Products and recording a sale

Marking a deal won used to ask for a product name and a number, typed fresh every time. Two things went wrong with that, and only one is obvious.

The obvious one: you retyped the price from memory at the exact moment you were least inclined to go and check it.

The other one is worse. The same offer reached your revenue totals under four spellings, so nothing could ever be summed by product. Your dashboard could tell you what you had earned and never what had earned it.

Save what you sell

Open Products and add each thing you sell once:

• Title — what you call it.
• Price — the usual figure.
• Info — freeform, and deliberately so. What it includes, who it is for, the objection it answers. This is the note you want in front of you on the call, not a field somebody else designed.

Products file into folders, the same system as scripts, images and links.

Recording the sale

Move somebody to Deal Won and you are asked which product and what it was worth.

• The price is a default, not a rule. It fills the amount in and the amount stays editable, because discounts and bundles are the norm rather than the exception.
• A blank price is a real answer. Plenty of things are priced on the call, so the list says Priced on the call rather than showing a hopeful $0.
• "Something else…" is always there. The list is the common case, not the only one — a one-off deal must never be unrecordable. Choosing it brings the free-text box back.
• Skipping is allowed and the deal still counts. The dashboard says how many deals have no figure rather than quietly reporting a total that reads low.

Deleting a product

Deals already recorded against it keep their name and amount. What you sold is a fact, and it does not change because you stopped selling it.