A Customer is an established account — an organization you have or want an ongoing business relationship with. Where Leads are prospects you're still qualifying, Customers are the companies you've decided to work with.
What a customer carries
- Name — the company name. The one field that's always required.
- Type — Company or Individual.
- Website, Email, Phone — primary contact details.
- Industry and tags — light categorization for filtering.
- A full address block — two street lines, city, state or province, postal code and country.
- Status — see below.
Status has four values — and the Archived checkbox is a separate control
The Status dropdown offers Active, Prospect, Inactive and Archived — four, not two. They describe the state of the relationship:
- Active — a live account you are working with.
- Prospect — a company you have created as a customer but haven't started real business with yet.
- Inactive — dormant, but still someone you'd re-engage.
- Archived — done with, kept for history.
Setting Status to Archived is not what hides the account. Below the dropdown there is a separate Archived tickbox, and that is the one that takes a customer out of your day-to-day list. The Status value records how you think of the relationship; the tickbox decides whether you keep seeing it. You can use either, or both — but if an account you marked Archived is still showing up, the tickbox is the one you want.
Notes and activities
A customer has no notes field. Notes are separate entries on the customer's own Notes panel, added one at a time and stamped with who wrote them and when, alongside logged activities (calls, emails, meetings). That is where the account's history lives — including the “how did we start working together?” story.
Where customers come from
- Converted from a won lead — the most common path. When you win an opportunity and convert, the lead's data is preserved and it becomes a customer. See the funnel.
- Created directly — add a customer by hand for a deal that closed outside the lead pipeline (referral, inbound contract).
What attaches to a customer
- Contacts — the people you talk to (buyer, technical reviewer, finance approver).
- Opportunities — specific deals with amounts and expected close dates. Many open at once is normal.
- Deals — the order ledger once real business starts: each one moves Open → Delivered → Invoiced → Paid. A deal is the won order, separate from the opportunity (the pursuit) that produced it. Winning an opportunity attached to this customer — marking it Closed-Won — creates one automatically, with no manual step; you can also add one by hand with Add deal.
Deal and order are the same thing, under two labels. On a customer the button reads Add deal and the section counts “deals”; the workspace-wide roll-up of the same records is the Orders page, with Total Ordered and Outstanding AR across all customers. Nothing differs but the wording — an opportunity is the pursuit, a deal/order is what you won.
Tips
- Don't pre-create customers for prospects you're still researching — keep them as leads so the Agent can keep working them (automation only touches leads).
- If a customer goes dormant, set Status to Inactive or archive it rather than deleting — you'll likely re-engage, and the history is gold.
- Money on a customer is in the workspace currency, which is set once for the whole workspace in CRM Settings.