Most CRMs do not become cluttered in one go. A manager wants to know the size of a customer, so a field is added. Marketing wants to know the event where someone was met, so another one follows. A year later a deal screen has forty fields, half of them empty, and nobody remembers why some of them exist. Pomio CRM recommends treating a new field as a small decision with a clear owner, not as a quick fix.
Why extra fields are not free
Every field costs attention. Salespeople scroll past it on every record, new colleagues ask what it means, and imports and migrations have to map it. Worse, a field that is filled in by some people and ignored by others gives reports a false sense of precision: a chart based on a field that is twenty percent complete says more about who filled it in than about your customers. That is also why required fields should only block a stage change where the information truly matters for the next step.
Four questions before you add a field
Before adding a field, answer four questions. Which report, view or decision will use it? Who fills it in, and at which moment, for example when a lead becomes a deal? What are the allowed values: a fixed list, a number, a date or free text? And who owns the field, meaning who decides on changes and checks that it is used? A fixed list of values is almost always better than free text, for the same reason that a CRM benefits from a fixed list of labels and a clear industry category. If a question only matters for one deal, a note on that deal is enough.
Let a small group decide
Adding fields is a settings change that affects everyone, so it belongs with the same small group that manages the CRM, as described in how many administrators a CRM should have. Anyone may propose a field; the owner checks it against the four questions and adds it with a short description that explains what belongs in it. That description is often the difference between a field that is filled in consistently and one that means something different to every salesperson.
Review and remove unused fields
Fields that once had a purpose can lose it. Make a quarterly check part of the regular data quality check: which fields are mostly empty, which are never used in a report or filter, and which duplicate another field? Hide those first, and remove them once nobody has missed them for a while. Before moving to another system, this is also the moment to drop fields rather than carry them along; see cleaning up CRM data before a migration.