Contacts, and the six lifecycle stages
A person and a piece of work are two different things, and they have two different sets of stages. Confusing them is the commonest mistake in a demo.
There are 110 people in this org and 96 enquiries. Those numbers are not the same, and they are never going to be: one person can enquire twice, and one enquiry can involve a co-applicant.
So the org keeps two records and two sets of stages. The enquiry has the stages you read in The deals board and the seven stages — where this piece of work has got to. The person has a lifecycle — what they are to the business, across everything they have ever done with it.
The six a person moves through
| Lifecycle stage | People here today |
|---|---|
| Lead | 18 |
| MQL | 22 |
| SQL | 26 |
| Opportunity | 9 |
| Customer | 29 |
| Unqualified | 6 |
Lead
- People here today
- 18
MQL
- People here today
- 22
SQL
- People here today
- 26
Opportunity
- People here today
- 9
Customer
- People here today
- 29
Unqualified
- People here today
- 6
Read those names and then read the pipeline's again. One list says New Enquiry, Documents Received, Offer Sent. The other says Lead, MQL, SQL. The first was written by somebody who knows how lending works; the second is what every Expedify org starts with, and nobody has touched it.
That asymmetry is worth pointing at in a demo, not hiding. It is exactly the conversation to have with a client: your pipeline is yours and we built it with you — this second axis is still generic, and it should be describing your customers in your words. It also shows, at a glance, what “configured” means in this product.
The two axes are independent, and that is the point
| The person is | Their enquiry is at | What that means |
|---|---|---|
Lead | New Enquiry | Somebody new, and their first piece of work has just arrived. |
Customer | New Enquiry | Somebody who has borrowed before, enquiring again. The most valuable row in this table. |
Customer | Disbursed | The ordinary happy path — they took a loan and it went out. |
Lead
- Their enquiry is at
New Enquiry- What that means
- Somebody new, and their first piece of work has just arrived.
Customer
- Their enquiry is at
New Enquiry- What that means
- Somebody who has borrowed before, enquiring again. The most valuable row in this table.
Customer
- Their enquiry is at
Disbursed- What that means
- The ordinary happy path — they took a loan and it went out.
A Customer with a brand-new enquiry is not a contradiction, it is a repeat customer. If the two ideas were one field you could not represent that at all — the person would be dragged backwards to Lead every time they asked for something, and the business would lose the fact that it already knows them.
Which one should a workflow read?
Almost always the enquiry, and it is worth knowing why before Module 3 makes you guess. Work happens to enquiries: they arrive, get scored, get routed, get chased. The lifecycle changes rarely and describes a relationship, so it is what you segment by rather than what you act on.
- Chasing an enquiry that has gone quiet — read the enquiry's stage.
- Deciding who gets a campaign about a new product — read the lifecycle.
- Deciding how urgently to call somebody back — read the enquiry, then look at the person for context.
Where the person's record earns its keep
The contact holds what stays true between enquiries — the number they answer, the city they live in, and where they originally came from. That last one matters more than it looks, and you will see why in Capturing a lead from any other system: when somebody already on file enquires again, the intake workflow deliberately refreshes only two fields and leaves the rest alone.
Overwrite a returning person's original source and attribution dies quietly. Every repeat customer starts looking as though they came from wherever they happened to click most recently, the reports still render, and the numbers are wrong. One decision, in one node, three modules away.
Change one thing — move somebody, and see what does not happen
- Find a contact whose lifecycle stage looks wrong for what their enquiries say. There are
110to choose from. - Change their lifecycle stage. Save.
- Open their enquiry and confirm it has not moved. Two axes, independently.
- Put it back if it was right to begin with.
Try it
- Count how many people are at
Leadand compare it with how many enquiries sit at the board's first stage. Explain the gap. - Write the six lifecycle names you would propose to a lending client instead of these. That is a real deliverable, and it takes ten minutes.
Next: Products, and where a deal's value comes from — what this business actually sells, and why the number on an enquiry has nothing to do with the price of it.
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