Lead Statuses: How to Set Up Your Pipeline

Lead statuses are the stages of your sales or support pipeline: “New”, “In progress”, “Awaiting payment”, “Success”, “Declined”, and any others your specific business needs. In this article you’ll set up lead statuses to match your process: choose colors, names, and special flags. Only the company Owner can configure the pipeline.

What you’ll need

• Owner access — the Statuses section is available to the Owner only.
• An understanding of your process: which stages a lead goes through from the first message to a closed deal.

How statuses work

Each status is a color + name plus a set of flags that define its role in the pipeline:

• Default — this status is automatically assigned to every new lead. Only one status can be the default (for example, “New”).
• Success (won) — the stage where a lead is considered won: the deal is closed and the customer has paid.
• Lost (lost) — the stage where a lead is lost: declined, no answer, spam.

Next to each status you’ll see the number of leads currently in it, so you can instantly tell where requests are piling up.

Step-by-step: how to set up your pipeline

1. Open the Statuses section in the left-hand menu of your account.
2. To add a stage, pick a color, enter a status name, and save — the new status appears in the list.
3. Create all the pipeline stages you need, in order: from first contact to the outcome (for example, “New” → “In progress” → “Awaiting payment” → “Success” / “Declined”).
4. Set the Default flag on the starting status — every new lead will begin there.
5. Set the Success (won) flag on the closed-deal status and the Lost (lost) flag on the lost-lead status.
6. Arrange the stages in the right order with the ↑ and ↓ arrows: the order in the list is the order of your pipeline.
7. Archive any statuses you don’t need with the 🗄 button — you can restore them later if needed.

How it works with leads

The statuses you set up are used in the shared inbox: when an agent opens a lead, they change its status with the Change status action. The lead moves through the pipeline stages, while the counters in the Statuses section show how many requests are at each step. Every customer and their path through the pipeline is visible in the contacts database.

FAQ