Inside one enquiry: value, stage, source, next step
One record, six fields, and the empty one that explains half the automations in this org.
A board is a shape. Underneath it are 96 records, and everything the rest of this course does — every workflow, every agent, every report — is either reading one of these or writing one. So it is worth opening one properly, once.
One open enquiry
| Field | On this record |
|---|---|
| Name | Loan Against Property — Rohit Kaur |
| Value | ₹79,02,491 |
| Stage | Offer Sent |
| Source | Paid Search |
| Next step | empty |
| Person | Rohit Kaur |
Name
- On this record
- Loan Against Property — Rohit Kaur
Value
- On this record
₹79,02,491
Stage
- On this record
Offer Sent
Source
- On this record
Paid Search
Next step
- On this record
- empty
Person
- On this record
- Rohit Kaur
Six fields, and four of them are load-bearing for the rest of the course. The name is a label somebody's automation wrote. The person is a link to another record. The other four are each a decision, and each one is read by something later.
Value is a request, not a price
₹79,02,491 is what this person asked to borrow. It is not what the business will earn, and it is not the price of anything — a point worth being clear on before Products, and where a deal's value comes from, because it catches people out.
Two of the automations you will read in Module 3 do arithmetic on this number. One compares it against the business's average ticket to decide how fast somebody has to ring. The other compares it against a bigger figure to decide who gets it at all. Both are one number in one box, and both are the sort of thing a client changes in the first month.
Stage is a string, and things match on it
This record says Offer Sent. Not an id, not a number — that text. It is the same text you read on the board in The deals board and the seven stages, and the same text that sits inside condition boxes in six workflows. One field, three places, and only one of them is obvious.
Source is how anybody knows the marketing works
This enquiry came from Paid Search. Across the whole pipeline the commonest is Facebook, with 38 of 96.
A lead with no source is spend nobody can account for. This one field is the entire reason the last lesson of Module 3 can tell an ad platform which enquiries were worth having. Lose it — overwrite it when somebody enquires a second time, say — and the reporting keeps working and quietly starts lying.
And next step is empty
That is the most useful thing on this record. The field that says what happens next, on the enquiry with more logged against it than any other open one in the org, has nothing in it.
It is not an oversight in the demo — it is what CRMs look like. Nobody fills that field in, because filling it in is admin and the advisor already knows what they are doing next. Then they are on leave, or they leave, and nobody else does.
Half of Module 3 exists because of this empty box. The morning sweep that finds enquiries nobody has touched, the escalation whose text reads “a case with no owner and no date is the state cases die in” — those are written for exactly this record. Automation here is not replacing work somebody does; it is doing work nobody was ever going to do.
Change one thing — fill it in
- Open this enquiry, or the fullest-looking one on your own board.
- Write a real next step in it: an action and a date, in the words an advisor would use.
- Now open two more enquiries at the same stage and check theirs. Count how many are empty.
- Decide whether you would ask a client's team to fill this field in, or whether you would automate around them. There is a right answer and it is not the first one.
Try it
- Find an enquiry whose value looks wrong for its product, and work out what that would mean if a workflow routed on it.
- Find one with no source recorded, if there is one. Say what that costs the business at the end of the month.
Next: Contacts, and the six lifecycle stages — the person attached to this enquiry, and the second, quieter set of stages that describes them rather than the work.
Related lessons
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ReadLoss aversion, sunk cost and regression — what it costs you
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Read