Ask a sales team how many customers it has and you often get three different answers: one from finance, one from the CRM and one from memory. The CRM version is usually the weakest, because companies are stored without saying whether they ever bought anything. Prospects, active customers and companies that left years ago all sit in the same list. Pomio CRM recommends one field that settles it: a customer status on every company.
Why one status per company helps
The customer status answers questions you need every week. Is this inbound lead a new company or an existing customer asking for more? Which customers have not been contacted in six months? How many former customers could be won back? Without the field, every answer requires a search through deals and invoices, and different people reach different conclusions.
Keep the list short and fixed
Three values cover most SMEs: prospect, customer and former customer. Some teams add partner or supplier, but do that only if those companies really need a different follow-up. Use a fixed list rather than free text, just as you would with a fixed list of labels, so filters and reports always work. The status is not the same as a lifecycle stage on a contact: the lifecycle stage describes where a person is in your marketing and sales process, the customer status describes the relationship with the company as a whole.
Define when the status changes
Write the rules down in one sentence each. A company becomes a customer when its first deal is marked as won. It becomes a former customer when the last contract ends or when it has bought nothing for an agreed period, for example eighteen months. A former customer that buys again becomes a customer again. Clear rules stop people from setting the status on gut feeling and make it possible to track new and existing customer deals separately.
Let deals drive the status
The best customer status is one that nobody has to remember to change. When a deal is won, the company can move to customer automatically. When a contract or subscription is ended, the status can move to former customer. Manual changes remain possible for exceptions, but they should be rare and visible, ideally with a short note explaining why.
Put it on the company, not on the contacts
The company signs the contract and pays the invoices, so the status belongs there. Contacts inherit it through their link to the company. If a contact moves to another employer, the old company stays a customer and the new one keeps its own status. Combined with a clear company owner, everyone knows who looks after each customer.
Do not delete former customers
A former customer is still valuable: they know your product, they may come back and their history explains past revenue. Keep them with the status former customer instead of removing them, in line with archiving rather than deleting. Do respect your retention rules for personal data of contacts who are no longer relevant.
Check the exceptions every month
Add the customer status to your monthly data quality check. Look for customers without any won deal, prospects with a won deal and customers that have been quiet longer than your former customer period. Fix those few records and the field stays trustworthy.
How Pomio CRM supports it
In Pomio CRM the customer status is a fixed field on the company, so lists, filters and reports can rely on it. Roles decide who may change it, contacts stay linked to their company and the audit log shows who changed what and when.
In short
Give every company one customer status from a short fixed list, write down when it changes, let won and ended deals update it, keep former customers instead of deleting them and check the exceptions once a month.