Decide what a record represents
The first decision is the one most often skipped: does a record represent a legal entity, a trading name, a site, or a department? All four are defensible. Mixing them is not.
Branch offices, subsidiaries and holding companies need an explicit rule. Without one, the same customer appears three times and no report is trustworthy.
Use fields, not free text
Anything you will ever filter, group or report on needs to be a field with defined values, not a note. Industry, size band, region, lifecycle status and account owner all belong in structured fields.
The counter-discipline matters too: not everything deserves a field. Every optional field is a small tax on whoever creates a record, and fields that are rarely filled make reports misleading rather than incomplete.
- Categories and segments that match how you actually divide the market.
- Lifecycle statuses that map to your commercial stages, in your language.
- Explicit ownership — an individual or a named team queue, never blank.
- Custom fields for the handful of attributes specific to your business.
Agree naming conventions before the data grows
Duplicate records are almost always a naming problem. One person enters the legal name with its suffix, another the trading name, a third an abbreviation.
Pick a convention, write it down somewhere the team will actually see it, and clean up duplicates in the spreadsheet before importing rather than discovering the problem during a campaign.
Keep it findable
Organization only pays off at retrieval. Real-time search, saved filter presets and configurable column views are what turn a well-structured database into one people use.
Different departments need different views of the same records — a finance view and a sales view are not the same table, and forcing one on both guarantees someone exports to a spreadsheet.