Track leads with lead stages

This article shows how to define your own lead stages and assign them, so you can track what happens to a lead after it is sold. Contacted, quoted, sold, not interested: whatever your pipeline actually looks like.

These are your stages, not the platform's. Datahubb has its own internal pipeline stage that records where a lead got to during ingest, and the two are separate.

Prerequisites

• Admin access to create and edit stages
• A short list of the stages your process really uses. Start with four or five, not fifteen.

Create your stages

1. Open Lead Stages from the sidebar.
2. Add a stage and give it a label. Labels must be unique, and case does not make two labels different.
3. Pick a colour. It becomes the stage's badge everywhere a lead appears, so pick colours that are easy to tell apart at a glance. A stage with no colour set shows grey.
4. Optionally add reasons under the stage, and drag them into the order you want them offered. Reasons are how you capture why a lead landed in that stage, for example a "Not interested" stage with reasons for price, timing, and coverage.
5. Save.

The list shows how many stages you have, and how many do and do not carry reasons.

Assign a stage to a lead

1. Open Leads and click the lead.
2. Find the stage picker on the lead detail.
3. Choose the stage, and a reason if that stage has any.

The lead now carries a coloured badge wherever it appears in the lists.

Let buyers move their own leads

A buyer can change the stage of a lead sold to it, but only if you grant that permission. It is off by default, and it is granted per buyer.

This is the point of the feature for most workspaces. The buyer working the lead knows what happened to it, and letting them record it beats asking for a spreadsheet at the end of the month.

A buyer can only ever change stages on leads sold to that buyer.

See what changed

Every stage change is recorded: what it moved from, what it moved to, which reason was chosen, and who did it. Admins can open a lead's stage history, and the analytics view shows how leads are distributed across stages, the timeline of changes, and who is doing the most updating.

Expected result

Leads carry a coloured stage badge in the lists, buyers you have permitted can move their own leads through your stages, and you can open any lead and see who changed it and when.

Troubleshooting

• A stage will not save. A stage with that label already exists. Labels are unique regardless of case.
• A badge shows grey. No colour was set on that stage, or the colour is not a valid hex value.
• A buyer cannot change a stage. The permission is off for that buyer. Grant it per buyer, and remember a buyer can only touch leads sold to it.
• A lead's stage looks wrong after an import. Imported leads land in the built-in Imported stage, which is the internal pipeline stage rather than one of yours.
• You are confusing two stages with similar names. Your custom stages and the platform's internal pipeline stage are separate things. The internal one records how far a lead got during ingest, and you cannot edit it.