Working the Captivar Lead Pipeline

A lead that lands on the platform and never gets worked is worse than no lead at all — it’s a captured prospect telling you the system is doing its job, then watching the agency drop the ball on the other side. The pipeline exists to make that handoff impossible to miss. This article covers how to actually work it.

What lands on the pipeline

A lead is created automatically whenever Captivar captures contact info from a visitor. Three sources feed the pipeline:

• Form submissions with at least name and email (or name and phone) filled in
• AI receptionist conversations where the receptionist captured the visitor’s contact details using the capture_lead tool
• Bookings — every confirmed booking also creates a lead pipeline card, pre-populated with the booking details

All three flow into the same pipeline. A visitor who chats first, books a call second, and submits a form third becomes one lead with all three interactions linked to it — not three separate leads to deduplicate later.

The pipeline lives on the Leads page in the sidebar. Open it.

The Kanban view

Default view is a Kanban board — five columns, left to right:

• New — just landed, nobody has touched it
• Contacted — outreach attempt logged (call, email, message)
• Qualified — confirmed they’re a real opportunity worth working
• Closed won — became a paying customer
• Closed lost — disqualified or did not convert

Each lead is a card sitting in one column. Drag cards between columns as the lead progresses. The status updates instantly.

What’s on a lead card

Card front, in order of importance:

• The visitor’s name (or “Anonymous” if not provided)
• Source — the channel + the specific source (e.g., “Chat — receptionist booked consult”, “Form — Contact us”, “Booking — 30-min discovery”)
• Email and phone if captured
• A small avatar for the source channel (chat bubble, form icon, calendar)
• Days in the current status — small but important; turns red after 3 days in new
• Lead value if set (more on this below)

Click the card to open the lead detail.

The lead detail

The detail panel slides in from the right and contains everything tied to this lead:

• Contact info, source, captured timestamp
• Every form submission the visitor made (with field values)
• Every chat conversation in full
• Every booking — past and upcoming
• The full visitor journey from Visitors and Journeys
• A timeline of status changes
• Notes you’ve added
• Follow-up reminders you’ve set
• Lead value field

The right panel is where you actually work the lead. Reading what they asked the receptionist, what they wrote in the form, what page they were on when they converted — that context shapes how the agency responds.

Working a single lead — the practical flow

Once a new lead lands on the pipeline:

1. Read everything tied to the lead. Open the detail panel. Read the chat conversation in full, scan the form submission, check the journey. Spend two minutes here. The visitor told you what they want — knowing this changes the first outreach.

2. Reach out within the response-time window. Industry research is consistent: response within 5 minutes triples conversion vs response within 30 minutes. The lead notification email is real-time; the only delay should be how fast someone reads it. Most agencies set 1 hour as their hard limit during business hours.

3. Log the outreach as a note. “Called at 2:15 PM, left voicemail. Sent follow-up email.” Keep notes operational, not exhaustive — what was done, what’s next.

4. Move the card to “Contacted.” Drag it across, or change status from the detail panel. This stops the days-in-status counter from turning red.

5. Set a follow-up reminder. If the contact didn’t immediately reach a conclusion, set a follow-up date. The system sends an email reminder when it’s due.

6. As the conversation progresses, qualify or disqualify. Move to Qualified once you confirm they’re a real fit, or to Closed lost with a disqualification reason if they’re not. Don’t let leads sit in Contacted indefinitely.

7. Close. When the deal closes, move to Closed won and set the lead value (dollar amount of the deal). For lost deals, capture the lost reason — “wrong fit,” “went with competitor,” “no response,” “budget.” Lost reasons feed your pattern recognition over time.

Notes and follow-ups

Two features that exist specifically to make the pipeline a working tool, not a record-keeping system.

Notes

Open the lead detail. The notes section is a running log — each note timestamped, attributed to the team member who wrote it. Notes are not editable after creation (one-line typo fix excluded) — they’re a history, not a wiki.

What to put in notes:

• Every outreach attempt: medium, time, outcome
• Anything the prospect said that the chat or form didn’t capture
• Decisions made: “qualified for the Agency tier, sending proposal”
• Internal context that doesn’t belong in client-facing fields

What not to put in notes:

• Anything you wouldn’t want the client to see if they read it (they can, depending on access)
• Outreach scripts or templates — those belong in a separate place
• Personal opinions about the prospect (“seems flaky”) — keep it factual

Follow-ups

Below notes, the follow-ups section. Each follow-up is a reminder with a due date, a note describing what’s planned, and a notification recipient.

Set follow-ups whenever:

• You sent an email and didn’t get a response — follow up in 2-3 days
• The prospect asked for time to think — schedule the check-in
• You promised them something by a specific date
• You agreed to call back at a specific time

The reminder email lands in your inbox at 8 AM in your time zone on the day it’s due. The lead card shows the upcoming follow-up date prominently while it’s pending.

Lead value

Optional field on every lead card. Dollar value the lead represents — your expected revenue from this deal if it closes.

Set lead value as soon as you have enough information to estimate it. For closed_won, this is your actual revenue from the deal. For pipeline leads, your best guess.

Why bother:

• The Leads page shows total pipeline value at the top — open opportunity dollars across all qualified leads
• The Catch Report (covered later) reports closed_won value back to the client — far more impactful than “we got you 12 leads this week”
• Pattern recognition over time — high-value leads tend to come from specific channels; knowing which is worth budget

Filtering and the per-site lens

The pipeline view defaults to whichever site is selected in the site switcher. All sites mode shows leads from every site you manage, useful for the founder-level pipeline view.

Filters at the top of the page:

• Status — show one column or a subset
• Source channel — chat-only, form-only, booking-only, or all
• Date range — when the lead was created
• Owner — team-member-specific work view (if multiple people work the pipeline)
• Tag — if you’ve tagged leads with custom labels

Filters stack. A common operational view: status: new + status: contacted, site: ClientX, date range: last 14 days, owner: me. Saves to a URL you can bookmark or share.

CSV export

Top-right of the Leads page, an Export button. Downloads the current filtered view as CSV with all fields visible in the table, plus a few that aren’t visible (notes count, follow-up count, current-status duration).

Common reasons to export:

• Bulk import into a different CRM the agency uses (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive)
• Sharing a monthly closed-won report with the client
• Spreadsheet analysis the dashboard doesn’t show natively
• Backup before bulk-editing leads

Exports are scoped to the current filter and site. To export everything, clear filters and switch to All sites first.

Bulk actions

For multi-lead operations, select multiple cards (hold Cmd or Shift, click cards) and the toolbar at the top of the page shows bulk actions:

• Change status for all selected
• Assign to a team member
• Add a tag
• Delete (with confirmation)
• Export selected only

Bulk operations log a single status-change event on each card, not a flood of individual events. Notes are unchanged.

How leads age out (and what to do about them)

Leads do not expire automatically. A lead from six months ago that nobody worked is still sitting in the pipeline with new status if no one moved it. The platform doesn’t garbage-collect — that’s intentional, because deleting old leads silently is worse than seeing them stale.

What we recommend instead:

• Weekly: scan the pipeline for anything red. Work them or close them.
• Monthly: anything in contacted for 30+ days with no closed status — close as lost with a reason. Free the visual space.
• Quarterly: export the full pipeline to CSV for archive, then bulk-close any remaining new leads older than 90 days. They’re cold.

A clean pipeline shows the truth about how well leads are being worked. A pipeline cluttered with stale new leads hides whether the team is keeping up with this week’s work.

What happens next

The lead pipeline is the operational center of working with Captivar — where actions get taken and revenue gets earned. Two more layers complete the conversion picture: how the visitor experiences a booking (covered next), and how the agency reports all of this back to clients via the weekly Catch Report.