When you created your Pipeline, you fully customized your pipeline stages. How do you get the same level of customization on leads, people, opportunities and companies? Create custom fields!
In this module, we'll tackle the following:
Understand custom fields
By default, your lead, people, company and opportunity records present you with fields to fill out. When you clicked 'Add New' in the last few exercises, you had required fields to fill out to create the record - things like 'Lead Name' or 'Primary Contact.' There were also a number of optional default fields on each record. Click the links in this sentence to review the default fields for leads, people, companies or opportunities.
These default fields may not give you all the data you want to collect and report on. That's where adding custom fields to the records can help.
Let's look at an example of why you might create a custom field:
As a B2B software company, you want to know which industries rely on your software most heavily. To collect this data, you could create a custom drop-down field called 'Industry' and add it to the company record. Your Team Members would select the relevant industry from the drop-down field when filling out the company record, which you can report on later.
Note: If you plan to import data from another source, you'll want to create all of your custom fields first. That way the data you bring into the system will have a place to land.
Define how you'll use custom fields
Answer the following questions to determine if you should create custom fields. These questions will also help you determine what fields you need to create:
What data are you hoping to collect from leads, people, companies and opportunities?
Of that data, what isn't available in the default fields for leads, people, companies or opportunities?
What reports do you want to build to measure success?
If you want to build reports around data that isn't native to the lead, person, company or opportunity record, you'll need to create a custom field to capture that data.
Create a custom field
The easiest way to create a new custom field is in a record view:
You can also create a new field from your Copper settings:
Sign into your Copper account, and click 'Settings' from the left-hand menu.
Select 'Custom Fields' from the 'Customize Copper' section.
Choose the record type you want to create a field for.
Choose your field type in the pop-up box.
Give the field a label. This is the name that will identify the field on the record.
Click 'Create Field.'
Continue creating as many custom fields as you need.
Organize your Fields into Sections
If you'd like to organize your Fields into specific, collapsible sections, you can do so by clicking "Add Section" in the upper right corner of field settings.
This allows you to organize your default and custom fields into sections that contain related information. For example, you might create a section for "Contact Details" or "System Info" or "Financial Details".
To learn how to do create these sections, please review our article Organize your Fields with Collapsible Sections.