Leads & intake

What this covers

Long before there is a contract, there is a job in prospect — a property, an idea of what it should become, and a series of conversations that turn one into the other. That is real work, and it needs somewhere to live.

A lead is the record of that work before it is won. It holds the property, the people, the scope being discussed, and every meeting held along the way.

The rename to know first: a Legacy KI “Lead” is a KI Project Record. It is not a pre-sales stage that later converts into something else. The Project Record exists from the job walk onward and stays the same record through design, construction, and completion — see section 4.1.

Which interface to use

This is the area where the split between the interfaces bites hardest, so it is worth being precise about it.

The Admin Portal holds the design conversation. The lead carries the residential design layer — phase, scope, home type, square footage — plus the meetings and the questionnaires attached to it. That is where the design record lives.

Legacy KI holds sales triage. There is no lead management screen in the Admin Portal. Priority, likelihood, target dates, bid windows and the Lead Champion are all Legacy KI attributes with no Admin Portal equivalent, and the pipeline board is a Legacy KI screen. If you are working a pipeline rather than a design conversation, that is where you are working.

Admin Portal intake creates a client and a project directly. One consequence worth knowing before you rely on the numbers: an inquiry that never converts leaves no pre-sale record there, so close rate and loss reasons are not something the Admin Portal can currently answer.

Where a lead comes from

When a lead is moved to the job walk stage of the CRM — our customer relationship management system — a Project Record is created in KI. Client contact information, the project address, some project budget information, and the Division all transfer automatically. The CRM today is Active Campaign, though we may move to another one — treat it as a replaceable source of those fields rather than a fixed dependency. See section 6.1.

Website submissions do not create a lead. They send an email — a name and a phone number — and nothing enters the lead register automatically. In practice the system of record for inbound web demand is an inbox, and the lead register only knows about an enquiry once somebody puts it there. If you are reconciling web enquiries against leads and the numbers do not agree, this is the reason.

What a lead carries

A lead is more than a name and a phone number. It carries the shape of the job being discussed:

Project phase — where the project stands in the Design Build sequence: Project Proposal, Visioning, Final Design, or Build. There is no Schematic Design or Design Development phase; those are architectural stages, not phases KI tracks.

Project scope — what we have been engaged to do: Design Build, Design Only, Build Only, Interiors Only, Furniture Only, or Story Select. Scope decides the workflow, so this is the field that determines which path the job runs down (section 6.2).

Home type and square footage — the kind of property being renovated and how much of it is in scope.

Status — Open, Won, Lost, NA or Bidding, carried over unchanged from Legacy KI.

Meetings

Design happens in meetings, and those meetings are part of the record rather than something remembered afterwards. Intake, job walk, visioning presentation, finish presentation and final design presentation all attach to the lead, as do the structured questionnaires built in the Forms module.

What a client says in a visioning form and what is presented in a visioning meeting both become part of the project record, which is what later design work and pricing are built on.

Turning a lead into a project

When the work is won, the lead becomes the project. The scope, the phase, the meetings and the form answers carry through — nothing is retyped.

Two behaviours to expect:

Winning a lead closes it, silently. Creating a project from a lead sets the lead to closed as a side effect. There is no prompt and no confirmation.

One lead produces one project per Division. Attempting a second project of the same Division from the same lead is blocked with “A project already exists for selected lead division.” This is the design/build split being enforced — a design job and a construction job from one lead are fine; two of either are not.

What the client sees

The client experiences this area as the meetings themselves and the questionnaires they fill in beforehand. They do not see the lead record, its status, or the triage attributes.

Part 3 — How a project runs — where intake sits in the project sequence
Estimating and proposals — how the discussed scope gets priced

Design — the design phases the lead feeds