Lead management

What the lead management module does

Every CRM has a leads screen. The difference is usually not in the list but in how much of the work around the list you still have to do by hand — creating the record, finding out whether this person already exists, deciding who owns it, and remembering to follow up.

In SaleInline those four steps are handled by the system:

• Creation is automatic from every inbound channel. A WhatsApp message from an unknown number becomes a lead before anyone opens the CRM.
• Identity is resolved by normalising the phone number to international E.164 format, so 0532…, +90532… and 90532… are recognised as one person rather than three.
• Ownership is assigned round-robin among the agents attached to that channel, or by automation rules, and the owner is notified immediately.
• Follow-up is driven by stage-based automations and tasks rather than by memory.

What is left for the salesperson is the part that actually needs a person: the conversation.

How leads arrive and get assigned

Leads can enter the system six ways, and all of them produce the same kind of record:

The webhook is worth a separate note, because it is how most advertising traffic gets in. It is a plain URL that accepts a browser GET or a POST with no headers, creates the source automatically if it does not exist, writes custom-field values, and deduplicates. That means a lead form on an ad platform, a landing-page builder or your own website can feed the CRM without any development work.

Round-robin distribution is set per channel: you choose which users are in the rotation for a given WhatsApp number, and ownerless incoming conversations are handed out in order. This is the single setting that stops the "whoever happens to look first" pattern, which in practice means the same one or two people take everything and the rest of the team is idle.

Pipelines, stages and the kanban board

A pipeline is a named sequence of stages. You can run several at once — new business and renewals, or one per branch or product line — each with its own stages, and move records between them.

The kanban board shows leads as cards in stage columns, and you drag a card to change its stage. There is an "all pipelines" view that shows everything at once, with drag restricted within each pipeline so a card cannot accidentally land in a stage that belongs to a different process. The list view is the same data with filters, sortable columns and inline editing.

Stages can require fields. If your process says a lead cannot move to "quote sent" without a budget figure, you mark the budget field required at that stage and the system enforces it. This is how the pipeline stays trustworthy — the alternative is a board that looks organised and contains records with no information in them.

Custom fields, tags and layouts

Three different mechanisms shape what a lead record looks like, and they solve different problems.

Custom fields — structured data you filter and report on

Five types: text, number, date, list and checkbox. They can be marked required, used as list columns, used as filter criteria, used as automation conditions and used as dimensions in pivot reports. Country and language are system fields, derived automatically from the phone country code across 214 countries and 65 languages — and written only when empty, so a value you correct by hand is never overwritten.

Tags — loose labels you apply in a click

For the things that do not deserve a field. Tags are applied from a picker on the lead card, managed in settings with usage counts, filterable in the list, addable by automation, and available as a dimension in reports.

Layouts — who sees which parts of the record

You can build several lead-detail layouts, decide which sections and tabs appear in each, and assign a layout per role. A manager and an agent then open the same lead and see it arranged for the job they are doing, without hiding data from anyone who is allowed to see it.

Saved views sit on top of all three: any combination of filters, columns and pipeline can be saved and reapplied in one click, kept private or shared with the team. In practice most agents end up with three or four — "my open leads", "no reply in 3 days", "this month's ad traffic" — and stop rebuilding filters every morning.

Scoring, duplicates and data quality

Three features exist purely to stop a growing database from becoming useless.

Lead scoring is a seven-star rating on each lead. It is deliberately simple and manual rather than an opaque algorithm, because a salesperson who has spoken to someone knows more than a formula does. Scores are filterable and sortable, so "show me the five-star leads nobody has touched this week" is a saved view rather than a meeting.

Duplicate detection works on the normalised phone number. New leads are checked on arrival, and there is a duplicates report that scans existing records so you can merge what accumulated before you started. This matters more than it sounds: a duplicated customer means two people calling the same person about the same thing, which is the fastest way to look disorganised.

Phone normalisation converts every number, at every entry point, to E.164. It runs on WhatsApp arrivals, inbound and outbound calls, manual entry and imports. Without it, deduplication cannot work at all, because the same person really is stored three different ways.

Working in bulk

Anything you can do to one lead you can usually do to a filtered set. Select the rows you want, or use "select all matching this filter" — the Gmail-style selection that covers the whole result set rather than just the visible page — and then:

1. Change stage or pipelineMove a whole segment to a different stage, or to a different pipeline entirely, with the pipeline reference kept in sync so nothing becomes invisible.
2. Reassign ownersHand a departing colleague's leads to the rest of the team in one operation.
3. Add tags or update fieldsLabel a campaign's intake, or correct a field value across thousands of records.
4. Queue for callingSend the selection to the power dialer, which calls through the list and records a disposition for each.
5. Export to CSVExactly the columns you are looking at, with the filters you have applied, chunked so large exports do not time out.

Bulk operations are written to the activity log in readable form, so a mass change is traceable afterwards rather than a mystery.

What you can measure

Leads are a dataset in the pivot report builder, which means most questions are a report you build rather than a request you file. The ones teams build first are usually:

• Conversion by source — which channel and which campaign actually produce customers, not just enquiries.
• Funnel by stage — where leads stop moving. Almost every business has one stage that leaks, and it is rarely the last one.
• Response time by agent and channel — measured in working minutes against each person's shift calendar, so a message arriving at 23:40 and answered at 09:12 counts as 12 minutes rather than eleven hours.
• Ageing — how long records have sat in their current stage, which is the metric that matters most in long sales cycles.

Response time deserves emphasis because of how much it decides. A Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 companies found that contacting a lead within an hour made a meaningful conversation with a decision maker seven times more likely than waiting just one hour longer, while the average company took 42 hours to respond and 23% never responded at all.

Source: Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, Harvard Business Review, March 2011.

Which plan includes what

The lead module itself, including scoring, tags, saved views, custom fields, the configurable layout, duplicate detection and CSV export, is in every plan from Starter upward. Capacity and a few advanced pieces scale with the plan:

Exceeding a record limit never deletes anything — records above the ceiling become read-only and searchable until you upgrade. See the pricing page for the full comparison.