The leads board

Open Leads from the left navigation. Owners and admins also see an Automations tab, where lead automations are built, and a business that has connected Meta lead forms sees Lead Ads, the inbox for leads from its ads. This article covers the board.

The columns

Out of the box the board has six columns, in this order:

1. New
2. Contacted
3. Follow-up: leads you are following up, whether by hand or via a scheduled follow-up.
4. Appointment Booked: leads waiting for their first appointment.
5. Needs Attention
6. Qualified

Each column header shows its name and a count. An empty column reads No leads.

Owners and admins can add their own stages and rename or reorder any column from Stages (next to Sources above the board). A custom stage is an ordinary column: leads move into it by drag, from the row menu or from the lead's page, and nothing moves a lead there automatically. Archiving a custom stage asks where its leads should go first. The built-in stages keep their behaviour whatever they are called: New is where a lead starts, Appointment Booked and Needs Attention are set by appointments booked online and follow-ups, and Converted and Lost stay off the board.

Converted and Lost are real statuses but they deliberately have no column. Otherwise the board would fill up with finished work. When you have some, a line under the board tells you how many, and points you at the status filters. Selecting Converted or Lost in the filters switches you to List view automatically.

Filters and views

Above the board:

• Status pills: All, New, Contacted, Follow-up, Appointment Booked, Needs Attention, Qualified, Converted, Lost.
• Board / List toggle. Board is the default.
• Source dropdown: defaults to All sources.
• Embed widget and Sources (owners and admins only), and Add lead.

Moving a lead

There are three ways, and they all do the same thing:

Drag it. On the board, drag the card into another column.

Use the row menu. In List view, open the kebab menu on a lead. Depending on where the lead is now, you will see:

• Send SMS: only when the lead has a phone number and your company has SMS connected.
• Mark contacted, Mark follow-up, Mark qualified, Mark appointment booked
• Mark converted: opens the convert dialog, covered in Converting a lead.
• Mark lost
• Revert to qualified (on a converted lead) or Reopen (qualified) (on a lost one).

Open the lead. Click any card or row to open the lead's page, then use Update status.

Scheduling a follow-up moves a lead into Follow-up for you, and Needs Attention is set by the system when a scheduled follow-up fires. You will normally find leads already sitting there rather than dragging leads into it.

What is on a lead card

Cards show the name, the email and phone (or No contact details), the source badge and the lead date. List rows add the status badge, a referrer badge (which links straight to that person's client record if they are one of your clients) and the branch.

Leads are ordered by lead date, newest first.

A lead's page

Clicking a lead opens its own page, with the name and status at the top and a line telling you where it came from: From your website, Added by {name}, or Manually added. All leads takes you back to the board. The page has its own address, so you can bookmark a lead or send the link to a colleague.

On the left, under Details, you can edit Name, Email, Phone, Source, Referred by, Lead date, Follow-up and Summary, then Save changes. Name, email and phone belong to the person's contact, so changing them updates the contact and every enquiry from that person. Open contact takes you to it. When someone who is already a contact sends a new enquiry with a different phone number or name, the contact's details stay as they are and what they sent is noted in the enquiry's Summary. On the right: the lead's automations and stage history, then Messages, Notes, Appointments and Call transcripts.

Messages opens on Texts when your business has a text number and the lead has a mobile: the same chat as Conversations, where you can read the thread and reply without leaving the lead. Everything lists every email, text, voicemail, call and website chat message with the lead, newest first: sent and received texts in full, emails by subject with Show email to read what went out, calls with how long they ran, and what they typed in your website chat alongside the replies they got. A lead from the website chat is created as soon as they give their details, so their chat messages are here rather than in the Summary, and a lead who has only chatted opens on Everything. Emails sent before 22 September 2026 show their subject only. It finds them by the lead's email address and phone number too, so a text sent from Conversations before the lead was added still shows. Everyone on your team sees every email sent to the lead, whichever connected inbox it came from. A reply that came back by email stays in the inbox it was sent from.

The phone field has Call and Record & transcribe buttons next to it. See Making calls. Any recorded calls appear under Call transcripts.

Once a lead is converted, a View {name} in Clients link appears at the top of the page.

Deleting a lead

Anyone on your team can delete a lead for good: Delete lead on the lead's page, or in the row menu on the list. It removes the lead with its notes, stage history, scheduled messages and the record of every automation that ran for it, and stops any automation still running for it. Appointments, calls, text conversations and form submissions are kept, just no longer linked to a lead. It cannot be undone, so if you only want a lead off the board, mark it lost instead.

Automations on the board

A small lightning count on a column header means one or more automations run when a lead is moved into that stage. Open a lead and Automations and stage history shows every automation that has run for it. A running one shows what it will do next and when; open it to see what it has sent so far and the steps still to come. One that is waiting has a Stop button. Run automation on the lead starts any automation set up as Started from a lead. See How automations work.

Where directory enquiries go

A message someone sends from your Marketli directory profile arrives on the board as a new lead, with the source Marketli directory and their message in the notes. There is no separate enquiries inbox.