01
Start with the contact model
Identify the person, their organization, role, and current relationship owner. Check how the CRM handles multiple contacts at one organization and how duplicate records can be reviewed before merging.
Contact record / 01Illustrative example
ContextWhat matters to them
Last interactionDecision and open question
Next actionOwner and follow-up date
A shared record, built for the next conversation.
Field notes for growing startups · 01
When a contact changes hands, the context should travel.
A useful CRM history gives the next person a place to understand what was discussed, what remains open, and who is responsible for following up.
Explore the contact workflow01 / The challenge
The handoff gets harder as the team grows.
At first, customer context may live comfortably in a founder’s inbox and memory. Once several people speak with the same contact, that context can scatter across notes, messages, and individual calendars.
The practical risk: a teammate repeats a question, misses a commitment, or cannot tell whether a follow-up is already in progress. The issue is not a lack of data. It is a lack of usable context at the moment of handoff.
The design question: can the team find a concise account of the relationship without reading every message? Evaluate a CRM contact record against that question before collecting more fields than anyone will maintain.
02 / Workflow guide
Make the timeline useful to someone who wasn’t there.
Use a real handoff as your evaluation scenario. Walk through the contact record from the perspective of the person receiving it, then test whether the information and ownership are clear.
02
Record the interaction, not just the activity
For each meaningful call, email, or meeting, look for a date, participants, channel, and a short summary. Include decisions, relevant context, and unanswered questions. Agree on what should stay out of notes.
03
Make the next step explicit
Capture the promised action, its owner, and a target date. Evaluate whether a teammate can find that action alongside the history and distinguish it from completed work.
04
Test access and retrieval
Ask who needs to read or edit a record and what restrictions are available. Check whether the timeline can be searched or filtered by date and activity type when a relationship has a longer history.
Workshop exercise
Give a teammate a recent contact and five minutes to prepare for a handoff. Ask them to identify the last decision, the open question, and the next owner. Note every detail they have to ask someone else to find.
03 / Handoff exercise
A note with somewhere to go.
Compare a vague entry like “good call” with a note that gives the next teammate enough context to act. The structure matters more than the exact wording.
Interaction
Call with the contact about their team’s evaluation process.
Decision
The contact will involve an operations colleague in the next discussion.
Open question
Which existing contact records need to be brought over?
Next action
Relationship owner to follow up with a proposed agenda by the agreed date.
Illustrative example · Adapt the fields to your team’s actual handoff.
04 / Implementation questions
Before moving your history, settle the rules.
What should we migrate first?
Start by inventorying contact sources and choosing a small set of records to test. Map names, organizations, owners, and dates to destination fields. Review the result before deciding how much older activity is worth importing.
How much history belongs in a contact record?
Prioritize information that changes the next conversation: decisions, commitments, preferences, and unresolved questions. Set a shared standard for summaries and avoid adding sensitive details that the team does not need.
How do we keep the record useful as roles change?
Agree who updates ownership, when a handoff note is required, and how stale next actions are reviewed. Test these habits with a small group before asking the wider team to adopt them.