Leads That Open Themselves
The four ways a contact lands on the board without anyone opening the Pipeline screen.
Most leads should not be typed in. A contact reaching the board is usually a side effect of something else — a rule firing, an agent filing a conversation, a sync from your CRM.
Every route below does the same thing: it puts a contact on a stage. If that contact has no lead on the board yet, one opens there. If they already have one, it moves.
A contact holds one lead per board. None of these routes can produce a second one, and none of them ever creates a duplicate card.
An Automation Rule
The Assign Stage action in the automation builder is the main one. It is available on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook rules.
Build the rule as usual — see Triggers and Conditions.
Add an Assign Stage action and pick the column from the list of your board's stages.
Save. From then on, a contact meeting the rule lands on that column.
A lead opened this way has no owner and its timeline reads "Added by automation", naming whoever set the rule off. Its source and channel follow the platform the rule fired on — a WhatsApp rule produces a WhatsApp enquiry.
The picker says "No pipeline columns yet — create a pipeline before using this action." if your organisation has no board.
Assign Lifecycle is the older action this replaced. It is still offered on rules that already use it, so nothing you built stops running, but new rules should use Assign Stage. See Actions.
From the Inbox
The Ticket Details panel beside a conversation carries a Pipeline Stage section: every column on the board as a chip, the current one highlighted.
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Click a chip | Puts the contact on that column, opening a lead if they had none |
| Click the highlighted chip again | Takes them off the board |
| Nothing highlighted | "Not on the board. Pick a stage to add them." |
This is the fastest route for an agent who has just worked out that an enquiry is real.
Taking a contact off the board deletes their lead — its notes, its next activities, its timeline and its assignees go with it. The confirmation counts each of those before you commit. To record that a deal did not happen, mark it lost instead; a lost lead stays on the board and still counts in your insights.
From the Contacts Table
Select contacts in Contacts and use Update Pipeline Stage to put all of them on one column in a single action.
The result reports what actually happened — how many were matched, how many changed, and how many were already sitting on that column. It is normal for the changed count to be lower than the number you selected.
On an organisation without the Pipeline feature the same button reads Update Lifecycle Stage and writes a lifecycle stage instead. Which one you see depends on your team's feature access.
From Zoho Bigin
If you have connected Zoho Bigin under Integrations, Lead Status Mapping lines each Zoho lead status up against one of your pipeline columns. The dialog tracks how many statuses are still unmapped, and Save Mapping & Sync applies it.
Once mapped, a lead moving in Bigin moves the matching card on your board, and vice versa. An inbound change is applied without echoing back, so the two do not fight each other.
What Does Not Happen Automatically
A lead that arrives by any of these routes has no team and no assignees. Assigning a stage names a board, not the people on it.
| Not automatic | Do it yourself |
|---|---|
| Putting the lead on a team | From the lead drawer |
| Assigning it to someone | On the card, or in bulk from the List |
| Scheduling a next activity | From the lead drawer. This is what stops it stalling |
| Setting an expected close date | From the drawer, or it sits in the forecast's Unscheduled column |
A rule that files leads onto the board and nothing else produces a growing column of unassigned cards with no next step — every one of them will eventually be flagged as stalled. An Assign Team action in the same rule routes the conversation, not the lead, so somebody still has to pick each card up. Watch the sidebar's No next activity count for how well that is going.
Related Pages
- Actions
- Working a Lead
- Lifecycle Stages — what the board superseded
- Integrations