Lead Sources

If selling things is a significant aspect of your work, it's very helpful to know where your customers are coming from. Lead Sources are one of many things Jigawatt tracks at the Project level. Designating the Lead Source can be automated when a Project is created in the system automatically, as with The Wiz or a Zapier integration (coming soon). But when a user creates a Project manually, Jigawatt doesn't know where the lead came from, so it's up to the user to designate it. This can be done in the New Project drawer, or the Project Info panel of an existing Project.

Lead Source Structure

Lead Sources have two parameters, a Type and a Source. Type is designated by a dropdown, and there is a set list of these. The Source is a freeform text field, where you can type anything you want; a dropdown will reveal existing Source records that match what you type. For instance, if you type "ric", the dropdown may include "Ricky Bobby" (a Referral), "Rice Harvest Festival" (an Event), and Rich Dad's Fave Contractors" (a source for Purchased Leads), assuming you've cited these Sources before. If you enter a Source name not already in the system, it will create a new record that you can cite on future Projects. The type-ahead saves people having to type for entire seconds, though it also helps them misspell fewer words.
Some examples of well-structured lead sources might be:

Advertisement: Google Adwords Tax Credit Campaign

Direct Contact: Canvassing

Referral: Ricky Bobby

Web: www.jw.solar

Lead Sources can be assigned to Projects in Jigawatt Core, but detailed Lead Source analytics (think "business intelligence lite") will be a Pro feature slated for release in early 2023.

Managing Lead Sources

Of course, if you have sales people in your organization, there's a good chance you've observed some remarkable creativity when it comes to spelling, and regardless of how well we nudge them toward uniformity, you're eventually going to wind up with about a dozen different spellings of Ricky Bobby. When this happens, you can merge your Lead Sources to prevent your business intelligence from being totally manic.

To merge Lead Sources:

Go go Settings > Workflow > Lead Sources.

For Source, choose the one you want to merge (which is to say "get gobbled up", probably the one that's spelled wrong).

For Destination, choose an existing Source that you want the Source ones to go by, probably one with a more correct or helpful name.

Click Merge Sources. Projects will be reassigned to the more helpful Source designation.

Bear in mind that it's very quick to merge all the "rocky booby" Projects into the more presentable "Ricky Bobby" Source, but if you mistakenly merged "rice harvist" into "Ricky Bobby" when you meant to select "Rice Harvest Festival", they'll have to be picked apart manually. So be careful! Or quit taking your business analytics so seriously. It's totally random for most small business, anyway...