Now that we understand what the Leads Inbox is, lets have a look at how to most effectively manage and qualify the leads that arrive in your Leads Inbox. In this article (part 2 of my series on the Pipedrive Leads Inbox) I'll look at how to qualify the leads that you receive so that you're only working with the best fit clients in your sales Pipeline.

Organising your leads

Out of the box, Pipedrive leads have default fields such as Title, Owner and Source Channel. In order to effectively manage leads it's also to track other aspects by setting up custom lead fields in Pipedrive (note that both leads and deals share the same field definitions in Pipedrive - if you set up a custom lead field then that field is also available to deals).

Custom fields for better filtering

Typically I recommend adding custom lead fields that track related marketing campaign details (by for example setting up utm parameters such as utm_id, utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content) and the original lead source - creating a custom field of single option type to track all typical lead sources (such as client or partner referral, Facebook, Google Search etc. ). While Pipedrive does have other lead source related fields such as "Source origin" and Source channel I tend to not use these default fields, but create my own custom field equivalents.

Once you've set up the appropriate custom fields you'll then be able to use these fields to indicate lead source, campaign information etc. when you receive new leads. You can the filter or sort  those leads in the leads list view.

Using labels to categorize your leads

As well as custom fields, it's also a great idea to use visual labels to categorize your leads. I typically recommend using labels for higher level categorization of leads. An example of usage might be to indicate whether a lead relates to a "Quote Request" or is a "General Enquiry". Other categorisations could include the type of service enquired about. For example, for a lawyer this could be "Commercial Law Enquiry" or "Wills & Estates Enquiry".

Qualifying your leads

Once you've starting collecting leads from your campaigns the next most important step is to have an agreed process for triaging those leads so that you're not wasting time with tire-kickers and bad fit clients.

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