Your CRM's notes field is where good intel goes to die
Every CRM has a notes field. Almost nobody trusts what’s in it. Here’s why free text feels efficient and isn’t, and what a structured summary looks like instead.
Every CRM has a notes field. Nobody trusts it.
Open any CRM at any distributor and you'll find the same thing: a notes field full of half-sentences, abbreviations only the original rep understands, and timestamps with nothing useful attached to them. It's not that reps are careless. It's that free text is where information goes when there's no better place to put it, and free text is nearly impossible to act on at scale.
"Follow up soon" is not a plan
Search any CRM’s notes field for the phrase "follow up" and count the results. Most of them have no date, no owner, and no specifics about what following up even means. It’s not a task. It’s a note someone wrote to feel like they’d handled something, without actually creating anything a manager, a report, or a future version of that same rep could use.
Why free text feels efficient and isn't
Typing a sentence is fast. That’s exactly the problem. It’s fast enough that reps default to it under time pressure, and vague enough that it satisfies the requirement to "log the visit" without producing anything usable. A hundred notes fields full of sentences can’t be filtered, reported on, or trusted, even though writing each one felt like doing the job correctly.
What structure looks like instead
The alternative isn’t asking reps to write more. It’s turning what they already say into fields instead of sentences. "I'll get back to them on the warranty claim" becomes a task with an owner and a due date. "They mentioned a competitor’s pricing" becomes a flagged risk on the account. The information was always there. Structure is just the difference between information that can be found and information that’s technically stored somewhere.
The notes field isn't the problem. What goes into it is.
Nobody needs to delete the notes field. They need to stop treating it as the only place a visit's details are allowed to live. When commitments, risks, and follow-ups get their own structured home, the notes field goes back to what it should have been the whole time: a place for context, not the last resting place for information that mattered but never got used.
