Adding a customer or lead

There are two forms for adding someone by hand, and which you use depends only on where they are with you: still deciding, or already working with you.

Adding a lead

Leads → Add lead. CLEO describes it as it is: Track a prospect before they become a client. No portal access is created here.

Leave a name out and CLEO says Name and contact name are required. Leave out both ways of reaching them and it says why that matters: Enter an email or phone number so you can follow up.

Press Add lead and you land on their new record, ready to plan the first follow-up.

Adding a customer you already work with

Customers → Add a customer. A longer form, because there's usually more to say: Start with what you know. CLEO can learn the rest over time.

Who is this? — The essential identity CLEO will use everywhere.

• Display name — the only required field on the whole form.
• Type — your own kinds of customer, if you use them.
• This is a — Organization or Person.
• They are a — Lead — someone who might become a customer or Client — someone you already work with.
• How did you meet them? — Referral, website, walk-in…
• Short internal summary — context for your team, never shown to them.

Contact information — contact name, Role or title, email, phone, website, address.

What should happen next? — Optional. Give CLEO one useful follow-up to remember. A date, a time if it matters, and a reason.

Which stage to choose

The stage is a statement about where you are with them, not about how important they are:

• Lead — you're still finding out whether this becomes work. They appear in Leads and in the Pipeline.
• Client — you already work with them. They appear in your customer list.

You can change it later on their record, and a lead can be converted properly when they sign on. Customers, leads and clients covers the difference and what conversion does.

Two records for the same person

Neither form checks for duplicates, so it's worth a quick search before you add someone you might already have.

Asking CLEO instead does check. Say "add Marta Reyes as a lead, 613 555 0142" and before preparing anything it looks for a record with that name — matching loosely, across business names, contact names and email addresses — and if it finds one, it asks whether this is the same person rather than quietly adding a second. You can tell it to add anyway.

Asked this way, CLEO needs the same minimum as the form — a name, and one way to reach them — and it won't invent either. Nothing is sent to the person, and no portal access is created.

Where the source comes from

Source records how someone arrived. Type it in your own words when you add them — Referral, Walk-in, Trade show — and it stays on their record.

When a record arrives on its own, CLEO fills the source in itself, and it may read as a technical label rather than a sentence. It's a note of origin, not something you need to tidy.

Records that arrive without you

Not everyone is added by hand. A website enquiry or an online booking creates a lead by itself. If the email or phone matches someone you already have, the new lead is marked as possibly being them, and CLEO asks you whether it is — it never adds a visitor to an existing record on its own.

Those paths have their own articles: Enquiries from your website and Online booking.

When you're finished with someone, you archive them rather than delete them — Archiving and bringing someone back.