A lead is someone who has reached out but is not yet a deal. Keeping the two apart is deliberate: it stops an enquiry becoming a forecast line before anyone has decided it is real.
Where Leads Come From
Mostly, they arrive on their own. When someone writes in over WhatsApp, email or web chat, a lead record is created from that conversation. You can also add one by hand.
Each lead carries the channel it came from, a classification - lead, client, renewal, support, complaint or spam - the linked contact and conversation, when it first got a response, and the campaign it came from where that is known.
The classification matters more than it looks. It is what separates a prospect from a support request arriving through the same inbox, so your pipeline does not fill up with people who just need help with a password.
Keep in mind
Channels are routers, not destinations. An inbound message never creates a deal directly - it creates a lead, and a person decides whether it becomes a deal.
The Board
The lead board is live: an inbound lead appears while you are looking at it, without a refresh.
Status runs new → contacted → qualified → converted, or lost. Owners can be assigned one at a time or in bulk, and every lead links straight back to the conversation it came from, so you can read what was actually said before deciding anything.
Converting To A Deal
Converting is one action. It creates the deal, stamps the lead as converted with a reference to the deal it became, carries the first-touch campaign attribution across, and takes you into the new deal.
Good to know
Conversion happens exactly once. If a lead was already converted, converting again returns the existing deal rather than making a second one - so a double-click, or two people acting on the same lead, cannot produce duplicates.
That attribution point is the one worth caring about later. The campaign that produced the lead travels onto the deal, which is what makes it possible to say honestly which channel produced the revenue rather than guessing.
Qualifying Well
- Read the conversation before you accept. The lead record links to it.
- Set an owner at the moment you qualify, not later. An unowned qualified lead is nobody's job.
- Reject rather than delete. A rejected lead stays visible, so the same person does not arrive next month with nobody remembering why they were passed over.
Common Questions
What happens to the conversation after conversion? It stays linked. Open the deal and the exchange that started it is on the timeline.
Can a lead exist without a contact? Yes, briefly - an inbound message from an unknown number creates the lead first. Linking the contact is part of qualifying it.
Do leads count towards the forecast? No. Only deals do. That is the point of the separation.
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