Introducing Clients, Sales Leads, and Jobs
Next are three closely related types of records in SMMware: Clients, Sales Leads, and Jobs.
The following diagram illustrates the relationships.
Someone who has hired you now, has hired you in the past, or may hire you soon, is a Client. That is to say, they are a Current Client, a Past Client, or a Potential Client. SMMware stores information about a given work opportunity with a Client in a Sales Lead. Once you have won the work, information is stored in a Job.
You can think of the Client record as the place where information goes about the person, things that don’t change from one Job to another. Examples would be their name, mobility issues (‘uses a walker’), mental acuity, or name of a pet.
It is common for a service company to get repeat business from a client, and it would not make sense to enter basic information such as their name into the system multiple times.
The information specific to a given work opportunity goes into a Sales Lead. This can include the traditional document of ‘What we’ll do for you, & how much it will cost’. But you may also want to take notes over multiple meetings with the client, you may want to assign Tasks (generate a quote, follow up with Client). You may want a place to store information like elevator codes or when garbage collection is, and the Sales Lead provides custom fields for that purpose. It is also common to take photos during the ‘sales phase’, and you will want a place to store those. All of these types of information go into a Sales Lead.
Once you’ve won the work, you create a Job from a Sales Lead, and the Job will inherit various information from the Sales Lead such as the photos and the custom fields. New information such as hours worked, are now stored with the Job.
Next, each of these three records will be explained individually in more detail.