Contact and Company Database Configuration

We start with how your business thinks about people and organisations. Do you sell to individuals, to companies or both? Can one company have many contacts, and can one person belong to several companies? Do you have branches, parent groups, distributors or agents? Do you need to record decision makers, influencers and users separately? The answers decide the data model. Then we list the information your team needs at each point: what a salesperson needs before a call, what accounts needs for an invoice, what support needs when someone writes in, and what marketing needs to segment a list. We separate must-have fields from nice-to-have ones, since every extra field is another box someone has to fill in. We design contact records with clear fields for name, mobile and landline in a standard format, email, job title, preferred language, city, lead source, owner, lifecycle stage and consent status, and company records with legal name, trade name, industry, size band, address, website and tax registration where relevant. We use dropdowns for fields that will be reported on, such as industry and source, and agree the allowed values. Next we set the rules for relationships: each contact links to one primary company, with optional additional links; each deal links to a company and at least one contact; each company has an owner. We write duplicate rules: for people, a match on mobile or email; for companies, a match on website domain, tax number or similar names, with fuzzy matching and a review step to avoid wrongly merging different firms. We turn on checks at entry points such as web forms and imports; see data import and migration. We add validation, for example standard phone formatting, required fields at certain stages and warnings for personal email domains on company contacts. We configure views, so that sales sees an uncluttered record, with the most important fields at the top, and different roles see what they need. We set permissions by team and role, with limited export rights. We add consent and communication preferences, and make sure unsubscribes flow through to every tool that sends messages. Where the CRM connects to your website and ad forms, we map form fields to CRM fields so that new records arrive complete; see Meta lead form integrations, Google Ads lead integrations and API and webhook integrations. We test by creating sample contacts and companies, trying to create duplicates, editing under different roles and exporting a list. We write a short data guide for your team, covering how to name companies, when to create a new record and how to merge, and we train staff; see CRM usage training. We plan a regular clean-up, monthly at first, to catch gaps. We cannot make staff enter data carefully, and old data may need a separate clean-up, but a well-designed structure makes careful entry easy and sloppy entry harder.