Contacts, leads & pipelines

Exabloom keeps the person and the sale apart on purpose. The person is a contact. Each thing they might buy is a lead, attached to that contact. One contact can have many leads: a parent enquiring about two subjects is one contact with two leads.

Every lead sits in a pipeline, at exactly one stage. As the sale moves forward, you move the lead to the next stage. That is the whole model:

• Contact - who you are talking to. Name, phone, email, tags.
• Lead - what they might buy, and who on your team owns it.
• Pipeline - the stages a lead goes through, from first enquiry to won or lost.

A contact is one person. It holds who they are (Name, Phone No., Email, their Facebook, Instagram and Telegram handles), when they last replied, their tags, and any custom fields your team added. Everyone you have ever talked to is on the Contacts page.

Contacts arrive in three ways:

• On their own. The first time someone messages one of your connected channels (WhatsApp, Messenger and so on), a contact is created for them.
• By import. Import brings in a spreadsheet. See Import contacts.
• By hand. New contact. Only First name is required.

A lead is one possible sale, signup or enrolment, attached to a contact. The Leads page lists them as a table, one row per lead, for one pipeline at a time. Each lead carries:

• A Title - a short name for the opportunity, like “P2 Maths”. If nobody changes it, it is the contact’s name, so rename it: it makes the table far easier to read.
• Its Pipeline and current Stage. Both are required.
• An Owner - the teammate responsible, or Unassigned.
• Any custom fields your team added for leads, plus the contact’s name, phone and tags.

Under the pipeline dropdown sit Filters, Columns (choose which columns show) and Export, which only admins see. The chat bubble at the end of each row jumps straight into that person’s conversation.

A pipeline is the path a lead takes, from first enquiry to won or lost. It is just an ordered list of stages that you name yourself, top to bottom in the order a lead moves through them. Admins edit that list in Settings → Pipelines. Only the two ends of it matter:

• The first stage is where every new lead starts, unless someone picks a different stage when they create it.
• Won and lost are stages too. There is no separate “Mark as won” button. End your pipeline with stages like Enrolled and Lost, and moving a lead there is how you close it.

Most leads are created for you, by forms, workflows or the AI agent. When you need one by hand, for a phone enquiry or a walk-in, it takes three choices.

Moving a lead forward means changing its Stage. The Leads page is a table, not a board of columns you drag cards between, so you change the value itself. There are three ways, plus workflows that do it for you.

Shift + click the Stage cell

The quickest way. Hold Shift and click the lead’s Stage cell. A list of stages opens. Click the new one and it saves straight away. A plain click (no Shift) opens the lead instead.

From the lead itself

When you want to read the conversation first, click the lead’s row. It opens on the right with the chat and the Lead Info panel.

Many leads at once

Tick the leads, then use Update field in the bar that appears at the bottom of the screen.

The Trigger workflow updates box is off by default. Leave it off and workflows that start on Lead updated will not notice this change. Tick it if they should.

Three tools narrow the table, and they stack: using two of them shows only the leads that match both.

Views are the everyday tool, and admins set them up for the whole team. How they work, and how to build your own, is in Organise leads with views. The Contacts page has the same idea, called folders.

Everything your business tracks beyond name and phone goes into a custom field, created in Settings → Custom Fields. Each one has a type (text, number, date, a pick list and so on). The one decision that matters: does the field describe the person or the opportunity?

A lead field only shows up on a pipeline once an admin switches it on in that pipeline’s Data Fields tab. That is covered in Build your sales pipeline.

Tags are the lighter option: a label with no value, like “VIP” or “Referral”, created in Settings → Tags. Use a tag for a yes/no fact about a person, and a custom field when you need to store an actual answer.

• One contact, many leads. A returning customer gets a new lead on the contact you already have, not a second contact.
• A plain click opens; Shift + click edits. Clicking a row opens the lead. Hold Shift to edit a cell in place.
• The table shows one pipeline at a time. If a lead seems to be missing, check the pipeline dropdown next to the Leads heading.
• Columns come from the pipeline. Owner, most contact fields and your custom fields only appear as columns once they are switched on in that pipeline’s Data Fields. A new pipeline starts with Created, Name, Phone No. and Email, and no Owner.
• Pipelines start empty. A new pipeline has no stages until an admin adds them, so build the exact steps your business uses, in order.
• Pick a custom field’s home once. Whether a field sits on the contact or the lead is set when it is created and can’t be changed afterwards. Decide before you add it.
• Tags live on the person. A tag added from one lead shows on all of that person’s leads.
• Won and lost are stages. Close a lead by moving it to your outcome stage. There is no other status to set.