Register an agent, team or company as a referral source.

New partners start in the first prospecting column, not Active.
Reaching Active is the promotion's job: tag the partner as
referralPartnerId on a loan and they move there automatically, with the
loan recorded as the cause. Creating them Active directly would produce a
partner who is Active with nothing saying why.

email and phone create the linked contact. A partner's contact
details live on a CRM contact, not on the partner row — supplying them
here creates that contact (or reuses an existing one matched by email) so
the partner is reachable from call and email lists immediately.

An unknown kind falls back to individual rather than failing.