The records
A contact holds a person: name, addresses, phone, their company, their history with you, and where they came from. A company holds an organisation and rolls up its contacts, opportunities and activity. Custom fields are configured per workspace at /crm/settings/fields, which is where you put the two or three things about a lead that actually decide whether you pursue it.
Rachel Nkemdirim
Meridian Group · added 9 Mar from portal signup
"Can you send pricing for 20 seats?"
Lead ingest
There is one ingest endpoint and one routing table. A lead arrives with a source identifier; the routing table maps that identifier to a workspace; the lead is created there. Everything else — portal signups, Phony calls, your own forms — goes through the same path, which is why there is only one place to look when a lead does not appear.
The ingest URL is given to you complete. Appending /crm to it — a natural thing to do, since the module is mounted at /crm — produces a path that 404s silently on the sending side, and the symptom is leads that simply never arrive. Use the URL exactly as issued.
If the identifier is missing or empty, the routing table cannot place it and the lead lands in the fallback workspace rather than being rejected. It is not lost, but it is in the wrong place, and nobody looking at the right workspace will see it. Always send the identifier.
At /crm/settings — it maps a source identifier to a workspace.
It is the only thing that decides where the lead lands.
No added path segments.
Anything in it arrived without a valid identifier and tells you which integration is misconfigured.
Duplicates and merging
The same person arriving from two sources creates two contacts if the email addresses differ. Merging is manual and deliberate: an automatic merge on a fuzzy name match is the sort of thing that quietly joins two customers into one, and unpicking that is worse than the duplicate.
- Merge from the contact record; the surviving record keeps both histories.
- Companies merge the same way and their contacts follow.
- A merge is recorded in the workspace audit log.
- The usual cause of duplicates is a personal address on one form and a work address on another — worth a required field rather than a cleanup habit.
What this does not do
Duplicates are surfaced, not merged. Deliberately.
Nothing appends firmographic data from a third-party provider.
Anyone in a workspace sees everything in it. Separation is by workspace.
Imports run through the API.
Questions
Can one contact belong to two companies?
No. One company per contact; move them if they change jobs and the history follows.
Where does "source" come from?
The ingest identifier, recorded at creation and never overwritten.
Can we require a field?
Yes, per workspace, in Settings → Custom fields.
Related
Opportunities, stages and pipelines in erp.io CRM — configuring stages that describe your actual sales motion, and reading stage velocity.
Lead capture from PhonyWhat happens after a Phony agent qualifies somebody: the person record, the hand-off to CRM, and the two reasons a lead appears to vanish.