Leads and converting them

A lead is a company whose type is Lead on your Customers page. You enter one with New lead, or with Create lead on a message in Inbound. Convert to a deal then creates one deal and makes the company a prospect.

What is a lead?

A lead is a company you might sell to, marked with the type Lead. Leads have no separate list. They are on the Customers page with every other company. To see only leads, choose Lead in the type filter, which shows All types until you do.

A company’s type changes as work begins:

• Lead: entered by hand, created from a message, or brought in with Import from a spreadsheet.
• Prospect: after you convert it into a deal.
• Customer: when a person marks one of its deals won.

A lead’s page is an ordinary company page, with Contacts, Deals and Activity tabs (see Track calls, meetings and follow-ups). An approver, an admin or the owner can change the company with Edit and add people with Add contact.

How do I enter a lead by hand?

Use New lead on the Customers page. Only Company is required. Save lead writes the lead straight away, with no approval step. The other fields are Contact person (optional), E-mail (optional), Phone (optional) and Website or domain (optional).

• The domain is saved in its plain form, so https://www.acme.de/about is kept as acme.de.
• A contact is written when you give a contact person or an e-mail address. If you give only the address, the contact is named after it. If you give neither, the lead has no contact, and a phone number on its own is not kept.

A known e-mail address is not entered twice. If any contact in this workspace already has the e-mail address you typed (upper or lower case does not matter), nothing is saved. Under the field the form says “A contact with this e-mail already exists in this workspace.”, with Open that company to open the company that person belongs to.

A shared domain is only a suggestion. If active companies already have the domain you entered, the form says “Saved. These companies have the same domain - is it one of them?”. It lists up to five of them and offers Open the new lead and Done. The lead is saved either way, and nothing is merged here, because two companies can share a domain (a group and its subsidiary, or a reseller).

How do I create a lead from an inbound message?

Click Create lead on the message in Inbound. The lead is written in your workspace straight away, with no approval step, and the message says “Lead created in your CRM.” with an Open the lead link.

The new lead holds:

• The sender’s name: their display name, or their address if there is no display name. The app does not guess a company name, so rename the lead with Edit.
• A contact for the sender, as the main contact, with their e-mail address when the sender has one (a LinkedIn sender has none).
• The company’s web domain, taken from a business address (anna@acme.de gives acme.de). A free-mail address such as gmail.com, gmx.de, web.de, outlook.com, t-online.de or proton.me does not name a company, so the lead gets no domain.
• Notes on where it came from: Created from the inbound message "…"., then Source: with the mailbox it arrived in (or LinkedIn and its thread), then Interested in: and an offering if the message’s subject or preview names one of your own active offerings. If it names none, that line is left out. The app does not guess an offering.

A known sender is not written twice. If the sender is already in this workspace, no new lead is written. That means the message is already linked to them, or a contact has the same e-mail address. The message then says “This sender is already in your CRM - nothing new was created.”, and Open the lead opens the company the sender belongs to. Clicking again on the same message writes nothing new.

“Draft quote” uses the same lead. On a message marked Quote request, Draft quote finds or writes the sender’s lead in the same way as Create lead. Only an admin or the owner can draft a quote. Click both buttons on one message, in either order, and you get one lead.

What happens when a company with the same web domain already exists?

Inbound tells you. Right after it writes a new lead with a business domain, the message adds Same web domain as:, followed by each company with that domain. It shows up to five and leaves out archived companies. Each company has a Merge into it button.

Merge into it is for an approver, an admin or the owner. It:

• moves the lead’s contacts to that company, and none of them stays a main contact;
• moves the lead’s activities, and the inbox messages linked to the lead;
• archives the lead. The lead is not deleted, and one audit event records exactly what moved.

The message then says Merged into followed by the company’s name.

A lead with work on it is not merged. If the lead has a deal, a quote or a project, whatever its status, the merge is refused. A merge is also refused into an archived company, or when either company is kept in an outside CRM. In Inbound, every refusal reads Could not merge the lead.

The suggestion appears once, right after the lead is written. Clicking Create lead again later finds the existing lead and does not offer the merge again. Inbound is the only place that offers a merge. The New lead form lists companies with the same domain but cannot merge.

Can a merge be undone?

Yes. An admin or the owner can use Undo merge on the lead’s page. Everything still where the merge put it goes back: contacts (with their main-contact mark), activities and inbox messages. The lead is active again, and the app confirms “Merge undone - the lead is back”.

• The Customers list shows active companies only, so a merged lead is not on it. Open its page from a link to it, such as Open the lead, which stays on the message in Inbound until you reload the page.
• For an admin or the owner, the button appears on every archived lead kept in Business-Gym. On a lead that was never merged, it says “There is no merge of this lead to undo” and changes nothing.
• An approver can merge but cannot undo. Undoing is the narrower right, as archiving is.

How do I convert a lead into a deal?

Click Convert to a deal on the lead’s page. In Convert this lead, set the Deal name (the company’s name to start with), the Stage and, if you want, the Amount in EUR (optional). Then click Convert. The deal is created and the lead becomes a Prospect.

• Stage lists your workspace’s open stages by their names. Won, lost and archived stages are not listed. It starts on your qualified stage if you have one, and on the first open stage otherwise. See Your pipeline stages.
• The amount must be 0 or more. Otherwise the dialog says “Enter an amount of 0 or more.”
• The deal’s main contact is the lead’s main contact. If no contact is marked as main, it is the contact added first.
• The app confirms “Lead converted - the deal is on the pipeline”. The deal is on the Pipeline board and on the company’s Deals tab.

Converting twice still gives one deal. The dialog says so: “Creates a deal on this company and its main contact; the company becomes a prospect. Safe to repeat.” A second click, two clicks at the same moment in two tabs, or a convert interrupted halfway all end with the one deal the first convert wrote.

The button appears only for an approver, an admin or the owner, and only on an active lead kept in Business-Gym. Once the company is a prospect, the button is gone.

What happens to a company when its deal is won?

When a person marks a deal won, its company becomes a Customer if it was a Lead or a Prospect. Marking a deal won means creating it in the won stage, or editing or moving it to won. Create and manage deals shows how.

These companies are not changed:

• a company that is already a Customer, a Partner or Churned;
• an archived company;
• a company kept in an outside CRM.

Only a change a person makes does this. An AI never does: a deal written through an approved proposal does not change its company’s type. Moving the deal out of won later does not turn the customer back into a prospect.

Who can do what with a lead?

Each role’s rights are checked when the change is saved, not only when the buttons are shown:

Action	Approver	Admin or owner	Read-only member
See leads and their pages	✅	✅	✅
Enter a lead, or create one from Inbound	✅	✅	❌
Convert a lead to a deal	✅	✅	❌
Merge a lead into a company	✅	✅	❌
Edit a company and its contacts	✅	✅	❌
Undo a merge	❌	✅	❌
Draft a quote from a message	❌	✅	❌

A read-only member does not see New lead or Convert to a deal. In Inbound, their Create lead button is dimmed, and its tooltip says “Read-only members cannot create leads.”

A company kept in an outside CRM is converted and merged in that CRM, not here. See Where does your CRM data live?.