Lead management: sources, statuses and follow-up until the sale

Every inquiry that goes unanswered is money handed to a competitor. A store that also sells to businesses, a studio that gets quote requests, or a business running a campaign to collect contact details all receive inquiries from several directions, and without some order a few of them get forgotten. A lead management system does one simple thing: every inquiry lands in one place with its source and a status, and the whole team sees what is waiting. This article explains what lead management is, where leads come from and how to bring them in, how to design statuses, how not to miss a lead, how to measure the process, and how it works in StoreChart.

What is a lead and lead management

A lead is someone who has shown interest and has not bought yet. Lead management is the process that takes them from the first inquiry to a purchase, or to the decision that they are not a fit.

It is part of customer relationship management, and it is the part where money is easiest to lose. A lead who never hears back does not complain. They just buy somewhere else.

When you need a lead management system

At two or three inquiries a week, a spreadsheet is enough. You need a system when one of these is true:

• Several sources. Inquiries arrive from several directions, and someone has to copy them into one place by hand.
• Several people. More than one person handles inquiries, and it is not clear who got back to whom.
• Campaign tracking. You want to know which campaign brings inquiries that close, not just inquiries.
• High-value inquiries. Some inquiries are worth a lot, such as a wholesale order, and forgetting one hurts.

Lead sources and lead capture

Most businesses use all three main routes:

• A website form. A "leave your details" or "request a quote" form, so nobody copies the lead by hand. Ask only for what you need to reply, because every extra field means fewer people finish the form.
• A connection from another system. A lead form in a paid campaign, a landing page in an outside tool or a booking system can send each new inquiry to your lead system's address. This connection is called a webhook: the sending system posts the inquiry details to a fixed URL, and a lead is created. When the source cannot send directly, a tool such as Make can pass it on.
• Manual entry. A phone call, a conversation at a trade fair, or a WhatsApp message someone on the team wants to follow up. The lead still goes into the same list, not onto a sticky note.

Fields per source

A good system lets you define fields for each source:

• An events form: the event date and the guest count.
• A business form: the company name and the quantity.

The data then sits in proper fields you can filter by, not in free text.

Duplicate leads

If every repeated submission creates a new lead, two people on your team will call the same person. Common cases:

• A double click: someone clicked submit twice.
• A retry: an outside system sent the inquiry again after an error.
• What to check: how the system recognizes a repeated submission, and whether it links a lead to an existing customer by phone number.

Lead statuses

A status describes where the lead is, and the list should match your real process. An example for a store that also sells in bulk to businesses:

A few rules that help:

• Four to six statuses. Beyond that the team hesitates between similar stages.
• An action for every status. If you cannot say what to do in a status, it is probably unnecessary.
• Estimated value. The expected value of each lead shows how much money waits at each stage and what to handle first.
• Colors. A color per status shows at a glance where leads get stuck on the board.

Example: an office ordering a coffee machine

The purchasing manager of a law firm needs a machine and beans for thirty employees, and contacts a coffee store. How the lead moves:

1. Sunday morning, "New". She fills in a form on the site. The lead arrives with the firm's name and headcount, and whoever handles it records an estimated deal value.
2. Sunday afternoon, "Contacted". Someone on the team calls and asks how many cups the office drinks a day.
3. Tuesday, "Quote sent". A quote goes out, with a task to check back the following Sunday.
4. The next Sunday, "Won". The firm approves, and an order with the customer's details is opened from the lead.

Had the firm dropped out, the lead would have moved to "Not relevant" and the archive, and it would still count in the form's conversion rate.

Lead tracking: how not to miss an inquiry

A warm lead cools quickly. Four habits keep it warm:

• Speed. An inquiry answered the same day closes far more often than one that waits until next week. A notification for each new lead means nobody waits for the next check of the list.
• An automatic first message. A WhatsApp message that goes out the moment the lead arrives, such as "We got your inquiry and will get back to you today", shows the person that someone is there and keeps the conversation open. The message has to be an approved template, and the person has to have agreed to receive messages.
• A next step with a date. "Call back after the customer checks with their partner", with no date, is a promise that will be forgotten. Record the next step as a task with an owner and a due date.
• A regular review. Once a day, go over the leads in "New", and once a week over the ones that have sat in the same status for a long time.

Lead management metrics

Three numbers are enough to know whether the process works:

1. Leads by source. How many inquiries came from each form, campaign or channel.
2. Conversion rate by source. How many of each source's leads became customers. A campaign that brings many inquiries that never close costs more than it looks.
3. Open lead value. The sum of estimated values still in progress, a picture of expected revenue.

The StoreChart lead management system

In the StoreChart Leads module each source is a channel. You can also add leads by hand.

Intake channels: forms and the webhook

• A form channel gets a form page with its own link. You choose the heading, description, button color and text, the thank-you message, and which fields appear and which are required.
• An API channel gets a webhook URL with a token. A submission missing a required field is rejected.
• An identical submission repeated within a short window merges into the existing lead.
• Request log: every request is recorded in the channel's log with its result.

Fields, statuses and the lead board

• Fields per channel, with types such as text, number, date, a choice from a list, phone and email, plus the status every new lead from that channel receives.
• Statuses you set yourself, with a name and a color. They are shared by all channels.
• Table and board: leads appear in a table with search and a status filter, and on a board where you drag a lead between statuses.
• Lead details: each lead has an estimated value, notes and a history of the changes made to it.

Notifications, automations and conversion

• Notification: a new lead from a form or the webhook shows up in the in-app bell for the account owner and admins.
• Automatic message: WhatsApp automations can send an approved template when a lead is created or moves to a chosen status, with an optional delay. Fields from the form can fill the template variables.
• Conversion: when the lead buys, you convert it to a customer, or to a customer plus a new order with their details.
• Tasks: you can record the next step as a task for a teammate, but the task is not linked to the lead itself.

What the Leads module does not include

• No lead scoring, and no multiple sales pipelines.
• No importing leads from a file.
• No assigning a lead to a specific rep on the leads screen.
• The website AI chat does not create leads.

How leads fit together with the store's customers and orders is explained in the article on CRM for online stores.