Working the board

Adding a lead

New lead captures the enquiry: contact name, company if there is one, email, what they want, the budget, and what you think it is worth.

Add it the day it arrives, even with half the fields blank. A lead on the board with three fields filled in gets followed up; one in somebody’s inbox does not.

Moving between stages

Move a lead as its state genuinely changes — Move to stage, or drag it on the board.

Resist moving things along to make the board look busy. A column full of leads parked at Quoting that nobody is actually pricing is worse than an honest Contacted column, because it hides the work that has not started.

Activity

Each lead carries an activity log. Record what happened each time you touch it: the call, what they said, what you agreed, what you are waiting for.

Two reasons this is worth the thirty seconds.

You will not remember. Six weeks and forty enquiries later, “spoke to them” tells you nothing. “Rang 14 Oct, they are waiting on council, said ring back mid-November” tells you exactly what to do and when.

Somebody else can pick it up. A lead with a written history can be handled by whoever is available. One with no history belongs to whoever took the call, and stops if they are away.

Log the next step, not just the last one

End every activity note with what happens next and when. “Ring back mid-November” turns the log into a to-do list rather than a diary.

Marking a lead lost

Mark as lost takes it off the board.

Do it, and record why. A pipeline that only ever grows is not a pipeline, and the reasons are the useful part:

Reason	What it tells you
Price	You were in the running — worth knowing by how much
Timing	Might come back; worth a diary note
Went with a mate	Nothing you could have done
Never responded	Look at how long it sat at New
Not qualified	Good — that is the system working

That fourth row is the one to watch. If leads are regularly lost to silence, the problem is not the market.

Enquiries from your website

Leads can be created directly from an enquiry form on your website, so a form submission lands on the board rather than in an inbox.

That closes the gap where enquiries are lost most often — between arriving and being noticed.

Email a copy of each enquiry to sends a copy to an address you nominate, so somebody sees it immediately as well. Leave it blank for no email.

The form is protected against automated spam, so what reaches the board is overwhelmingly real.

A weekly routine

Ten minutes, once a week:

1. Anything at New more than two days old — contact it today.
2. Anything with no activity in a fortnight — chase or mark lost.
3. Anything at Quoted past the date you said you would follow up — follow up.
4. Mark lost what is genuinely gone, with a reason.

Step four is what keeps the board honest, and an honest board is the only kind anybody keeps using.