Leads

Every enquiry becomes a lead in a Track — with an owner, a stage, a callback and a dial history — so "we'll call them back" stops being a promise nobody kept.

TL;DR

• What it is — an outbound work surface. A lead is one enquiry about one thing: it sits in a Track (the pipeline), holds a stage, an owner, a score, a callback time and a record of every dial attempted against it.
• Who it's for — telecallers working a list all day, team leads who need to know who was never called, and admins who want dials, connects and talk time per agent without a spreadsheet.
• Top outcome — nobody's enquiry goes untouched. The Untouched chip shows every lead never dialled once, the SLA clock shows the ones going cold, and the retry cadence schedules the next attempt for you.

At a glance

How to find it

Sidebar → More → Leads. If you work leads every day, pin it to the rail from More → Customise.

Direct URL: https://lodgestory.com/crm/leads

From a contact: open any contact's profile panel — the Leads section lists every lead that contact has ever had, newest first.

To add one by hand: New lead in the page header. Every member can — the enquiry that came in by phone or at the front desk. Once you pick a lead type, its plain-text fields suggest values already used on at least two recent leads of that type (a city, a property, a referrer) as you type — pick one with the mouse or the arrow keys and Enter. Email and phone fields never suggest.

To bring in a whole sheet: Import CSV in the same header (Admins) — download the sample, fill it in, upload it. See Importing leads from a CSV.

To work a list without leaving the page: Sidebar → More → Dialer (/crm/dialer) — three panes: the queue, the lead you are about to speak to, and what happened. Both appear together, and only once your organisation has an active Track.

Configuration: Tracks, lead types, retry cadence, dialer and compliance live in Lead Tracks.

📸 [SCREENSHOT: leads-nav.png — sidebar with Leads highlighted]

What is Leads?

The problem it solves

A chat is a conversation. A ticket is a problem to fix. Neither one is an enquiry you are trying to convert — and if you try to run outbound calling out of an inbox, three things go wrong within a week. Enquiries that nobody replied to look identical to enquiries somebody is working. "Call them back on Thursday" lives in one person's head. And when the month misses its number, there is no way to tell whether the leads were bad or simply never dialled.

Leads gives every enquiry its own record with an owner, a stage, a next-action time and an append-only dial history. The contact stays the person; the lead is the attempt to win their business. One person can have five leads over two years and each one keeps its own outcome.

What you get

• Leads live in Tracks. A Track is one pipeline — its stages, who works it, the retry cadence and the dialer settings. Pick a Track in the page header; the list and the board follow it. A lead can be moved to another Track when it turns out to be a different kind of business.
• Stage and status are different things. The stage is where the lead is in the pipeline (New, Visit booked, Negotiating). The status — Open, Won, Lost, Junk — follows from the kind of stage it entered. You never set both, and you can't have a lead sitting in "Won" while its status says open.
• Quick chips a calling floor actually uses. All · My leads · Unassigned · Due today · Overdue · Untouched · SLA breached. Each chip is a saved shape of the same filters, so you can start from a chip and narrow further.
• "Untouched" means never dialled. Not "not dialled recently" — never dialled, not once. It is the one number that tells you whether a source is being worked at all, and it is the first thing to look at on a Monday.
• Table or board, same filters. Switch between the list and the kanban with the toggle in the header; your filters, search and Track survive the switch.
• A callback that the system remembers. Every outcome can set a next action with a note. Due today and Overdue are chips, not reports, and the lead sheet shows the countdown.
• A retry cadence that schedules itself. When an agent records Did not pick, the Track's cadence for that outcome decides when the lead comes back — and after how many attempts it gives up and moves the lead on. The agent picks the outcome; the calendar takes care of itself.
• Every dial is kept. One row per attempt: who dialled, when, connected or not, the outcome, talk time, wrap time, the stage the lead was in at that moment, and the call recording when the dial went through the softphone.
• Captured details per lead type. A Site visit lead and a Rental lead capture different things. Each lead type owns its own typed fields; they show on the lead sheet, can be added as list columns, and come out as their own CSV columns in the export.

How it's different

• A lead is not a chat with a label on it. Many CRMs bolt a "lead" flag onto a conversation, which means a repeat enquirer overwrites their own history. Here a lead is its own record pointing at a contact, so a customer who enquired in March and again in September has two leads with two outcomes — and the contact panel shows both.
• Two stage engines, one pipeline. A Track either keeps its own simple stage list, or borrows the stages of a Workflow you already drew — inheriting its editor, its legal transitions and its "capture an outcome before closing" rule. Nothing downstream cares which you chose.
• The pool is a first-class place to be. A lead with no owner isn't broken, it's in the pool: it shows with a Pool chip, it's on the Unassigned chip, and an agent claims it in one click. Claiming is a race the server settles — two agents can't end up with the same lead.
• Untouched, not "aging". Aging reports tell you a lead is old. They don't tell you whether anybody ever picked up the phone. Those are different failures with different fixes.

Customer scenarios

• Real-estate site visits. Portal enquiries land in an Inbound sales Track as Site visit leads. Telecallers work the queue: connect, qualify, book a visit, move the stage to Visit booked. Anything that didn't pick comes back tomorrow morning by itself. The team lead watches the Untouched chip go to zero by 11 AM.
• The Monday review. An admin filters Untouched across all Tracks, groups by source, and sees that one portal's leads are never called because they arrive at 2 AM and the pool is empty. Fix: an assignment rule on the Track.
• Repeat enquiry. A customer who was marked Lost six months ago messages again. The agent opens their contact panel, sees the old lead and why it was lost, and creates a fresh lead in the right Track — the history stays intact.
• Handover when somebody leaves. An admin filters Owner = Asha, selects the page, and reassigns to Ravi — or returns the whole set to the pool for whoever pulls next.
• A walk-in. Somebody rings the front desk about a flat. The agent clicks New lead, types the name and number, ticks Assign it to me and calls them back from the lead sheet. If that number is already a contact, the lead lands on the existing contact instead of creating a twin.

How it fits with the rest of Lodgestory

Lead Tracks owns the pipeline, the cadence and the dialer. Dialling and recordings ride on Calls and the browser softphone. The person behind a lead is a Contact, and a lead's outcome form is a disposition template — the same kind calls and chats use. Assignment reuses Ticket Pools, so the rota you already built routes leads too. Reports has the two lead exports, and Kaylee in Analytics can answer lead questions directly.

📸 [SCREENSHOT: leads-landing.png — leads table with the track selector, chips and filter bar]

Core concepts

Quick Start — work your first lead in 3 minutes

Step 1 — Open Leads and pick a Track

Sidebar → Leads. If your organisation has more than one Track, choose one in the header. (No Leads item in the sidebar? Your organisation has no active Track yet — see Lead Tracks.)

Step 2 — Start from a chip

Click Untouched to see everything nobody has dialled, or My leads for your own.

📸 [SCREENSHOT: leads-qs-2.png — quick chips with Untouched selected]

Step 3 — Claim one (or add one)

An unassigned lead shows a Pool chip. Open it and click Claim — it becomes yours. If somebody else got there first you're told so, and nothing changes. Taking an enquiry that isn't in the list yet? New lead in the header.

Step 4 — Call

Use the Call button on the row (or the phone number on the lead sheet). The softphone dials; the floating call card behaves exactly as it does in Calls.

Step 5 — Record the outcome

Pick the outcome — connected or not — add a note, and save. In one step Lodgestory writes the outcome, appends the attempt, schedules the next callback from the Track's cadence, applies any stage move the outcome implies, and hands you the next lead.

What you'll see next: the lead's Attempts count goes up, Last outcome updates, and Next action shows the callback the cadence picked. If the outcome was final, the status follows the stage into Won, Lost or Junk.

Step 6 — Check the board

Switch to Board. Your lead is in its stage column. Drag it to move stages — only legal moves are offered.

How it works

When an agent saves an outcome, Lodgestory does all of this in one round trip:

1. Appends an attempt row — agent, outcome, connected, talk and wrap seconds, the call it came from, and the script blocks walked.
2. Records the outcome as the lead's disposition — on the Track's outcome form when it has one, with the answers to its questions — and links it to the attempt. That is what a stage's "capture an outcome before leaving" rule checks, and what the dispositions report and the disposition.created webhook carry.
3. Updates the lead's counters: attempts, connects, last outcome, last-contacted time, and the first-touch stamp on the very first dial.
4. Asks the Track's retry cadence what happens next for that outcome: the delay until the next attempt, whether the caps (per lead, per day, per number of days) are exhausted, and which stage the lead lands in if they are.
5. Applies the stage move — an explicit move by the agent always beats the cadence's.
6. Returns the next lead from the queue, so the agent never goes back to the list.

Book a visit or meeting under Next call books for this lead without leaving the call; the booking's time is filled in as the next call, so saving the outcome keeps it. An explicit callback time the agent typed always wins over the cadence's suggestion. A stage that requires an outcome before you can leave it refuses the move until one is captured. When the Track has an outcome form, its required questions must be answered before the outcome saves — nothing is written until they are.

The Dialer page (/crm/dialer) is that loop as a screen — queue, lead, dial, outcome, next — with the compliance gate checked against the lead about to be dialled and auto-advance waiting until the outcome has actually saved. Skip ("not now", with a reason) keeps the lead out of the next queue read for a few minutes and notes the reason on the lead's history — it is not a stage move, so the lead's time in its stage keeps counting. Talk time comes from the switch and wrap time from the moment the call ended to the moment the outcome was saved, so neither has to be typed.

Messaging is logged too, and kept separate on purpose. The dialer's WhatsApp action records the touch on the lead's timeline and opens the conversation in the inbox — but it does not spend one of the lead's dial retries, does not stop the first-response clock, and does not clear the Untouched chip. Attempts on a lead means dials, because that is what the retry cadence, the SLA and the aging chip are all about; a message is a fact on the record, not a call that was made.

The work queue assembles an agent's next work in bands, in the order the Track configures: overdue callbacks first, then callbacks due today, then leads whose SLA is at risk, then the agent's own open leads, then the pool. Within a band a due callback dominates, then priority, then score, then oldest-waiting. Work older than 30 days stops being pushed at an agent — it stays on the list and the board, because an unbounded queue is an abandoned queue. A callback is the exception: however far ahead it was set, it comes back into the queue when it falls due.

Features in depth

The Leads list

Where to find it: Sidebar → More → Leads → Table.

Columns available: Lead (contact name, with the Pool chip when unowned), Stage, Status, Owner, Track, Type, Source, Next action, Attempts, Last outcome, Last contacted, Score, Priority, SLA, In stage, Created, Updated — plus a Call button on every row.

Shown by default: Lead, Stage, Owner, Source, Next action, Attempts, Last outcome, SLA. Columns adds the rest, and any captured detail as its own column, grouped per lead type (Site visit · details). Field columns are off by default. Both which columns you show and the order you put them in are remembered per browser; a newly toggled-on column goes to the end.

Sort by clicking a header: contact name, stage entered, next action, attempts, last contacted, score, created, updated. Score is 0–10 and comes from the Track's scoring table; a blank score means the Track doesn't score or nothing on the lead was scoreable, so it sorts last rather than as a zero. A lead with no callback never sorts to the top of "most urgent" — empty next-action values always sort last, in both directions.

Click any row to open the lead sheet.

Filters

• Search — spans the contact's name, phone and email plus the lead's own free text (source detail, callback note). Type digits and it matches the number: "98765" finds the phone.
• Track, Type (retired types are listed as (retired) — their old leads still carry values), Stage, Status.
• Owner — multi-select, plus Unassigned pool. Picking both a person and the pool means both: "Asha's leads and the pool", not neither.
• Source — where the lead came from: MANUAL, CSV_IMPORT, WEB_FORM, PUBLIC_API, WEBHOOK, META_LEAD_ADS (a Facebook or Instagram Instant Form submission synced by Meta Lead Ads — source detail is the form's name, and the campaign, ad set and ad are on the lead), CHAT (a conversation, including one started from a click-to-chat ad — a guest who only signed in on your own app, for push notifications, never becomes one), CALL_INBOUND, CALL_MISSED, CALL_OUTBOUND, GOAL, DISPOSITION, TICKET, AUTOMATION or BOOKING (a public booking from a customer with no open lead), with source detail naming the campaign, portal, form or number.
• Created and Next action date ranges.
• Untouched (never dialled) and SLA breached toggles.
• Details — conditions on the lead type's own captured fields, at the bottom of the Filters panel. Pick one Lead type first (fields belong to a type), then Field → Condition → Value → Add. Up to 5 conditions, all of which must match; each shows as a chip you can remove.
  • Text, email and phone fields: contains, is (ignores case).
  • Dropdown and radio: is any of. Multi-select: has any of.
  • Number: =, ≥, ≤, between. Date: on, on or before, on or after, between.
  • Yes/no: is yes, is no (a box never ticked counts as no).
  • Every field except yes/no: is empty, is filled.
  • A value that isn't a real number or date (say "approx 1L" typed into a number field) never matches a number or date condition.
  • Changing or clearing the lead type clears its detail conditions. They apply to the table and the board; exports don't use them yet.

Status defaults to All statuses, so a won or lost lead never looks missing from its Track. Pick Open under Filters → Status for the live work only. The Untouched and SLA breached chips always mean open leads unless you pick a status.

Non-admins don't get the owner picker; they use the chips (My leads, Unassigned) instead.

The board

Where to find it: Sidebar → More → Leads → Board.

One column per stage of the selected Track, each with its own count and its own paging — nothing ever loads a whole Track at once. Drag a card to move it, and only moves the Track allows are offered: a column whose stage has no onward transitions offers no drop at all rather than guessing at one. The stage filter is ignored on the board (a board shows every column by definition).

The lead sheet

Opens from a row or a card, on the right:

1. Lead — the contact (name, Pool chip when unowned), phone, email, the owner (Admins reassign it here; everyone else sees who has it), the next action and its reason, score, attempts, last outcome and created date.
   • To change the next action: click the pencil beside Next action on an open lead. Pick a date and time (or In 1 hour, Tomorrow 10 AM, In 3 days), write the reason, and Save. Clear removes the callback. Any member can do this; a time in the past is refused. Won, Lost and Junk leads have no callback to change.
2. Pipeline — the current stage with a move control and an optional "why is it moving?" remark, and the Track with a move control. Moving Track can re-type the lead if the destination doesn't accept its current type.
3. Captured details — the lead type's fields, viewed and edited in place. A lead created before a field existed shows it empty and can be completed here. Editing is a merge: sending one field never clears the others.
4. Conversations — the chats already open with this person; click one to open it in the inbox.
5. Bookings — this lead's site visits and meetings (plus any of the contact's bookings not linked to another lead). Book makes one for this lead, so the Track's booking rules run; Copy link gives the customer a booking link that lands on this lead.
6. Attempts — every dial, newest first. Never dialled when there are none.
7. History — every stage the lead entered, with when it was entered and left, plus the skips and remarks recorded along the way, every hand change to the next action (who, when, old and new time, reason — set, rescheduled, cleared or reason changed), and every booking event: booked, rescheduled, cancelled, completed or no-show, how the booking reached this lead, and what the booking rules did — including a stage move the Track refused. No moves yet when nothing has happened. A callback set by recording a call outcome shows under Attempts instead.

Adding a lead by hand

New lead in the page header opens a short form: the Track (the one you are looking at, by default), the lead type — only the types that Track accepts, and already chosen when it accepts exactly one — the person's name, phone and email, the type's own questions (required ones are enforced), and an optional first-call time. The person is found before anything is created: a phone number and country code, or an email, that already belongs to a contact puts the lead on that contact. Tick Assign it to me to take it yourself; otherwise the Track's ownership rule decides. Giving a new lead to somebody else is for Admins.

When the Track doesn't allow duplicates and this person already has an open lead on it, nothing new is made — you're told so, and that lead opens instead.

Importing leads from a CSV

Import CSV in the page header (Admins) brings in a whole sheet — a portal export, an expo list, a spreadsheet somebody typed up. Pick the Track and, when the sheet carries a type's own questions, the lead type — only the types the Track accepts are offered, and a Track that accepts exactly one starts on it; then drop the file, or click Download sample first. The sample is a ready-made sheet with every column the importer offers — first and last name, phone number, country code, email, source detail, priority and the three UTM columns — plus an Owner email column and the chosen type's own fields under their labels, with two example rows showing the expected spelling: yes/no for a checkbox, a date written like 2026-11-05, options separated by commas for a multi-select, two of your teammates' addresses as owners. Fill it in, keep the header row, and upload it.

After the upload the importer shows the sheet's real columns, a first value from each, and its guess at what every column holds — the sample's columns, and any header that is a field's label, come back already mapped. Change any guess, leave a column as Not imported to ignore it, and set a source detail and priority for the whole file when the sheet has none. A row needs at least a first name, a phone number or an email to become a lead. Start import runs it in the background: close the dialog and come back — it offers the running import again — while the Leads list fills as rows land.

Assigning rows to teammates from the sheet. Put a teammate's email address in a column and map it to Owner (email) — the sample has one, and a header that says email — Owner email, Agent email, Assignee email — maps on its own. A bare Owner, Agent or Assigned to column is left for you to map: in a property business it is as often the landlord or the channel partner, and in a telecalling export it is usually a column of names. A row whose address belongs to a member of your organisation is created already owned by them, on a Pool Track as much as an Assign-on-arrival one, and that beats the Track's rule for that row. A blank cell follows the Track's rule. So does an address that is not a teammate's, and the run lists each such address once under Owners not found, with the first row that created a lead with it, so you can fix the sheet or assign those leads from the list. Matching is exact and ignores case; service accounts cannot own leads.

Every row goes through the same door as a lead added by hand: the person is matched to an existing contact by phone or email, and the Track's duplicate rule applies. A person who already has an open lead on the Track counts as Merged when the Track reuses that lead and Skipped when it refuses; up to 50 rows that did not import are listed with the reason (the list is shared with the owner addresses above). Imported leads carry the source CSV_IMPORT, with the source detail you set (or the import's id) so they can be filtered as a batch.

Bulk actions

Tick leads in the list and the bulk bar appears (Admins). Tick the page, or press Select all … matching this view to act on every lead the current filters match — the server re-reads the filter, so a 20,000-lead action never leaves the browser carrying 20,000 ids; untick a row to leave it out. Bulk action opens the builder, where you stack the steps that run in order on each lead:

• Move to a stage of the Track you are looking at. A lead whose workflow does not allow that move is left where it is (the review screen shows how many will actually move), and a closing stage clears the follow-up time. The outcome-required rule is not applied — this is housekeeping, not a call.
• Move to another track. The lead lands in the destination's first stage and keeps its owner. A lead whose type the destination refuses is left alone unless you pick a type; a person who already has an open lead there (on a Track that refuses duplicates) is skipped.
• Assign to a teammate or Return to the pool.
• Delete. The leads go with their stage history, attempts and compliance log; contacts, bookings, chats, dispositions and Meta lead records stay and lose their link to the lead. Apply always asks you to type the count back.

Two kinds of lead are always left alone and show as unchanged in Activity: a merged lead (it was folded into another lead, and re-opening it would make a second live lead for the same person) and a lead with a call in progress. Delete skips only the latter.

Review shows the exact count and, per step, how many leads it will change; above 1,000 you type the number to confirm. Bulk actions run silently — no webhooks, no automations, no notifications, no SLA changes — and in the background: Activity on the bar lists every run with its progress, and Undo is offered for 7 days. Undo puts back what the run changed and skips any lead edited again since; an undone delete returns the lead under its old id with its history, attempts and the links from its bookings, dispositions and Meta lead records. Two runs that overlap on the same leads never touch a lead at the same time — the later run waits for the earlier one to let go of it.

Deleting one lead

Open the lead and press Delete next to Call and Contact (Admins). It asks once, then the lead goes for good with its stage history, attempts and compliance log — the contact, bookings, chats, dispositions and Meta lead records stay, without their link. A lead with a call in progress cannot be deleted until the call ends. This path has no Undo; to delete with Undo, use a bulk action from the list.

Claiming from the pool

An unassigned lead can be claimed by whoever opens it. The claim is settled by the server — the loser of a race is told the lead is already taken and nothing is overwritten.

Paced dialing (Progressive, Power, Predictive)

When a supervisor starts a paced session for your Track on the Team wallboard, the Dialer stops asking you to press Call: the switch picks the lead, dials, and puts the call through to you.

• Be ready. Keep the Dialer page open, with calling set to Browser (the Browser / Phone switch on the call button or the keypad) and the browser phone connected. The header shows where you stand — Ready for the next call, Call on its way…, On a paced call, or Paused — no calls. Press Paused to stop calls for a break; the pacer notices within seconds.
• Calls answer themselves. A paced call is picked up by your browser phone automatically — a customer who answers a Power or Predictive call has only two seconds to reach a person. Your ordinary calls still ring as usual.
• The lead is already on screen. As the call connects, its lead, script and outcome form open by themselves.
• No refreshing. A session starting, pausing or stopping, and a call being handed to you, reach the page over the same realtime channel the rest of the CRM uses, within about a second. The page only polls slowly as a fallback if that connection drops.
• One call at a time. After the call, save the outcome to get the next one. On a Track with a wrap-up limit, the next call comes when the wrap-up runs out even if you haven't saved. A Progressive call where the customer never picked up is recorded for you and needs no outcome.
• The queue is for reading. While a session runs, opening a lead from the queue doesn't claim it, and Pull next is off — the session hands out the leads.

A session belongs to the supervisor who started it; pausing or stopping it gives everyone their Call button back. How the pace is set, and the 3% abandoned-call rule behind it, is in Lead Tracks.

Leads on a contact

A contact's profile panel lists that contact's leads (up to 50, newest first), so an agent who opens a chat or answers a call sees every enquiry that person has ever raised and how each one ended.

Roles and permissions

Cross-module workflows

Portal enquiry → lead → call → won

An enquiry arrives from a portal and becomes a lead in the Inbound sales Track. (Intakes — the portal, web-form and event connections that create leads by themselves — are set up through the API; Facebook and Instagram lead forms have their own screen, Meta Lead Ads.) The Track's assignment rule gives it to whoever is on that hour's rota from its Ticket Pool. The agent's queue surfaces it inside the SLA window; they dial from the softphone, the call is recorded, the outcome is captured on the lead, and the stage moves to Visit booked. When the visit converts, the stage moves to a Won stage and the lead's status follows.

Modules involved: Lead Tracks → Leads → Calls → Reports.

Did not pick → cadence → retry → give up

The agent records Did not pick. The Track's cadence sets the callback for tomorrow, counts the attempt, and — once six attempts over fourteen days are used up — moves the lead to the stage the Track nominates for an exhausted cadence. Nobody had to remember any of it.

Modules involved: Lead Tracks → Leads.

Per-agent calling review

An admin exports LEAD_ACTIVITY from Reports for last week: one row per dial with agent, outcome, connected, talk and wrap seconds. Pivot on agent and hour and you have dials, connects and talk time per agent per hour. Or just ask Kaylee in Analytics for the same thing.

Modules involved: Leads → Reports / Analytics.

Limits a user will run into

Errors & FAQ

Frequently asked

What's the difference between a lead and a ticket?
A ticket is a problem to resolve. A lead is business to win. A ticket closes when the issue is fixed; a lead closes Won, Lost or Junk.

Can one contact have several leads?
Yes, and that's the point. Each enquiry keeps its own stage, owner and outcome, and the contact panel shows all of them.

Why does my list show fewer leads than I expect?
Check Filters → Status: it shows every status by default, but if someone picked one (say Open), leads in the others are hidden. The Untouched and SLA breached chips also show open leads only.

Does "Untouched" mean nobody replied?
It means nobody dialled — zero attempts ever. A lead you messaged but never called still counts as untouched.

Can two leads be merged?
Not yet. A Merged status is reserved for that flow, but no action sets it today. To stop duplicates arriving in the first place, set the Track's duplicate policy to reuse the open lead.

Where did the time-in-stage number come from?
The moment the lead entered its current stage. Every stage entry and exit is kept, so the full trail is on the lead sheet and in the LEAD export.

Can I export the captured details?
Yes — the LEAD export adds one column per lead-type field, labelled by field, with the lead type's name prefixed when two types use the same label.

Related modules & next steps

• Lead Tracks — the pipeline, the cadence, the dialer, the SLA and the compliance gate.
• Calls — the softphone, the call card, recordings and transcripts.
• Contacts — the person behind every lead.
• Ticket Pools — the rota a Track assigns from.
• Workflow Lifecycle Stages — the stage engine a MACHINE Track borrows.
• Reports — the LEAD and LEAD_ACTIVITY CSV exports.
• Analytics — ask Kaylee for per-agent dials, funnels and untouched leads.