You have a renewal coming up at the end of next month and you don't know who the current contact is, whether they're happy with the service, or what the competitor put in when they last tried to break in. That's not a CRM problem — that's a data problem. The CRM is only as useful as what goes into it after every visit.
The Competitive Audit Built Into Every Call
Opposition Info is the field most reps underuse. Logging what a competitor currently has installed at an account — make, model, vintage — turns the daily activity record into an ongoing competitive audit of the territory. When you can pull up every account running a particular competitor's aging fleet and cross-reference with Rental Period and Commencement Date, you have a list of targets sorted by likelihood to switch, built from data you collected yourself over months of site visits.
Client Type alongside Visit Type segments that data further. The existing customer on an active rental agreement is a retention call. The prospect with competitor equipment is a displacement opportunity. Keeping both types in the same record structure means the territory view is consistent — you're not toggling between separate prospect and customer systems that don't share field definitions.
Happy With Service and Issues create the early warning layer. An account that logs a service issue and then stops showing "happy" on subsequent visits is telling you something before anyone formally escalates. The pattern across six visits is information that a single visit note never is.
Lifecycle Timing as a Sales Signal
Commencement Date, Rental Period, and Current Rental together produce the one metric that matters most in equipment lease sales: time remaining. An account at month twenty-two of a twenty-four month agreement is at a fundamentally different stage of the sales relationship than one at month eight. The renewal conversation at month twenty-two should already be underway — the install, the pricing discussion, the upgrade path. At month eight, the conversation is about service quality and relationship continuity.
Cartridge Cost Monthly attached to the account record turns the CRM entry into a revenue record. Territory managers who need to report on monthly recurring revenue by account shouldn't have to pull billing reports and cross-reference with the account list manually. If the cost is logged in the visit record at the time the agreement is confirmed, the MRR calculation lives in the same database as the relationship data.
Current Equipment and Equipment together track what's installed now versus what was discussed or demoed. A client who was shown a newer model six months ago and hasn't converted yet is a different situation than one who's never seen the current lineup. Having both in the same record surfaces that gap when you're planning the next visit.
Business Name with Contact Person, Work Phone, and Mobile Phone — the mobile specifically — is the layer that survives organizational churn. Companies change. The gatekeeper changes. The procurement contact who signed the original agreement retires. The rep who logged the direct mobile for the operations manager two years ago, when they were still a junior, has a relationship that doesn't route through the main switchboard.