Question

What's the rationale for no 'source' on People?

  • 5 December 2021
  • 6 replies
  • 60 views

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

I tried asking this earlier in the integration section. But no answer, and not just integration related. This is making it difficult to to source attribution, as soon as a Lead is promoted to a Person, we lose the source they came from.

What’s the rationale? Is there a workaround for this limitation?

 

The Lead record has a Source (which is a list of options).

However, the Person record does not.

What’s the rationale for this? When I convert a Lead to a Person, I lose this information. Its also something i’m confused of as i integrate w/ Mautic.

If I create a ‘custom field’ on Person for Source, it doesn’t have an option to track the sources list (which is another table).

All i can find in the user guide is: “There is no 'Source' field on a person or company record, so if you create an opportunity from scratch that's related or unrelated to a person or company record, you'll want to fill in the source field manually.”

So… What’s the rationale for this, how do i keep the source info present as i promote a lead?


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6 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Hi @donbowman, unfortunately I don’t have an answer as to why there’s no Source field on People by default. But I will bring this up with the product team.

As a workaround, you can create a new custom field on that’s applied to both Leads and People. This way they share the list of dropdown options, and when you convert the Lead, the Source information will carry over to the Person record. You can also apply the custom field to Opportunities and Companies if you want them to carry over upon conversion.

If you go with this option, you can disable the default Source field on Leads to avoid confusion on the front end.

It’s not as easy as having it there by default, but it will allow the data to carry over from Leads to People upon conversion.

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

uh, thanks.

i would be great to get this fixed tho.

 

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

I'd say the reason is that an opportunity has a source, not a person. Where you meet a person is different than a source, and an opportunity can only have 1 source, but many people involved in the opportunity.

If you want to use sources on people, then I'm betting you're not using the opportunity section properly or at all. The source should for sure just be on lead and opportunity.

 

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

we learn about people using methods.

some of those methods work better than others.

working well implies $. Money is from an opportunity.

i want to know which methods to do more of.

 

“Humans” → “Opportunities” → Money

here, i have bifurcated Humans into Leads (not yet qualified) and People (qualified). Why should i “forget” where i learned of someone?.

 

Or you are saying I should maintain this out of band on post-it-notes, and, when i create the opprortunity, look back up where i learned of that person from?

 

Why is a Person special? A person can be in an opportunity, why can it not have a source?

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

Because a person can have multiple opportunities, first opportunity might be referral, second source would be "past customer".

We use a "how you met" text field for lead + people records as a reference of where you met this person. But the actual structured drop-down source is tied to the opportunity.

It just comes down to reporting. How much closed business came from a certain source type? That's stored on the opportunity, you're not storing money on the person record.

So I agree, you should have a field of where you met said person, but I'd say have that be less structured, and reserve the opportunity/lead Source fields for the reporting pieces.

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

it just seems odd to discard this fact as soon as a lead is promoted to a person.

if an opportunity is created from a lead, it has a source pre-populated, if its created from a person its unknown.

we can always fill in a different value in the opportunity if more is known, but it would be nice not to lose the attribution “I met X at trade show Y, and that lead to opportunity Z”. As soon as X becomes a person, I lose this info.

@Michelle from Copper ‘s idea to create a new custom field for all 3 works, but then is clumsy in the UI to use.

 

I believe that this is an oversight that ‘customer source’ cannot be set on People, only on Lead, and its discarded on conversion.

 

given Lead is an optional feature in Copper, how would someone who doesn’t use that abstraction track the source?