The Leads pipeline

A lead is someone who might buy. A customer is someone who has. Keeping them apart stops your customer list filling up with people who asked for a price in March and never called back.

Leads sits sixth in the sidebar and opens on your pipeline board.

1. Pipeline view

The default. A column per stage, a card per lead, and you drag cards from left to right as things progress. Each column shows how many leads are sitting in it.

This is the view for working your day: it makes stalled leads obvious, because you can see a column filling up.

2. Table view

The same leads as a sortable list with stage as a column. Better when you want to sort by value, scan thirty leads quickly, or work through a list methodically rather than visually.

3. Filters

Narrow the board by stage, source, owner or date. Most useful for "show me only my leads" once more than one person is selling.

4. Search

Searches name, email, phone and address. Handy when someone calls back and you can't remember which stage they're in.

5. New Lead

Creates one by hand, for the phone calls and referrals that don't come through a form.

6. Pipeline settings

Where you add, rename and reorder stages, and where you'd create a second pipeline if you sell more than one way.

The default stages

A new account ships with New lead, Contacted, Responded, Estimate Sent, Won and Lost. That's a sensible spine for most home service businesses and it's worth using as-is for a few weeks before you start customising.

Won and Lost are the two that matter for reporting. A lead that sits in Contacted forever is invisible in your numbers, so move things out.

Tips and gotchas

• Leads are not customers. Converting a lead creates the customer record. Until then they stay out of your customer list.
• Empty columns are information. Nothing in Estimate Sent means you're not quoting.
• Drag, don't retype. Moving a card between columns is the whole point of the board view.

Next up: Creating a lead