Getting in
Conversion is where most CRMs quietly lose the first month.
The lead becomes a contact, an account and a deal — and the calls, the notes and the emails from before anybody qualified them stay behind on a record nobody opens again.
Six weeks later somebody asks how this started, and the answer is gone.
Arriving
Four doors, and each one knows a different amount.
A rep types one in after a conversation at a stand. A form on your website posts one directly. A spreadsheet from an event arrives with four hundred. Company discovery turns a scored company into one.
They do not arrive knowing the same things, and the routing rules respect that: a rule testing a field the door never collected simply does not match, because absence is never treated as a wildcard.
- Typed in by a repArrives with: Everything they askedcan be routed by → any rule
- A form on your siteArrives with: Name, email, campaigncan be routed by → source and campaign only
- A spreadsheetArrives with: Whatever the columns heldcan be routed by → any mapped field
- Company discoveryArrives with: Firmographics and a scorecan be routed by → country, industry, size
- A duplicate email hands you the existing lead —
With its name, status, company and owner — so the screen can offer to open it. And it can be overridden, because the same person enquiring twice about two products is real.
- An already-converted lead does not block a new one —
Deliberately. That person is no longer a live lead, so capturing them again is legitimate rather than a mistake.
- A spreadsheet without a full-name column still works —
It builds one from the first and last name columns, and only refuses when neither exists.
- Marking somebody contacted twice is silent, not an error —
A second click returns the lead unchanged rather than regressing a status somebody has since advanced.
Converting
The timeline is copied, not moved — and the reason is the whole point.
Converting creates or links an account, creates the contact, and optionally opens the deal — as one transaction, so a failure part-way leaves nothing behind.
The activities, notes and tasks are copied onto the contact and left on the lead. Moving them would erase the distinction between what you knew before you qualified somebody and what you learned afterwards, and that distinction is exactly what a post-mortem needs.
What does not get duplicated is work. The open tasks on the lead side are closed, with a reason naming the contact they moved to, so the same to-do does not appear twice on a rep's list. Completed ones are left alone.
- Consent travels with the person —
What they agreed to on the form is carried onto the contact. If the contact step is skipped, the orphaned consent is counted and logged for reconciliation rather than quietly dropped.
- Currency comes from your workspace —
Not a default somebody forgot to change. The comment in the code records the bug that taught this: a hardcoded currency produced rogue deals on every conversion where the form did not set one.
- A size band that does not map is dropped, not rejected —
Rather than refusing a conversion the rep has already committed to, an unmappable value is left blank and the completeness prompt picks it up.
- Territory assignments carry across —
Mirrored onto the new account rather than recalculated — because teams often assign territory by hand, and a recalculation would overwrite that.
- The record says created or matched, separately —
For each of the four outcomes. So "we made a new account" and "we linked an existing one" remain different answers a quarter later.
Qualifying
Seven states, with the transitions that should be one-way actually one-way.
New, contacted, qualified, disqualified, converted, duplicate, junk. Disqualifying needs a written reason. Converted is terminal. And disqualified is terminal for qualification — there is no path back, which is deliberate: a lead you want to reopen is a new lead with new circumstances, not a rewrite of the judgement you made.
Marking one a duplicate validates the target through your own visibility, so you cannot point a lead at a record you are not allowed to see — which would otherwise tell you it exists.
›Can a lead be merged with another?
No. Marking a duplicate records the relationship and the status; it does not combine field values or move the timeline. For true merging, convert one and use the contact or account merge.
›Can I work through more than the first page of leads?
Not today. The list returns a capped page ordered by score, with no next page — you narrow with the filters, the search box or an export. Worth knowing before importing a large list.
›Is there a first-response timer?
Not on leads. That machinery — response clocks, warnings before a breach, breach flags — exists in the product, but on support tickets. A lead that sits untouched raises no alarm.
›What can a bulk action do?
Reassign, delete, and set status among new, contacted and junk. The others — qualify, disqualify, convert, duplicate — each need context that cannot be supplied for forty records at once, so they stay per record.