Leads: Capturing and Qualifying Prospects

Leads

A Lead is a prospect — a company or person you'd like to sell to but haven't established a relationship with yet. Leads are the busiest object in AB Sales Management Service: every piece of automation, every template send, every “is this worth pursuing?” decision happens here. When a lead is ready to be treated as a real account, it becomes a Customer.

What a lead carries

• Name — usually the company name. Required; it's the search anchor for the Agent's AI fill.
• Contact name — the primary person at that company. Optional.
• Email, Phone, Website — the three pieces that, together with Name, get the lead into “Information filled” status (see below).
• Industry and Source — light categorization (e.g. “Manufacturing”, “Referral”) used for filtering.
• Notes — freeform context. The Agent also feeds this into AI prompts as additional context, so the more you put here the better the research.
• Status — where the lead is in the pipeline; see below.

The status pipeline

Every lead is in exactly one of five statuses, moving left to right as outreach progresses:

• New — just added. Maybe only a name or email. Not ready to email yet.
• Information filled — has all three of Name, Website, and Email. Set automatically the moment those three are populated, whether you typed them in or the Agent filled them. This is the gate for automated outreach: the Agent will only send a template email to leads in this state.
• Contacted — an outbound email has been sent (manual or automated).
• Qualified — the lead responded and is worth pursuing. Move to Customer when ready.
• Disqualified — ruled out (wrong fit, no budget, hostile, etc.). Stays archived for context but no further outreach.

You can click any step from the lead detail panel to advance manually — the panel asks for a short reason so the change history stays useful.

Getting a website with AI: the “Get URL” button

When a lead has a name but no website, the lead detail panel shows a Get URL button next to the Website field. It runs the same logic the Agent uses on the nightly pass:

1. If the lead has a corporate email, the email's domain is tried first — many B2B leads finish here in milliseconds, no AI call needed.
2. Otherwise, Gemini (with Google Search grounding) is asked for the company's official URL, using everything the lead has — name, industry, phone, email domain, notes — as context.
3. Whatever URL comes back must respond 2xx AND the page text must mention the company name. AI confidence alone isn't trusted; this keeps hallucinated URLs out of your CRM.
4. If verified, the URL is saved immediately. If not, the panel shows a short reason ("page didn't mention the company name", "site didn't respond", etc.) so you know what to try next.

How leads get created

• Manual — from the Leads list, click New Lead and fill the form.
• Bulk import — paste a CSV of names and emails to add many at once.
• Automation — the Agent will fill in missing websites and contact emails on existing leads, but does not create new leads on its own.

Searching and filtering

• The Leads list has a search box that matches name, contact name, email, phone, or the lead's ID — paste a long row key like 6604ddef7d5941fbbc995851d3d84028 and the right lead surfaces.
• Status chips along the top filter to one bucket at a time (with counts).

Tips

• The Email field is treated strictly as an address — if you paste info@example.com (general inquiries) it's saved as just info@example.com. Don't try to keep memo text in there; use Notes.
• If a lead's email domain isn't useful (gmail, yahoo, outlook), the Agent skips the fast path automatically and goes to AI search.
• Disqualified isn't deletion. You can move a lead back to New any time the situation changes.

Leads that make it through the pipeline are exactly the ones worth your time — the Agent and the verified-URL bar exist to filter out the noise before it touches your inbox.