Contacts, leads & pipelines

Exabloom keeps two things separate on purpose: the person you’re talking to, and each opportunity that person represents. The person is a contact. Each opportunity is a lead attached to that contact. The crucial part: one contact can have many leads.

Every lead lives in a pipeline and sits at one stage within it. That’s the whole model: people on one side, opportunities on the other, each opportunity moving through a defined set of stages. The rest of this guide takes each piece in turn.

A contact is a person you talk to. Each one carries identity details — First Name Last Name Phone No. Email — plus channel handles like Telegram Handle, Facebook ID and Instagram ID, the dates they last replied, any tags, and your own custom fields.

Contacts arrive three ways:

• Automatically — the first time someone messages a connected channel (WhatsApp, Telegram, and so on), a contact is created for them.
• By import — bring a spreadsheet in through the Import contacts dialog.
• By hand — + New contact, where only First name is required.

A lead is a single opportunity attached to a contact — one potential sale, signup or enrolment. Because a person can want more than one thing, the same contact can hold several leads at once, each at its own stage. A lead carries:

• A Title — a short label for the opportunity (e.g. “P2 Math”). Optional; it defaults to the contact’s name.
• Its Pipeline and current Stage — both required when the lead is created.
• An Owner — the teammate responsible. Leads can also sit Unassigned.
• Any custom fields defined for leads, and the contact’s tags.

A pipeline is the journey a lead takes from first hello to closed. It’s a named, ordered list of stages — the steps you sell through. As an opportunity progresses, the lead moves from one stage to the next, so anyone can see at a glance where every deal stands.

Stages are yours to define. Under Settings → Pipelines, an admin creates a pipeline, names it, and adds stages one by one — dragging to reorder them. There are no pre-filled stages; a brand-new pipeline starts empty and you build the exact steps your business uses.

The Leads screen is a table, one row per lead, scoped to the pipeline picked in the top-left dropdown. Out of the box you’ll see columns like Title, the contact’s Name, Stage, Owner and Tags — plus a Chat button to jump straight into the conversation.

The toolbar gives you Search, Filters (a badge shows how many are active), Columns to choose what’s shown, an admin-only Export, and New lead. You can reorder and resize columns, and add columns for any custom field.

Moving a lead forward means changing its Stage. Click the stage cell on any row and pick the new stage — the change saves on the spot, no separate “save” step.

There are three ways a lead’s stage gets updated:

• Inline — edit the stage (or owner, or tags) right in the table cell.
• In bulk — tick several leads and use Bulk update to set the same Stage or Owner across all of them at once.
• By workflow — an automation can move a lead’s stage as part of its steps, so routine progress happens without anyone clicking. See Automate with workflows.

Beyond ad-hoc filters, you can save reusable views as pills above the table. They come in three group types — and two of them build themselves:

• Custom — views you build by hand from any filter (e.g. “Hot leads”).
• Monthly — auto-generated month pills based on when each lead was created. Show the last 3, 6 or 12 months; they roll forward on their own as time passes.
• Stages — one pill per stage in the current pipeline, generated automatically and kept in sync when you edit your stages.

The built-in fields cover identity and progress. Everything else your business cares about goes into custom fields, defined under Settings → Custom Fields. Each field has a type — text, number, date, single- or multi-select, and so on — and can be marked required.

The key decision is what the field describes. A custom field belongs either to the contact or to the lead — and that choice decides where the answer lives:

A reliable test: would the answer be the same across every opportunity this person has? Then it’s a contact field (preferred language, postal code). Does it change per opportunity (the subject they’re enquiring about, a per-deal budget)? That’s a lead field.

Tags are the lightweight cousin: shared labels you define once in Settings → Tags and stick on contacts. Reach for a tag when you just need a yes/no badge on the person (“VIP”, “Referral”), and a custom field when you need to store an actual value.

A few common shapes, built from the pieces above. Adapt them to how your business actually sells.

• One contact, many leads. Don’t create a second contact for a returning customer — add another lead to the person you already have.
• Tags live on the contact. A tag added from a lead row applies to the person and shows on all their leads. Use stages, not tags, to track a single opportunity.
• There’s no money field. Leads track stage, not amount. Store a quote or budget as a lead custom field if you need it.
• Pipelines start empty. A new pipeline has no stages until you add them — build the exact steps your business uses, in order.
• The Leads view is a table. Move a lead by editing its Stage, in a row, in bulk, or via a workflow — there’s no drag-between-columns board.
• Custom fields have a home. Decide up front whether each field describes the person (contact) or the opportunity (lead) — you can’t cleanly move it later.