From prospect to client, end to end
The arc from a name on a list to a client crosses six kinds of record, and none of them replaces the one before it. The prospect keeps its research, the Person and Company hold the relationship, the Opportunity holds the deal, and the lifecycle stage is the single field that says where the whole thing stands. Nothing is deleted as it progresses.
The whole arc#
- Trigger — a discovery run or an import puts an organisation on the list.
- User event — a person decides the prospect is worth contacting, or an outreach sequence reaches it.
- Authentication and workspace resolution — every step below happens inside one workspace and cannot reach outside it.
- Ingest — research reads public sources and the prospect record fills with claims and their evidence.
- Canonical record — the prospect exists with a fit reason and a contactability state.
- Reasoning — the opening is written from evidence-backed claims; the reply that comes back is classified.
- Knowledge, memory and rules — what the workspace knows shapes both the message and the answer; a stop at any point ends the cold path for good.
- Autonomy and approval — the send is gated by mode, compliance and allowance; conversion to a deal is a human decision and is never automatic.
- Action through a provider — messages leave through the shared send boundary and are proved by the provider's acknowledgement.
- Result — a Person and an Identity exist, an Opportunity is created, and the lifecycle stage moves through the vocabulary
stages()defines. - Relationship, timeline and memory — everything said on every channel collects on the person's timeline and in Customer 360.
- Audit, usage and Needs You — each decision is logged with its rule, and anything waiting on a human sits in one queue rather than in six screens.
Which record changes when#
| Moment | Created | Changed | Untouched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovered | Prospect | The headline counts | Everything else |
| Researched | Claims and evidence | Score, fit reason, contactability | Relationships |
| First outreach | Thread and message | Already-contacted count | Pipeline |
| Reply | Person, Identity | Prospect next action; sequence stopped | Opportunity |
| Converted | Opportunity, Company where warranted | Lifecycle stage | The prospect's evidence, which is linked not copied |
| Won | Onboarding record | Lifecycle stage | The research that started it |
| Served | Support cases as they arise | Timeline, Customer 360 | The prospect record, now history |
Reading down the *untouched* column is the fastest way to understand the design. Each stage adds a record with a narrower job than the last, and the earlier ones stay readable. That is why a question like 'why did we approach them in the first place' still has an answer after the deal closes.
The transitions people get wrong#
- Converting on a reply
- A warm sentence is not a decision. Converting early fills the pipeline with deals nobody is working, and the stage vocabulary stops meaning anything.
- Skipping the Person
- Creating an Opportunity without an Identity leaves the deal with nowhere to attach future mail, and the next message from the same human arrives as a stranger.
- Two Persons for one human
- Different addresses, never linked. Merge them; the merge preserves identities, stages, follow-ups, deals, demos, cases and onboarding from both sides.
- Deleting the prospect after conversion
- It is the provenance of the whole relationship. It costs nothing to keep and answers a question you will eventually be asked.
What carries all the way through#
- The workspace stamp. Every record above carries it, and a row without one is invisible rather than missing.
- Evidence. A claim proved during prospecting is still readable, with its source, from the relationship it became.
- The decision trail. Who decided what, under which rule, including the refusals along the way.
- Identity. One address on one channel resolves to one Person, which is what lets a call, an email and a WhatsApp message belong to the same history.
- Memory, at four tiers, narrowest first — a contact-level instruction survives the prospect becoming a client.
Questions#
At what point does someone stop being a prospect?
The prospect record never stops existing; it is marked converted and stays readable. What changes is where the work happens — the pipeline and the relationship rather than the prospect list.
Does the research follow the customer into support?
It stays where it is and remains linked. A support case reads the relationship and the timeline, which is the current picture, rather than the claims that justified an approach eighteen months earlier.
Can this whole arc happen without a person?
No, and deliberately so. Discovery, research and even sending can run under autonomy, but creating a deal and moving a lifecycle stage are decisions recorded against a person or an explicit instruction.