Documentation / QueryTek Tapestry glossary / Commercial Referral Lifecycle
The commercial referral lifecycle is the sequence of defined states a referral moves through between partners — introduced, qualified, active, and concluded. Making the states explicit is what allows two organizations to agree on what has happened without reconciling their records.
When one organization refers work or a customer to another, both sides track it. Left implicit, each tracks it in its own language, and the resulting disagreement about whether something is "active" is a recurring commercial dispute rather than a data problem.
A lifecycle removes the ambiguity by naming states and transitions.
States are defined by evidence. Each state has a condition that must hold to enter it — something observable, not a judgement. "Qualified" means a stated test was met, not that someone felt confident.
Transitions are one-directional and recorded. A referral advances when the condition is met, and the transition is retained. This is what allows the history of a referral to be reconstructed rather than inferred from its current state.
Both parties read the same state. A shared lifecycle is only useful if both sides see the same value. Two mirrored pipelines with private state produce the reconciliation problem the lifecycle was meant to prevent.
The distinction from a sales pipeline is who owns it. A pipeline is internal and can be redefined at will. A referral lifecycle is a shared contract between organizations, which makes changing it a bilateral matter — the reason lifecycles are kept deliberately small.
The states also carry commercial consequence, since entitlement usually attaches to a transition. That makes the integrity of the record, not the sophistication of the model, the thing that matters.
Referral disputes are almost always definitional rather than adversarial: both parties are reading their own systems correctly and reaching different conclusions. A shared lifecycle with evidence-based transitions converts that from a negotiation into a lookup.
It also makes partner performance measurable. Without defined states, conversion and time-in-state cannot be compared across partners because each partner's records mean something slightly different.
QueryTek Tapestry represents referral progression as shared lifecycle state so partners work from one account of what has happened rather than reconciling separate records. Settlement calculation, commercial terms, entitlement rules, and partner agreement specifics are commercial matters handled outside public documentation.
