Activities are the record of contact with a prospect or customer. Notes are internal commentary. Keeping them apart is deliberate: one is what happened, the other is what you think about it.
Activities
Both leads and companies have an Activities tab, and both work the same way.
Add activity records:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Type | Visit or Call. |
| Date | When the contact happened — not when you are typing it up. |
| Summary | What took place. |
| Conclusion | What was decided or agreed. |
| Opportunities | Business identified — the field that makes activities worth reading later. |
| Description | Longer detail where the structured fields are not enough. |
| Documents | Attachments: meeting notes, a signed visit report, photographs. |
The activity also records who logged it and when, so a customer's history reads as a timeline across the whole sales team rather than one person's memory.
Getting value out of them
- Fill in Opportunities. Summary and conclusion describe the past; opportunities is the only field that feeds the next conversation. A visit logged without it is close to worthless three months on.
- Use the real date. Backdating an activity to when it happened keeps the timeline honest. The created timestamp records when you typed it, so nothing is lost.
- Log the call that went nowhere. The value of activity history is knowing a customer was approached and declined, not just the wins.
Activities survive qualification
Activities logged against a lead stay with that lead's history when it is qualified into a company. Activity logging then continues on the company. If you want the account's full story, look at both.
Notes
Notes exist on companies only. A note is free text with an author and a timestamp — no type, no date field, no attachments.
Use notes for internal context that is not a record of contact: "always disputes THC", "accounts contact is on maternity leave until March", "do not quote below cost — approved by management".
Notes can be edited and deleted after the fact, so they are not an audit trail. Anything that must stand as a record of what happened belongs in an activity.
Which to use
| Situation | Use |
|---|---|
| You met or called the customer | Activity |
| You want to warn colleagues about how to handle the account | Note |
| You agreed something commercially binding | Activity — with the agreement attached as a document |
| A quick reminder to yourself | Note |
Last updated 9 September 2026