You have just come off a call with someone new. The details are in your head right now and they will be gone by this afternoon. Typing them means eleven fields and a form you are not looking forward to.
Say it instead. One sentence, and the new Client form appears with everything filled in.
You say:
“New Client, Sarah Noodle at My Noodle Company, sarah at internoodle dot com, 604 111 1111, referred by Tom, wants help with her corporate year end, follow up next Tuesday.”
The form comes back with the name, company, email and phone in place, a note recording what she wants and who referred her, and a Follow-Up set for Tuesday. You glance over it, set the Client Type, and save.
Roughly fifteen seconds, against two or three minutes of typing — and, more to the point, it happens now rather than never.
The lightning bolt, on any page. You do not need to find the Client screen first.
Start with “new Client” so it knows what you are creating, then talk normally. Order does not matter — it works out which part is the email and which is the phone number.
What they want, where they came from, anything you would otherwise scribble down. This becomes the first note on their record, which in six months is the thing you will be glad is there.
“Follow up next Tuesday” creates the Follow-Up as part of the same sentence. This is the step people skip when typing, and it is the one that turns a contact into a Client.
The one field worth doing by hand. Client Type is what your reports and Campaigns filter on later, and retrofitting it across two hundred records is genuinely tedious.
Now they exist, with a history that starts at the first conversation.
Spelling out an email address is the one place worth slowing down: “sarah at internoodle dot com” rather than reading it as a word. Unusual surnames are worth spelling too.
Everything else can be conversational. “She runs a small consultancy, two staff, wants us to take over the bookkeeping from January” is a perfectly good note, and far more useful in a year's time than “bookkeeping enquiry”.
Do it in the car park. On your phone, straight after the meeting. This is the single habit that changes how much of your pipeline survives.
Say the Follow-Up in the same breath. A person without a next action is a person you will forget.
Record who referred them. It costs you three words and tells you, a year from now, where your work actually comes from.
Use the right record type. Someone you have spoken to but not signed is a Prospect, not a Client. Keeping that line clean is what makes “how many did we convert” answerable.
Do not tidy before saving. A rough record now beats a perfect one you never make. You can edit any of it later.
The record you just created is the spine everything else hangs from. Their Invoices attach to it. Files you send them attach to it. Emails, Tasks, notes and eventually their Payments all land on the same screen.
That is why getting them into the system in the first minute matters more than getting them in perfectly. Once the record exists, everything you do with that person accumulates in one place instead of scattering across your inbox.
It got the email wrong. Say it as “name at domain dot ca” and fix any remainder in the form.
It created a Prospect and I wanted a Client. Say which you want. You can also convert afterwards, which keeps the history.
The Follow-Up did not appear. Give it a day rather than a vague phrase — “next Tuesday” works, “soon” does not.
It split the name oddly. Common with double-barrelled and non-English surnames. Correct the two fields before saving.
This person is already in the system. It will tell you rather than creating a duplicate. Open the existing record and add the note there.
I did not catch their company name. Leave it. Nothing is required except enough to identify them.
A long natural sentence is fine. It is better at one flowing description than at a list of fragments.
No. It fills the form and stops. You review and save.
Yes — say which type. Suppliers and referral partners belong as Contacts.
It flags an obvious match rather than silently creating a second record.
Yes, and that is where it earns its keep.
Save them anyway. A record with one field is infinitely more useful than a name on a receipt in your pocket.
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