Published
The statuses belong to the office
The office defines its own set of statuses, and an inquiry moves onto any of them — from the list, the record or the after-call form; intake and import start on the office's own starting status.
The Settings → Statuses screen promised something simple: the office adds a status of its own, ties it to a step of the funnel — and inquiries live on it. The promise was not kept all the way: inquiries still only moved onto the statuses that came by default. Now the list of statuses really is the office's list.
You name the steps the way they are named in your office and put them in your own order — "waiting for documents", "offer sent", whatever matches the work as it actually goes. An inquiry moves onto any active status by every route that changes a status: from the list, from the record and on the after-call form; a new inquiry — received or imported from history — starts on your office's own starting status, not the factory one. The transition log keeps what happened even if the status itself is later taken out of the set.
Each status is tied to one of five system stages — New · Contacted · Qualified · Won · Lost. The stages are a constant of the product, and everything that counts rests on them: the dashboard funnel, the funnel path in the record, the export and the quality loop. That is why status names can be changed without worry: the numbers and the events add up the same under any set of words.
A few boundaries the product keeps itself:
- a status that requires the deal-closing permission is never set by the after-call form — closing a deal stays a separate action;
- if no suitable active status is left on the stage in question, the call is still recorded: the text and the scheduled callback are not lost, and the system says the status did not change — to the owner it also says where to fix that;
- a status with inquiries on it cannot be deleted, and the system names how many there are; it can be switched off, and then it warns how many inquiries will be left on it;
- a switched-off status stays in the list filter marked as switched off while inquiries remain on it — otherwise the advice to move those inquiries would be impossible to follow.
One minimum is checked on save: an active status is required on the New, Qualified and Lost stages. That is not a limit on your freedom but the condition under which the set stays a path that can be walked.
Want to see this on your own office's inquiries?