Next
You’ve already looked at your last five enquiries, so pick out the one detail that would have saved you the most chasing. That’s your first field sorted.
Then open whatever system you use now and have a clear-out. Duplicate fields, boxes nobody fills in, that “Misc” column someone set up in 2021: get rid of them before you add anything. While you’re in there, ask each person in the team to show you their tasks for the coming week. If they have to dig around to find them, that needs fixing too.
For the next fortnight, keep it simple. Record renewal dates, record who owns each follow-up, and leave everything else alone. Once that’s happening without anyone being reminded, you can start adding to it.
If follow-up still feels inconsistent after a few weeks, the cause is usually the process rather than the software. At Waggle Dance, we start by looking at how enquiries are actually handled in your business on an ordinary day. We then set up the fields, views and routines to match how your team really works, which makes it far more likely the system will be used.
Most of the founder-led businesses we work with don’t need more tools. What they need is a simpler process and a clear understanding of who is responsible for each follow-up, and by when.
FAQs
How many custom fields should I start with?
Three, maybe four, and five at a push. The renewal date and the service they’re after are good places to begin, because both tell you when to call and what to talk about. Get the team filling those in without being nagged, then think about adding more.
Is a spreadsheet good enough for a small business?
For a while, yes. If it’s just you and a dozen or so prospects, a spreadsheet will do the job perfectly well. Things start to go wrong when three people are editing it, two versions are floating around on email, and nobody’s quite sure who promised to ring the dentist back. That’s usually the point to move to something with proper date fields, reminders and the option to assign a follow-up to a named person.
How do I get my team to keep the database up to date?
Keep it quick to update and make sure the information is used. That means keeping the number of fields low, giving every record an owner and a next-contact date, and going through the database in your weekly review. If nobody ever looks at what’s been entered, people will understandably stop bothering.
Can I send marketing emails to everyone in my database?
No, not automatically. Having someone’s email address doesn’t give you permission to send them marketing. In the UK, the rules are set out in UK GDPR and PECR, and they differ depending on whether you’re contacting a limited company or an individual, such as a sole trader. Keep a record of how each lead found you, log any opt-out requests straight away, and read the ICO’s guidance before you start any outreach campaign.
If your follow-up currently depends on memory and good intentions, it may help to have someone look at it from the outside. Book a Clarity Call with Waggle Dance and we’ll go through how enquiries move through your business at the moment, and where you might be losing them.
