The pipeline and your stages

Eight stages, in the order they happen:

Everyone starts Untracked

Opening a conversation is not a decision, so opening one does not put anybody in your pipeline. Somebody enters when you give them a stage.

That is what keeps the top of your funnel honest. If every thread you ever opened counted as a new lead, your reply rate would read like a catastrophe and the number above it would be a lie.

An untracked person:

• Is not in your pipeline, your board, your funnel or any count.
• Has no label in Messenger. Their row looks exactly as it did before you installed anything.
• Is still a full record. Notes, tags and the thread link all work.

That last point is the reason Untracked is a stage rather than a delete button: it takes somebody back out of the pipeline without losing a word you wrote about them.

HOT is where they stand

HOT is not a questionnaire. It is Interest, Offer Made and Call Booked — the three stages where the deal is live.

Red means HOT and nothing else, which is why no stage colour is red. A screen where every stage pill was red would tell you nothing.

Replied moves by itself

When somebody writes back, a New Lead moves to Replied on its own. Only from New Lead — moving someone out of Interest because they said "thanks" would walk them backwards.

What each stage asks for

Three stages ask you a question, because they are the three moments where the answer is worth having and you will not remember it later.

• Deal Won asks which product and what it was worth. Closing is the only moment you reliably know the figure; a number asked for a week later is a number somebody guesses. Skipping is allowed and the deal still counts — your dashboard says how many have no figure rather than quietly reporting a total that reads low. See Products and recording a sale.
• Call Booked asks when, and whether it is phone or Zoom. See Follow-ups and bookings.
• Follow-Up asks when, and writes the reminder. A follow-up with no date is just a note.

Seeing the whole pipeline

Open Pipeline from the extension's left nav.

List is the default. The board is the better picture of your pipeline; the list is the better place to work, and working is what you open it for. Both pills in a row do something — the stage pill drops the other stages under it, the tag pills open the tag editor.

The board is a column per stage and a card per person, with their avatar, tags, what happens next and when it is due. Drag a card to move them. Empty stages stay hidden until you start dragging, and every stage is also on a card's menu, so you never need a mouse for it.

Finding people:

• Filter by stage or tag. Stages are an or — Interest or Offer Made. Tags are an and, because that is what picking two means.
• Search covers names, tags and note bodies. People remember "the roofer in Tampa" long after they have forgotten which Dave that was.
• Sort by last activity, due date, stage, name or recently added.

Bulk actions: select rows or cards and move stage, or add and remove a tag across the whole selection. Each bulk action is one entry in the undo history.

Contacts is not the pipeline

Contacts answers a smaller question: have I talked to this person, and how do I get back to them. It is a phone book — a name, when you last touched it, a way into the record and a way into the thread. No stage pills, no tags, no hot flags.

That absence is the point. A column you read past makes finding somebody slower. Filter or search and the stages and tags appear on each row, because then you asked about them.