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: every piece of automation, every template send, every “is this worth pursuing?” decision happens here.
What a lead carries
- Name — usually the company name. Required; it's the anchor for AI research.
- Contact name — the primary person at that company. Optional.
- Email, Phone, Website — how to reach them. Of these, Website and Email are the two that, together with Name, move the lead to “Information filled”. Phone is not part of that rule — a lead with a phone number and nothing else stays in New.
- Industry and Source — light categorization for filtering.
- Notes — freeform context; also fed into AI prompts, so more here means better research.
- Labels — colored tags for segmenting. See Labels.
The status pipeline
Every lead sits in one of five outreach statuses, moving left to right as you work it:
New Information filled Contacted Qualified Disqualified
- New — just added; maybe only a name or email. Not ready to email.
- Information filled — has Name, Website, and Email. Set automatically the moment those three are present, whether you typed them or the Agent found them. This is the gate for automated outreach.
- Contacted — an outbound email has been sent (manual or automated).
- Qualified — the lead responded and is worth pursuing. Convert to a customer when ready.
- Disqualified — ruled out. Kept for context, no further outreach.
Importing from a spreadsheet? The CSV column wants
InformationFilled as one word, not the Information filled shown above — and an unrecognised value is corrected to New without flagging the row. See Importing and exporting leads.Status vs. the funnel. Status tracks outreach (have we emailed them yet?). The funnel tracks structure (Lead → Contact → Opportunity → Customer, based on what you add). They're two independent axes on the same lead.
Finding a website with AI: the “Get URL” button
When a lead has a name but no website, the detail panel shows a Get URL button. It runs the same logic the Agent uses:
- If the lead has a corporate email, its domain is tried first — instant, no AI call.
- Otherwise an AI (grounded in web search) is asked for the official URL, using everything known about the lead.
- The URL must respond AND the page must mention the company name before it's saved.
- If it fails, the panel shows a short reason so you know what to try next.
AI confidence alone isn't trusted — the respond-plus-mention check is what keeps hallucinated URLs out of your CRM.
Capturing a meeting: the “Capture Meeting” button
On a lead's detail page, the Capture Meeting button (camera-reels icon, next to Send Email) turns a Teams meeting into a note. Paste the join link from the meeting invite or chat, and AI fetches the meeting's transcript and summarizes it — an overview plus the next steps, objections, and commitments it picked out.
- Paste the join link. From the meeting invite or the chat's meeting details, into the Meeting link field.
- AI summarizes. Fetch & summarize pulls the transcript and drafts a summary.
- Review and edit. The summary is yours to adjust before saving.
- Save as note. It's added to the lead's Activity Notes.
Only works inside the Teams app, not the plain browser view, and the meeting needs to have had transcription turned on. If either isn't true, the panel says so instead of failing silently.
How leads get created
- Manual — Leads list → New Lead.
- Bulk import — upload a CSV file from Leads → Import / Export; labels, opt-outs and more come along. See Importing and exporting leads.
- Your website form or API — a download, demo or contact form on your own site posts straight to AB Sales, or your backend sends the same fields as JSON, using the workspace’s intake key from Settings. These arrive with the source Website, and a repeat submission from the same email adds a note to the existing lead instead of a duplicate. See Leads from your website form or API.
- Automation — the Agent fills gaps on existing leads, but doesn't create new ones.
Tips
- The Email field is treated strictly as an address — paste
info@example.com (general)and it's saved as justinfo@example.com. Keep memos in Notes. - Search matches name, contact, email, phone, or the lead's ID — paste a long row key and the right lead surfaces.
- Disqualified isn't deletion — move a lead back to New whenever the situation changes.