Powering your Lead Management with Pipedrive's Leads Inbox

In many businesses, a large proportion of leads received are not ready to enter a traditional sales pipeline. These are leads where qualification hasn't taken place yet.

Maybe the services requested don't match those offered by your business or maybe the prospect's budget is unrealistic. Adding a lead to your sales pipeline at this stage may result in additional clutter (too many deals stuck at the "Lead In" deal stage) and wasted time in the future.

To solve the problem of a cluttered deals pipeline and centralise the management of leads, Pipedrive introduced the "Leads Inbox" in April 2020.

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Consistent use of the leads inbox allows sales teams to manage pre-qualified deals (aka leads) effectively outside of the standard sales pipeline. When a new lead is received by the business - be it a lead from social media, direct email or phone calls or via a landing page or online quote or contact form - a lead entry is added to the leads inbox in the first instance.

A team member should then reach out to the related contact to qualify the lead and either convert the lead to a deal or delete or archive the lead if there's no likelihood of ongoing business (although it's recommended that the contact be added to longer term nurture via email marketing).

Leads vs Deals

If you look at the Data Fields settings within Pipedrive (accessible to admins or regular users with the correct permissions) you'll notice that both Lead and Deal entities share the same sets of fields. At a data level they're very similar. This is intentional, because Leads are effectively Deals before they come alive in the deals pipeline. The information that you've added to a Lead should still be visible after that Lead has been converted to a Deal.

The key distinction between leads and deals is in their probability of converting into business. For an unqualified lead - a lead that is created and for which there's been no qualification carried out (e.g. you haven't yet phoned or emailed them to check for fit) - there's potentially a 0% chance of conversion into a sale.

A deal, however, would never enter the Pipeline unless there's a non-zero probability of conversion. The deals pipeline should only contain deals that have a chance of becoming business - and money in the bank.

Using the Leads Inbox

Although I'd strongly recommend that all leads enter the leads inbox automatically - for example, as the result of an enquiry via your contact form - it is also easy to add leads manually in a number of ways.

You can either click on the big green +Lead button and manually enter the Lead details or click on the + icon next to the search box and select the Lead option.

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The lead input box looks like this by default:

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You'll be able to add the details of a new contact person linked to the lead, or add a new contact. Note that all leads must be associated with a contact. You cannot create a lead without also creating or associating a contact.

As well as the contact person details you can also add a title for the lead (I typically use the Contact name plus the word 'Lead') as well as an anticipated value. Typically you wouldn't add a value until you're ready to convert the lead to a deal.

Adding leads via a Web Form or Chatbot

As part of Pipedrive's LeadBooster add-on you can easily create handy web forms that will seamlessly integrate with Pipedrive's Leads Inbox. You can quickly add fields to the web form and quickly map to both standard and custom lead fields. I have several clients who use Web Forms for integrating their website contact form with the Pipedrive Leads inbox - all without the need for custom integrations. It all works seamlessly out of the box.

The LeadBooster add-on also includes Chatbot and Live Chat support. Leads received via a website chatbot or Live Chat can be integrated with the Leads inbox as well. Read more about Pipedrive chatbot support here or Live Chat here.

The importance of efficient lead management

Managing leads well will allow you to maximise sales efficiency and team productivity (less wasted time on managing leads that will never qualify and a more efficient and structured approach to lead management).

Without an approach like the Leads Inbox, it’s easy for new enquiries to get buried in emails or spreadsheets. Think of those enquiries that arrive late on a Friday and get lost in a cluttered inbox (and never responded to). Sales teams waste time chasing low-quality leads or struggle to distinguish new opportunities from deals already in progress.

Most importantly, adopting the Pipedrive Leads Inbox supports efficient enquiry management. Many studies - and much real life experience - have shown that the longer it takes for a business to respond to enquiries the less likely they are to convert that lead into business.

Speed to Lead is critically important to ensuring you're not wasting the leads generated by your marketing campaigns, for example.

By also leveraging Pipedrive's native automation feature to automatically acknowledge all new enquiries (via email or SMS) and notifying team members that a new enquiry has been received you'll make sure you impress your prospective customers with your responsiveness and set a positive impression of your business from the get-go.

By adopting Pipedrive's Lead inbox and thereby keeping unqualified prospects in a dedicated holding area, you create breathing room in your pipeline. You can focus on what matters: the leads with real potential. And when you’re ready, it takes only a click to turn a lead into a pipeline deal—with all the relevant data carried across.

Final Thoughts

The Leads Inbox is one of Pipedrive’s most under-used yet powerful features. It creates a natural, practical separation between potential opportunities (leads) and those in progress (deals), allowing your team to spend more time selling and less time guessing.

If you’re not using it already, consider this your nudge to set it up and start managing your leads with more clarity and confidence.

As a Pipedrive Premier Partner, Process Culture can offer you an extended 30-day trial of Pipedrive. Please click here to sign up for a free trial.

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