Pursuits and mandates
The two stages a search can be in, and why they are not a lifecycle.
A search is either a pursuit or a mandate. They are not two steps of one process — a firm runs dozens of pursuits alongside a handful of mandates, continuously, and both are ordinary states.
Pursuit. Broad and shallow, and it can run for a year or more. You are chasing something: a relationship you are building, a market you want to be the obvious call in, a company you think will need someone before it knows it. Most pursuits never convert, and that is not a failure — it is what the stage is for.
Mandate. Narrow and deep, and it has a clock. Someone has engaged you for a specific seat.
A pursuit that converts becomes a mandate, and everything already filed against it comes with it. Nothing is re-typed and nothing is lost.
Why the distinction is on the search
Because they need different research. A pursuit wants the shape of a market — who is out there, what the seat pays, how hard the people are to move. A mandate wants that too, plus depth on the specific firms in play.
It also separates how a search is being run from whether it is still open. Collapsing them into one status column is what makes "lost pursuit" and "live pursuit" two values of the same word as "mandate", and a partner then cannot answer "what are we currently chasing?" from their own pipeline.
The fee band
A won mandate is worth multiples of a year's subscription, and the product should be able to say so. The band is optional and it is a band, never a figure — a partner will pick one in two seconds, and almost nobody types an exact fee into someone else's software. A column that is empty on every row proves nothing.