Working with Leads

What a lead is

A lead is a prospect you haven't qualified yet — someone from a web form, a cold call, a referral, or an event, before you know they're a real opportunity worth tracking as a full Contact. It has a status (New, Contacted, Qualified, Unqualified, Converted), a source, a score, and free-form notes.

Why it's separate from Contacts

Not every enquiry is worth cluttering your Contacts list with, especially ones that never go anywhere. Keeping Leads separate means your Contacts stay a clean list of real relationships, while your Leads list tracks the "should I bother following up" stage on its own.

What you can do on a lead

A lead isn't a holding pen — it's a working record. Everything you'd do on a contact, you can do here:

• Log calls, meetings and notes on its activity timeline, with @mentions for teammates.
• Email them and keep the thread in the lead's Email Log — sent through your own SMTP, with your signature and Reply-To, exactly like contact email.
• WhatsApp them with one click, if you've captured a phone number.
• Create tasks against them, so a follow-up you promised doesn't rely on memory.
• Attach files — the enquiry they sent, a site photo, a spec sheet.

Working a lead properly *before* deciding whether to convert is the point. You shouldn't have to promote someone to a Contact just to record that you phoned them.

How to use leads

1. Go to Leads in the sidebar and click New Lead — or let them arrive by themselves through your lead capture form, or import a list.
2. Fill in name, contact details, company name, and where the lead came from (source).
3. Work it: log the calls, set the follow-up tasks, email them.
4. Update its status as you go — New → Contacted → Qualified (or Unqualified if it's a dead end).
5. Once it's a real opportunity, click Convert to Contact.

What happens when you convert

Converting creates a real Contact — and a Company too, if you entered a company name that doesn't already exist.

Everything you logged on the lead comes with it. Calls, meetings, notes, emails, tasks and attachments all move onto the new contact, and a note is added recording that it came from a lead, along with its source and score. Whoever opens that contact next sees the full history from first enquiry onward, not a blank record that starts the day it was converted.

The original lead is marked Converted and links to the contact. It can no longer be edited — the Contact record takes over from there.

Plan limits

Leads aren't counted against your plan's contact limit — only converted Contacts are. There's no cap on how many leads you can hold.