Lead management is the set of rules that decides what happens to every enquiry between the moment it arrives and the moment it becomes a deal or is closed off. This article answers one question: which few operating rules make lead management work in a company of 10 to 250 people, and how do you enforce them on the platform? Once they are in place, no enquiry sits unowned, every lead has a dated next action, and you can see on any morning which ones are slipping.
Three rules that do most of the work
Most firms with stalled revenue do not lack leads. They lose a steady share of them in the gap between marketing and sales, where nobody is quite sure whose job the enquiry is. Three rules close that gap.
Every lead has exactly one owner from the minute it is created. Every lead has a next action with a date on it. Every lead ends in one of a small number of named outcomes, never in silence. If you enforce only these three, you close most of the gaps where enquiries go missing.
Everything else, from scoring to nurture sequences, sits on top of these rules. Without them, extra tooling just produces a faster mess.
What a managed lead looks like on the platform
On the platform, a lead is a record in Contacts. It carries a source, an owner, a status field you define, tags, and the full history of messages in Conversations. With the rules below, every enquiry also gets an opportunity in a pipeline from the start, so it appears in the board view and the reports; how those deals are then worked is covered in turning leads into pipeline deals.
The status field is the backbone. A short list such as new, contacted, working, nurture and closed tells anyone looking at the record where it stands without reading the history. Tasks hold the next action. Workflows in Automation do the assigning, reminding and escalating so the rules do not depend on memory.
Before you start
- A written list of every route enquiries arrive through: forms, calls, chat, email, portals, referrals.
- The names of the people who will own leads, each with a user in the account.
- A decision on how leads are shared out: by territory, by service line, by turn, or to one person.
- Your list of lead statuses, five or six at most, with one sentence defining each.
- A lead source field already in place, so you can tell later which routes produce good leads.
How to set up lead management on the platform
Decide the statuses, owners and sharing rule on paper first. Then three workflows enforce the rules: one turns every enquiry into an opportunity, one gives it an owner, and one raises the alarm when it stops moving.
Rule one: every enquiry becomes an opportunity
- In the left menu go to Automation, then Workflows.
- Select Create Workflow, then Start from Scratch.
- Select Add New Trigger, choose Form Submitted, pick your enquiry form and select Save Trigger.
- Select the Add action button below the trigger and choose Create/Update Opportunity.
- Choose the Pipeline and the Stage new enquiries enter.
- Set the Status to Open and enter a Value if you know the typical deal size.
- Leave duplicate opportunities off, so a repeat enquiry updates the existing card rather than creating a second one.
- Select Save Action.
- Toggle Draft to Publish in the top-right corner.
The action stays the same whatever the route; only the trigger changes. Build one per enquiry route, or add several triggers to the same workflow, so calls logged by reception, chat leads and referral forms all land in the pipeline the same way.
Rule two: every opportunity has an owner within a minute
- Go to Automation, open Workflows, click Create Workflow and choose Start from Scratch.
- Add a trigger matched to the lead source, such as Contact Created.
- Add the Assign to User action, choose the people who take new leads and leave split traffic on equally.
- Add an Internal Notification after it, pick in-app, SMS or email, and choose assigned user as the user type.
- Add a task action for the assigned user, due the same day, so first contact sits on their list.
- Switch the Publish toggle on, top right, and click Save.
If leads are shared by territory or service line rather than by turn, put an If/Else branch before the assignment and give each branch its own Assign to User action.
Rule three: no lead goes quiet unnoticed
- Go to Automation and open Workflows.
- Click Create Workflow and then Start from scratch.
- Click Add new Trigger and pick Stale Opportunities.
- Give the trigger a name such as "New enquiry not contacted".
- Click Add Filters.
- Enter the Duration in Days that a lead may sit before it counts as stale.
- Pick your sales pipeline in In Pipeline and the first stage in Pipeline Stage.
- Click Save Trigger.
Each trigger watches one stage of one pipeline, so add one for each stage where silence costs you money. The clock starts when the trigger is added and resets whenever the opportunity is moved or updated. For the actions, notify the owner first and their manager on a second, longer trigger.
If you want the first reply to go out before a person picks the lead up, the article on automated lead follow-up shows how to send it instantly.
What it replaces and the weekly cost in time
Lead management on one platform replaces the shared inbox that four people half-watch, the spreadsheet of enquiries someone fills in on Fridays, and the habit of asking in a meeting whether anyone called back the person from Tuesday. It also replaces the arguments about whether marketing leads are any good, because the outcome of each one is recorded.
Each owner needs about fifteen minutes a day to work their view and update statuses. A sales lead needs around half an hour a week to look at leads that breached the first-contact rule and at closed reasons. That is the whole running cost once the workflows are live.
Suppose the firm receives 120 enquiries a month through its website, a phone line, partner referrals and event lists, and nobody can say how many were contacted. With owners, statuses and a same-day task in place, a month's report might show 104 contacted within a day, 9 contacted later and 7 never reached. Those 7 would become the agenda for next week's sales meeting.
The mistake most people make
They treat lead management as a tool purchase rather than a set of agreements. The platform will happily assign, remind and report, but it cannot decide for you what counts as first contact or when a lead should be closed. If those definitions are not written down, every person applies their own and the reports mean nothing.
Leaving leads open forever. A lead with no reply after a defined number of attempts should move to nurture or be closed with a reason. An open list of several hundred stale leads hides the fifteen that matter this week.
When not to use it
If you receive a handful of enquiries a month and one person handles all of them, a formal status list and assignment workflow are more structure than you need. A tag and a task will do. Lead management earns its keep once more than one person touches enquiries, or once volume rises past what one person can remember.
It is also the wrong place to fix weak demand. If the problem is too few enquiries, start with how leads are generated automatically and come back to this once the flow exists.
Troubleshooting
Leads arrive with no owner. One route bypasses the assignment workflow, usually a form added after the workflow was built. Add the new form as a trigger and recheck every route.
The same person appears as two opportunities. Either duplicate opportunities are allowed in the Create/Update Opportunity action, or two workflows create a card for the same route. Turn the duplicate setting off and keep one creating workflow per route.
Owners ignore the tasks. The tasks are created but the owner never opens the task list. Make their task list, filtered to today, the first screen they open, and review it with them for the first two weeks.
Stale alerts fire on leads that were contacted. The owner made contact but did not move or update the opportunity, so the timer never reset. Ask owners to move the deal to Contacted after the first call; that also keeps the board honest.
Old leads never raise an alert. Stale Opportunities does not look back. Opportunities already sitting in a stage start counting from the day you added the trigger, so review the existing backlog by hand once.
Frequently asked questions
Is lead management the same as a CRM?
No. The CRM is where the records live. Lead management is the set of rules about who handles each lead, how fast, and how it ends. You can own a CRM and still have no lead management.
Who should own lead management in a mid-sized firm?
One named person, usually the sales lead or head of operations. Marketing supplies leads and sales works them, but someone has to own the rules and the weekly review, or the gap between the two teams reopens.
How many lead statuses should we use?
Five or six. Fewer and you cannot tell working leads from untouched ones. More and people stop choosing carefully, which defeats the point.
What happens to leads that are not ready to buy?
They move to a nurture status with a scheduled sequence rather than being closed. How to build that sequence is covered in lead nurturing on the platform.