Module 6
The CRM and the identity graph
One person, one record, and everything they ever did.
After this module: You can explain how an anonymous visitor becomes a known contact with a full history, and demo the pipeline without fumbling the stage model.
How a stranger becomes a person
This is the mechanic behind the best moment in the demo, so it is worth understanding rather than hand-waving.
The join works backwards, which is why a new lead arrives with weeks of history rather than starting from zero.
The result is one record per person with everything they ever did: pages, sessions, emails sent and received, calls logged, notes, meetings. And it survives past the raw-data retention window, because durable per-session summaries are kept alongside the detail. A contact from eight months ago still has a journey.
Check yourself
The pipeline, and the missing column
The board has four columns: Lead, Qualified, Customer, Churned. A prospect will sometimes ask why there is no Prospects column, and the answer is a real product decision worth repeating.
Cold outbound contacts live inside Sales Automation, not on the pipeline. They only appear as a Lead once there has been a real interaction — a reply on any channel, a booked meeting, or a connected call.
One nuance that catches people out: clicking a link in an outreach email does not promote someone to Lead. A click is indistinguishable from curiosity, and treating it as a hand-raise is how pipelines fill with noise. A reply does promote them.
| Event | Promotes to Lead? |
|---|---|
| Replies to an outreach email | Yes |
| Books a meeting | Yes |
| Answers a call | Yes |
| Clicks a link in an email | No |
| Visits the site again | No |
Alongside this sits **lead scoring**, and the thing to demo is that it is explainable. Every score comes with its reasons and their weights, so a sales lead can argue with it — which is the only way they will ever trust it.
Check yourself
Worth remembering
- Contacts are the canonical person; identity stitching joins visitor, email and customer records into one lifetime history.
- The journey survives past the raw-data window, so a contact’s history does not evaporate after a month.
- The pipeline has four columns — Lead, Qualified, Customer, Churned — and deliberately no Prospects column.
- Cold outbound contacts live inside Sales Automation and only appear as a Lead after a real interaction.
- Lead scores are explainable: every score comes with the reasons and their weights.
Words that came up
- Identity stitching
- Joining the anonymous visitor, the email address and the paying customer into one person, retroactively.
- Lifecycle stage
- Where a contact sits: cold, lead, qualified, customer or churned. It drives the pipeline board.
- Hot visitor alert
- A same-day ping when a known contact or recognised company hits a high-intent page like pricing or booking.
Do this before moving on
Reading about a demo is not the same as having given one.
- 1Open a contact with a long history and scroll the journey. Note how far back it goes.
- 2Drag a contact between pipeline columns and watch what changes.
- 3Find a lead score and read its reasons. Be able to explain one to a customer.