CRM/Sales
Leads & Pipeline
Every field, stage, routing rule and conversion path for leads and the sales pipeline.
What it is
A lead is a person, not yet a customer, tracked through a status pipeline: new → contacted → mql → nurturing → sql, with a disqualified exit at any point. A separate ai_suggested status exists for leads an AI discovery agent has proposed but nobody has reviewed yet — it deliberately isn’t offered as a choice when you create a lead by hand, since that claim only makes sense for something an agent produced.
7
Pipeline statuses
80
Hot-lead score threshold
3
Ways to add a lead
Key fields
A lead record is organized into the same groups the create form uses:
- Contact — name, email, phone and mobile (each with its own country code), LinkedIn URL, and a trade role: Buyer/Importer, Supplier/Exporter, or Both.
- Company — name (with a company lookup that autofills industry, website, employee count and revenue), job title, industry, website.
- Location — street, city, state, country, postal code.
- Financial — estimated deal value, currency, expected close date.
- Details — status, priority (urgent/high/medium/low), lead source (website form, social platforms, Google Ads, email campaign, manual entry, API, referral, file import, other), tags, and notes.
Leads arrive three ways: created by hand, imported from a CSV file with column mapping and duplicate handling, or pulled in through a Salesforce import.
How the pipeline moves
- 1
New
The default status for a freshly created or imported lead. - 2
Contacted
A one-click status update once someone has reached out — available from New only. - 3
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
Qualified from New or Contacted, with optional notes on why. - 4
Nurturing
An optional holding stage for an MQL lead that isn’t ready for sales yet. - 5
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
Qualified from MQL or Nurturing, with an assignee, estimated value and expected close date. - 6
Converted
The end state once an SQL lead has been turned into an account, contact and opportunity — it can’t be qualified further.
Rules the pipeline enforces
You cannot qualify a lead to MQL if it’s already MQL, and you cannot move an SQL (or already-converted) lead back down to MQL. Disqualifying is available from any non-SQL, non-converted status, and a disqualified lead can always be reopened as New.The conversion path
Reaching SQL only changes the lead’s status — it does not create anything else. The Convert to account & opportunity wizard is the actual conversion step, and it runs off a server-generated preview so every field arrives pre-filled:
- A Company & address tab, with existing-account duplicates surfaced up front so you can link to one instead of creating a new record.
- An Opportunity tab, seeded from the lead’s estimated value, currency and expected close date.
- A Contact tab for the primary contact at that company.
One submit creates the company account, the primary contact, and a linked sales opportunity together, and takes you straight into that opportunity’s workspace.
Segments and Funnels
Two related tools sit next to the lead pipeline for working with leads in bulk:
- Segments are dynamic or static lists built from filter conditions (AND/OR) over lead fields. A dynamic segment recalculates its membership; a static one is a fixed set you add leads to directly. Segments are what you qualify or message in bulk — including qualifying every member of a segment as MQL or SQL in one action.
- Funnels group campaigns and draw the picture of how leads move between them. A funnel itself decides nothing — the routing rules live on each campaign’s own "ways out" — so a campaign that isn’t in any funnel still routes people correctly. Funnels are read-only reporting on top of that movement.
Separately, Lead Automation Workflows automate nurturing based on the products and behavior tied to a lead — a different mechanism again from segments and funnels, aimed at follow-up rather than reporting.
Related
New to the pipeline? Start with the Leads & Pipeline guide.