Make an attribute required or admin-only
Two settings that decide whether data gets captured at all, and who is allowed to see it.
These two settings look administrative and are about behaviour. Required changes what people type; admin-only changes what they see.
The trap with required fields is specific and worth stating: a required field must be knowable at the moment a contact is created. Requiring something an agent only learns on the second call does not produce better data — it produces made-up data on the first call, which is considerably worse than a blank.
Steps
Open the attribute and find its settings rail
Required, admin-only, a default and visibility all live per attribute rather than being global policies.
That granularity is what lets you require a phone number, hide a margin field from agents, and default a source — three different decisions about three different fields.
Make something required only if it is knowable up front
Name and phone, yes. Budget band, almost never — nobody knows that when they enter a lead, and requiring it guarantees a workspace full of guesses.
Expect required fields to sort first
They move to the top of the record and the create sheet with a red asterisk, which is what makes a long form navigable rather than exhausting.
Use admin-only for commercially sensitive fields
Margin, internal scoring, contract value, anything you would not want read aloud by an agent on a call. They see the record without those rows.
Set a default only where one is genuinely typical
A default source of "Website" saves a thousand keystrokes if most leads come from the website. A default that is wrong half the time silently poisons your source reporting, which is worse than having none.
Review after a month
Look at how often each required field contains junk. That is your evidence it should not have been required.
Check it worked
Filter Contacts by each required field and look for placeholder values — "n/a", "0", "TBC", a single full stop. Every one is somebody working around a requirement that does not fit reality.
The parts people get wrong
- Standard attributes can be made required or admin-only, but never renamed, retyped or deleted.
- Admin-only is a visibility control, not encryption. It keeps a field off an agent's screen; it is not a security boundary for secret data.