Mago is designed from the ground-up to be for working performers. We've made a few decisions on what concepts to borrow from traditional CRMs, what to improve, and what to completely reinvent. For example, in a traditional CRMs a Lead converts to an opportunity, contact and an account. Since most performers aren't really "account managers" that model is not optimal for the majority of workers.
Our concepts are as follows:
A contact is anyone who you have communicated with in the past and may want to communicate with in the future. For example if someone enquires about a show but doesn't book you, you still want that person in your database to re-prospect to, send mailings etc.
A Lead is an event that you might potentially perform at. At this point the contact has at least expressed interest and you may already have a relationship with that individual. A lead can be connected to one or more contacts. These are people involved in organizing the event and/or procuring the talent.
A lead is active if there is still a possibility you might book it. Once the date passes (or you mark it inactive) the lead is no longer active and no-longer appears on the dashboard unless you never had a date in the lead record. In that case, it will stay on the dashboard indefinitely and you'll need to manually mark it as inactive to keep it from cluttering your view.
A Gig Is an event where your presence is confirmed. You have formally or informally committed to perform at this event. This is a booking. This will appear on your dashboard until approximately 1 day after the event. If the gig hasn't been marked paid you will have a payment reminder in the alerts popup on top of the page.
A Company is an organization with with you do business. For example, I might perform 3 shows (gigs) for different departments of one company. Each time I have a different contact (my main contact for that particular booking) So, while each gig is connected to a different contact, they are all for the same company.
Separate from all of this is the idea of what we call a prospect. This is part of a larger expansion to make sales and cold-calling more efficient.
Routine - Mago has a very powerful workflow engine. What once required hours of your time and meticulous organization can now be completed in a single click. A routine is simply a series of actions that run on a schedule. For example, when I quote a show I send a proposal, then a followup a day later, then another 3 days later. I schedule a call for 5 days later and I send a final follow-up 7 days later - then, 10 months after the original enquiry, I send a new follow-up to see if they are planning an event this year. These 6 steps can be combined into one routine that you simply execute once and all emails (and other actions) are generated and scheduled.