A record in Copper is an essential contact or action that helps you move toward the close of a business deal. In our app, leads, people, companies, opportunities, projects or tasks are what we call records. Working with records will be a big part of your work as a Copper user, so let's get familiar with each record type.

We'll start with your contact records. Ask your admin if you'll use leads, people, or companies in your workflow. Maybe you'll use one or two. Maybe you'll use all three.

In this module, we'll tackle the following:

Define a lead

Define a person

Define a company

Understand the relationship between leads, people and companies

Create a record

A Lead is a person you might to business with. Maybe they've given you a business card, but they haven't yet formally evaluated your product or service. Before you can engage in a business deal, you must "qualify" the lead to determine it's mutually beneficial to move forward.

You'll start by creating the lead record, then later convert it to a person record if you two decide to move forward.

Define a Person

People are the contacts you've decided to engage in business with. This could be a customer who's ready to formally evaluate your product or service, or a partner or vendor you partner with in a business deal. People may be converted from a qualified lead, or you might not use leads at all and just add your contacts directly to Copper as people.

Define a Company

A company is a business entity that is ready to formally evaluate your product or service, or a business entity you've worked with in the past who you might work with again in the future. A company could be a business, a school, an association, or any other entity that links people together. Company records are often related to people records, as you need a human contact to speak on the company's behalf and move the business deal forward.

Relate leads, people and companies

The image below shows how leads, people, companies and opportunities relate to each other:

The image above shows a lead being entered into the system, then qualified. As we recall, A qualified lead is the one we've decided to do business with. After qualifying a lead, you turn it into a person record. This person might stand alone, but more likely, you'll relate the person to a company record, an opportunity record or both.

Create a lead, person or company

All record types can be created the same way. Choose whether it benefits you to learn to create a lead, person or company, then follow the instructions below:

3. Fill in the details for this record in the pop-up window that appears. Click 'Save' when you're finished:

4. The resulting record will look something like this:

To the left, we have all the details you filled out when creating this person, plus any info we pulled from their publicly-available social media. In the center, you can track your interactions with this contact, which we'll learn more about in step 7. To the right, we have the associated records and files that lend context to this person.