From stranger to advertiser

Somebody can reach you as a listener, as a lead, or as a name already in Contacts. These are the paths from there to buying, in the order they happen.

Two rules hold for all of them:

• Converting copies; it never moves. A listener who becomes a lead is still a listener, with their history intact. Losing the history loses the reason the record exists.
• Nothing becomes an advertiser by accident. The log is built from advertisers, so that step is always deliberate.

Listener → lead

Somebody writes in about advertising. Studio Inbox labels the message Business when it mentions advertising, sponsorship or a rate card. That guess is deliberately eager: a mislabeled song request costs nothing, and a missed advertiser costs money.

Open the ticket in Studio Inbox and choose Make this a lead.

The listener stays. You now have a lead in Leads carrying what they said and where they came from, so the first sales call starts from their own words.

Lead → company, contact and deal

Open the lead in Leads and choose Convert. One action makes three records:

• a company, at lifecycle stage prospect
• a contact: the person, with their name split into first and last
• an open deal, on the pipeline and stage you choose

A lead with no company name becomes a company under the person's own name, so a sole proprietor is still easy to find.

A lead can be converted only once. If it already was, the app says when, instead of making a second company.

Deal → won

Move a deal along the board with the stage control on the deal itself, not by editing it. That records how long it sat in each stage.

Time in each stage is the number that shows a pipeline stalling, and it cannot be rebuilt later.

On-The-Air is the won stage. Won and lost belong to the stage, not to its name, so you can rename a stage without breaking the forecast.

Company → advertiser

This is the crossing point, and the only one.

1. Create the advertiser in Advertisers. 2. Open the company in Companies and link it.

The link points from Sales into Traffic, never back. Linking changes nothing about the advertiser. That is deliberate: merging companies and advertisers would put half-entered prospects into the list that builds the log.

Now you can write an order. See Getting a spot on air.

Contact → listener

Sometimes it goes the other way: somebody in Contacts turns out to be a listener too.

Use the listener control on the contact. It looks for an existing listener first — by phone, email or handle, never by name — and links to it instead of creating a second person. Two people can share a name; nobody shares a cell number.

Why listeners and contacts are separate

A contact is somebody at a business the station sells to. A listener is the audience. Keeping them apart keeps ad buyers out of the Studio Inbox and song requests out of the pipeline.

It also keeps the right questions in the right place. "Is this the first time they have been in touch, or the eleventh?" matters for a listener. Nobody asks it of a media buyer.