From Lead Capture to a Scalable Sales Pipeline

#The problem, as it actually presented

The brief we get in this situation is almost never "our lead management is broken". It is "we cannot trust the forecast".

That is a symptom, and chasing it directly leads to dashboard work that changes nothing. Trace it back and the same shape appears: enquiries arrive through four channels that were each built by a different team in a different year. The web form writes a Lead. The broker portal writes to a spreadsheet that somebody imports weekly. Inbound calls are typed into whatever the adviser has open. Referral partners email a named person, who forwards it.

Four channels, four definitions of a lead, and no single place where an enquiry is known to exist.

Downstream, the effects compound. The same applicant appears three times because nothing matched them across channels. Two advisers work the same person without knowing. Reporting counts three enquiries where there was one, so conversion rate is understated and nobody can say by how much. And because stage definitions were never agreed, every deal sits at a high probability until the day it either closes or vanishes.

#What we designed, and why

One intake, not four front doors

The first decision is that every channel writes to the same object through the same service, and nothing is permitted to write around it. That sounds obvious and it is the part that gets negotiated hardest, because each channel has an owner who is confident their route is fine.

The argument that lands is not about tidiness. It is that deduplication cannot work if records arrive by four paths at four times with four shapes. One intake is what makes matching possible at all.

Matching before assignment, always

Deduplication has to run before a human is attached to a record. This ordering is the single decision that saves the most pain later.

Once two advisers own two records for the same applicant, you no longer have a data problem. You have a conversation about whose pipeline shrinks. That conversation is political, it takes weeks, and it recurs. Matching first makes it a non-event: the returning applicant lands on the record that already exists, with its history intact.

In practice this means matching rules on the identifying attributes that are stable, and accepting that some matches need a human decision. A queue for ambiguous matches, reviewed daily, is a far cheaper thing to run than a merge programme a year later.

Routing on permission, not on turn

Round robin is the default because it is fair and easy to explain. In a regulated lending business it is also wrong, because not every adviser is permitted to advise on every product.

So assignment reads product line, the adviser's licensing and accreditation, and current capacity. Fairness is preserved within the set of people who are actually allowed to take the enquiry, which is the only place fairness is meaningful.

This is worth stating plainly to the business: routing is a control, and it should be evidenced like one. The rules live in configuration that an auditor can read, not in a formula that has to be reverse-engineered.

Stage definitions tied to evidence

The forecast problem is solved here rather than in the reporting layer.

Every stage names an artefact the buyer produced. Not "adviser believes the client is interested" but "application submitted", "documents received", "credit decision issued". Each is something that either exists or does not, and none of them requires anyone to estimate a probability.

Then the required fields for each stage are exactly the fields that prove the artefact exists, and nothing else. We take fields out during this work as often as we add them, because a required field that no report, approval or obligation consumes is pure friction, and friction is what teaches people to type anything to get past the screen.

#Implementation

The sequence matters more than the components.

Settle the stage definitions first, before building anything. This is a facilitated argument, not a workshop. The people who own the number and the people who move the deals have to agree what qualified means, in writing. Everything downstream is cheap once this is settled and expensive to change afterwards.

Then the data model and matching. Person Accounts versus a contact-and-account pair is one of the decisions that is close to irreversible once the org holds real data, so it is made deliberately and early rather than defaulted into. The same applies to how related parties are represented.

Then intake, one channel at a time. The web form first, because it has the cleanest shape and the fewest owners. Each subsequent channel gets migrated only when the previous one is stable, so a routing defect is attributable to one change rather than four.

Then routing, then the pipeline fields, then reporting last. Reporting is built against a pipeline that already behaves. Building it first produces dashboards that have to be rewritten.

#The decisions that were contested

Removing fields. Every mandatory field had someone who asked for it. The rule we applied was that a field stays mandatory only if it can be traced to a report someone reads, an approval that gates something, or a regulatory obligation. Several did not survive, and the conversations were not comfortable.

Not building a scoring model on day one. There was appetite for lead scoring. We argued against it in the first phase, because a score built on the historic data would have learned from the duplicated, mis-attributed records we were in the middle of fixing. Scoring is worth doing on evidence that is trustworthy, which it was not yet.

Keeping the broker portal as a separate channel. The tidier design collapses it into the web form. The business reason not to is that brokers have a different relationship, different disclosure requirements and different service expectations, and flattening that into one form would have made both experiences worse.

#What changes

The outcomes worth claiming from this design are operational, and they follow from the decisions rather than from effort.

The second-order effect is the one leaders notice: the conversation in pipeline review changes. When a stage requires an artefact, the question stops being "how confident are you" and becomes "has the credit decision been issued", which has an answer.

#What we would tell you before starting

If your forecast is not trusted, do not start with the forecast. Start with what a stage means, get it agreed in writing by the person who owns the number, and be prepared for that to take longer than the build. Every implementation of this shape that goes badly goes badly there.

And if the enquiry volume is genuinely low and the team is genuinely small, some of this is over-engineering. Three advisers sharing one inbox do not need routing rules. The design above earns its cost when volume, product complexity or a licensing boundary makes the coordination cost real.