Leads

A lead is an inbound enquiry — someone who has shown interest but hasn't yet been confirmed as a real sales opportunity. Leads are kept separate from your real accounts and contacts until you've decided they're worth pursuing.

When you'd use a lead (vs. a contact)

Scenario	Use a…
Someone filled in a web form	Lead
A name on a trade-show list	Lead
You bought a marketing list	Lead
Existing customer's new buyer joined	Contact (under the existing account)
Confirmed decision-maker at a real account	Contact

The point is to keep unqualified noise out of your real customer database.

The 5 lead statuses

Every lead moves through these states. Reps can only advance one step at a time — the system blocks invalid jumps.

Status	What it means	What you typically do next
New	Just arrived, nobody has reached out	Make first contact within SLA
Contacted	A rep has reached out by phone/email	Apply BANT qualification
Qualified	Passes BANT — worth pursuing	Convert to an account, contact and opportunity
Unqualified	Not a fit (wrong industry, no budget, etc.)	Optionally reopen later if things change
Converted	Has become a real account & contact	(Lead is now locked)

You can also reopen an unqualified lead back to New if circumstances change (budget freed up, new project announced).

What each lead record stores

A lead record declares its fields in 10 groups. The lead's own record page curates its Details tab from a subset of them, so read this as the full inventory of what a lead carries rather than a screen-by-screen map:

Group	What's in it
Identity	Salutation, first/last name, full name, display title
Company Information	Company, job title, industry — plus a hidden normalised copy of the company name, which is what conversion and duplicate checks match on
Contact Information	Email, phone, mobile, website
Qualification	Status, Lead Score (a 1-5 star rating), lead source, next follow-up date, last contacted, disqualification reason
Assignment	Owner
Address	A single structured address field
Additional Info	Annual revenue, number of employees, description, notes
Communication Preferences	Do-not-call, email opt-out
Conversion	Converted flag, converted account, contact and opportunity, converted date — all auto-filled when the lead is converted
Duplicate Management	Duplicate Of (which object the surviving record lives on), Duplicate Of Lead, Duplicate Of Contact, Duplicate Status — the fields behind Duplicate leads below

The available industries include Technology, Software/SaaS, Finance, Healthcare, Retail, Manufacturing, Education, Real Estate, Media, Logistics, Hospitality, Energy, Government, Non-profit, and Other.

The available lead sources include Web, Referral, Event, Trade Show, Webinar, Partner, Advertisement, Cold Call, and Other.

Lead scoring — what the score means

A lead carries exactly one quality number: Lead Score, a 1-5 star rating. It is the same field the list views show in the Score column — there is no separate 0-100 number, and no budget or timeline field behind it.

Where the stars come from

When a lead is created without a rating, the system works one out from the lead's own fields and stores it. Everything it looks at is on the record in front of you — there is no web-visit or engagement tracking behind the number:

What it looks at	Stars added
A business email address — anything that isn't gmail, yahoo, hotmail, outlook, qq or 163	+1
Any phone number at all	+0.5
A senior job title — CEO, CTO, CFO, CIO, COO, Founder, VP, Vice President, Director, Head of	+1.5
Industry is Technology, Finance or Healthcare	+1
200 employees or more	+0.5
Annual revenue of $10M or more	+0.5

The total is capped at 5, floored at 1 and rounded to a whole star: a lead is never scored 0, and half stars are never stored.

Two limits worth knowing:

It runs on creation only. Filling in the job title or the headcount later does not re-score the lead — re-rate it yourself if the picture changed.
It never overwrites a rating that came in with the lead. Import a lead with a rating, or set one on the create form, and your value is what is kept.

What the stars trigger

New-lead routing reads the rating once, as the lead lands:

Rating	Next Follow-up Date it stamps	Alert to the lead's owner
4 stars or better	Tomorrow	"Hot lead — assign within 24h", sent to both the inbox and email, flagged as a warning
Everything else, including a lead with no rating at all	Three days out	"New lead to assign", inbox only

Four stars is the whole of the hot threshold: a 5-star lead is routed exactly like a 4-star one, and nothing separate happens at five.

The weights above live in the lead's automation code, not in a setup screen — see the admin tips at the end of this page.

Duplicate leads

The same person enquiring twice is normal, not an error. A returning prospect who fills in the web form again — or a trade-show list that overlaps one you already imported — creates a second lead, and HotCRM records the relationship instead of refusing the record.

When a lead arrives with an email address already in the system, it is saved with:

Duplicate Status = Suspected — a machine's guess, nothing has been decided.
Duplicate Of — the record it appears to repeat: an existing Contact if the person already became one, otherwise the oldest open Lead with that address. Every re-submission points at the same original, so a cluster is one list, not a chain.

Work them from the Suspected Duplicates view on the Leads tab. Open the pair, compare them, and then either:

It's a new enquiry from a known person — clear Duplicate Status and work the lead normally. A returning prospect with a fresh budget is a real opportunity.
It's the same enquiry twice — set the lead to Unqualified with the reason Duplicate. The form then requires you to name the surviving record and set Duplicate Status to Confirmed; the lead cannot be closed as a duplicate without saying what survives it, so the disqualification report always links to something you can open.

Anonymous Web-to-Lead submissions are always accepted. If the public form cannot check for existing records (it deliberately has no read access to your CRM data), the lead lands unflagged — review it from the normal lead queue.

When the surviving record is later deleted

Deleting a Contact, or the Account above it, is never blocked by a lead that pointed at it — including a lead you already closed as a confirmed duplicate. What happens to the lead depends on how far the review had got:

Still Suspected — nothing was decided, so the flag is dropped entirely. The lead stops claiming to duplicate anything and goes back to the normal queue.
Confirmed by a reviewer — the verdict stands. Duplicate Status stays Confirmed and Duplicate Of changes to Erased Record, so the lead reads as "a confirmed duplicate of a record that has since been erased". The disqualification and its reason are untouched.

Erased Record is not something you can choose. It is only ever written when the record a lead named is actually deleted, which is why seeing it on a lead is reliable evidence that the deletion happened rather than that someone typed it. This is what lets an erasure request be carried out in full without quietly deleting a reviewer's finding along with it.

Converting a qualified lead

When a lead is qualified, click Convert. A small form pops up asking:

Should we also create an Opportunity?
If yes — what's the opportunity name and amount?

The system then, in a single step:

Creates an Account from the lead's company information — or reuses the one you already have. The match ignores capitalisation and extra spaces, so a lead for ACME Corp lands on your existing Acme Corp instead of creating a second account. It is not a fuzzy match: Acme Corp and Acme Corporation are still two different companies.
Creates a Contact from the lead's person information, attached to that account, marked as primary.
(Optional) Creates an Opportunity in the Prospecting stage with a 90-day close date.
Marks the lead as Converted and locks it.
Sends you a confirmation email summarising what was created.

After conversion, the lead becomes read-only — all future activity happens on the new account, contact and opportunity.

How the AI Copilot helps

When you open a lead, the AI assistant is available in the side panel. Try asking:

"Qualify this lead" — runs BANT, gives you a score and a one-line justification per dimension.
"Is this a hot lead?" — quick yes/no plus reasoning.
"Draft an intro email" — writes a personalised first outreach.

The Copilot will recommend the next action (e.g., schedule a call, send a follow-up, disqualify).

Standard list views

The Leads list curates no tab row, so the switcher offers every saved view there is — eight of them, in this order:

View	What it shows
All Leads (the landing view)	Every lead, newest first, with the name as the link into the record plus company, email, status, score, source and owner. 25 rows a page, export to CSV or XLSX, and Add to Campaign on the selection toolbar. On an empty org it says so — No Leads Yet · Get started by creating your first lead.
My Leads	The leads you own, highest star rating first and newest within a rating. Also reachable from My Work › My Leads in the sidebar.
🔥 Hot Leads	Leads still New or Contacted rated 4 stars or better — exactly the leads new-lead routing calls hot, gives a next-day follow-up date and alerts their owner about ("assign within 24h"). Ordered by Next Follow-up Date, soonest first, with phone, email and owner on the row so it can be worked top to bottom.
High Priority	The same population — 4 stars and up, still New or Contacted — laid out to scan rather than to work through: no follow-up date, but the lead source on the row and rows tinted by rating (green at 5, orange at 4).
Suspected Duplicates	The review queue described above: leads whose Duplicate Status is Suspected, oldest suspicion first, with the duplicate-link fields on the row. Working it drains it — a lead set to Confirmed or cleared drops out. When there is nothing to review it says No Suspected Duplicates · Nothing to review — every re-captured email has been checked.
Lead Pipeline	The kanban board, one column per status, each column summing Annual Revenue. Opening a card slides the lead in from the side rather than taking you off the board.
Lead Calendar	Leads placed on a month calendar by the day they arrived, titled by company and coloured by status — the shape of your inflow.
Lead Cards	Gallery cards, one per lead, titled by company with name, email, phone, status and rating on the face.

Tips for sales reps

✅ Keep the Next Follow-up Date honest — it is what 🔥 Hot Leads sorts on, so a stale date buries a live lead at the bottom of the queue. A new lead gets one automatically (four stars or better is due tomorrow, everything else in three days), and Schedule Follow-up re-stamps it with the due date of the task you just filed.
✅ Set the stars yourself when you have a strong gut feel — a rating you supply on create is kept as-is, and the automatic one only fills in when you leave it blank.
✅ Don't convert too early — a converted lead can't be reverted. Use Qualified status while you confirm.
❌ Don't keep noise in New forever — disqualify after 3 failed contact attempts.

Tips for admins

The score formula lives in the lead's automation. To re-weight it, edit src/objects/lead.hook.ts (binds to crm_lead). See Customization.
Web-to-Lead can be enabled by granting the Guest Portal profile insert-only on the lead object — see Administration › Profiles.
To add a new industry or lead source, edit the lead object's picklists — see Customization.

Leads

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