Working with Leads · KISS Playbooks

// the definition

What counts as a lead

A contact is a person. A lead is the work of trying to start a conversation with that person. We have thousands of contacts and only ever a handful of live leads, and that is correct: a lead exists because somebody decided to work it.

Create a lead when

You are going to contact someone about becoming a customer, and
you can name who owns it, and
they are not already in an active sales conversation.

Don't create a lead for

A name on an imported list nobody has been assigned to work.
An existing customer contacting you about support or billing.
Someone who already has an open deal. That conversation has moved on.

One person, one live lead, one attempt cycle.

If someone tells you "not now" and you circle back in six months, that is a new lead, not the old one reopened. Each lead is one honest attempt with a start, an end, and a recorded outcome. That is what makes it possible to say later which channels and which plays actually worked.

// the pipeline

The five stages

Every move between stages is a fact you can check, not a judgement call. Did you reach out? Did a human reply? Did they book? Nobody has to decide how promising someone feels, which is what keeps the board honest as the team grows.

1

// nothing has happened yet

New

should empty itself

The lead exists and has an owner, but no one and nothing has reached out. This stage is a staging area, not a queue to browse.

Exit

The first touch goes out. If a sequence sends it, the lead moves itself.

2

// you have reached out, silence so far

Attempting

you, or a sequence

One or more touches have gone out and no human has replied yet. Most leads spend most of their life here.

Exit

A person replies, or you run out of steps and disqualify as No Response.

3

// a real human answered

Connected

you

A person replied with something a person wrote. An out-of-office, a bounce, or an auto-acknowledgement is not connected. Those go back to Attempting with the next step pushed out.

Exit

They agree to a meeting, or you disqualify with a reason. Nothing sits here indefinitely.

4

// the win

Meeting Booked

closes the lead

A meeting is on the calendar with someone who could actually buy. The lead is finished and the deal takes over. See when it becomes a deal.

Then

Create the deal from the lead record. That link is what makes the channel worth measuring.

5

// the honest ending

Disqualified

reason required

This attempt is over. Every disqualified lead carries a reason, and the reason is the single most useful thing the lead ever produces.

Never

Do not archive a lead instead of disqualifying it. See closing one out.

// the handoff

When a lead becomes a deal

One trigger, one direction, no exceptions: a meeting is booked with someone who could buy. At that moment you create the deal from the lead. The lead closes as Meeting Booked and the deal opens in the Deal Pipeline at Evaluation.

A lead is

An attempt to start a conversation. It has an owner and an outcome. It has no value, no close date, and nothing to forecast, because there is nothing to forecast yet.

A deal is

A real opportunity with a number attached and a person on the other side who is engaging with it. From here it moves toward a quote, which is the Working with Quotes playbook.

Always create the deal from the lead.

Not from the contact, not from the company, not from scratch. It takes the same number of clicks and it is the only thing that connects the money back to where the conversation started. A deal created from scratch is a deal that can never tell you which channel paid for it.

// the part everyone skips

Closing a lead out

Most leads end without a meeting. That is normal and it is not a failure. What is a failure is a lead that disappears without saying why, because then the effort taught us nothing.

Reason	Use it when	Comes back?
No Response	You worked the full sequence and never heard from a human	Yes, in a later campaign
No Interest	They replied and said no	Not for a long while
Not a Good Fit	Outside what we sell to. Too small, wrong business, wrong country	No
Bad Timing	Genuinely interested, wrong moment. Budget cycle, mid-build, just re-signed a competitor	Yes, on a date you set
No Decision-making Power	Right company, wrong person, and they could not point you onward	Yes, as a new lead on the right person
Budget Constraints	They want it and cannot fund it	Yes, on a date you set

Never archive a lead.

Archiving hides the record and throws the outcome away. Disqualifying keeps it and records what happened. They feel like the same thing when you are clearing your queue on a Friday, and they are opposites: one destroys the only useful thing the lead produced. Archive is for records created by mistake, and nothing else.

Bad Timing is a reason, not a parking space. There is deliberately no Nurture stage. If someone is worth revisiting, disqualify them as Bad Timing and set the date you will come back, then create a fresh lead when that date arrives. The live queue should only ever hold leads someone is working this week.

// attribution

Where leads come from

One field carries it: Lead Channel. It answers a single question — where did this lead come from, meaning the door they walked through, not what they asked for. Pick the value that describes how they reached us.

Lead Channel	Use it when
Website	They found us and filled in the form on their own.
Marketing	Our own broadcast reached them — a mass email, an organic social post, a piece of content — and they responded.
Outbound - Rep	One of our reps went and found them.
Outbound - IntentSignal	IntentSignal, the cold-outreach firm we pay, found them.
Referral	A customer or a personal introduction sent them, unpaid.
Tradeshow	An event: a conversation at the booth, or the attendee list afterwards.
Paid	They arrived through an ad we bought.

Website and Marketing are not the same thing.

This is the one people get wrong. Website means they came to us. Marketing means we went to them and they answered. In August one mass email with a demo-lock call to action produced nine of the first nine leads that had been filed as Website — which made the website look like a strong inbound channel when it had in fact produced none. If a campaign sent them, it is Marketing.

Running a campaign? Ask for its own link.

A campaign with a demo-lock call to action should point at a link minted for that campaign, not at the generic form. The link carries the attribution itself, so nobody has to remember to set it and it cannot be got wrong. Ask before the send goes out, not after.

You reached out first, then they used the form.

Raise the lead as Outbound - Rep before you send the message. If that person later fills in the website form, your lead keeps its channel and no duplicate is created. Leave it until afterwards and the form gets the credit.

Also on the record	What it tells you
Lead Type	New business for an account we do not sell to yet, Existing business for expansion into a current customer. Defaults to New business.
Demo Lock Requested Date	On the contact. The most recent time this person asked for a lock — so you know whether what they are holding is current hardware. Set automatically.
Lead Source	HubSpot's own web-analytics guess. Read-only and usually says "Offline Sources". Useful on one record, never in a report.

Still being set up. The No Response reason and the automatic New to Attempting move are in progress, and Lead Channel is not yet a required field. Until it is, set it yourself on any lead you create by hand — a lead made in HubSpot skips every check the request form runs for you, including this one and the naming.