In the early stages of your lead generation process, you may find yourself with a lot of potential deals sitting in the early stages of your pipeline, not ready to move forward through the sales process but also not cold enough to be lost or deleted. This can cause a lot of clutter in your workspace and can distract you from focusing on the deals that need your immediate attention. 

Pipedrive's Leads inbox is a separate inbox to keep your prequalified Leads in before they become deals. Once you decide which Leads can be qualified, you can easily convert them to deals and add them directly into your pipeline to start your sales process.

To access the Leads inbox, select the Leads tab > Leads Inbox.

Adding Leads

Leads can be added through spreadsheet import, by clicking the Add Lead button, or via Leadbooster. You can read more about how to import Leads in this article. 
To quickly add Leads one at a time or from a spreadsheet, click on the Add Lead button in your leads inbox. A lead will always need to be linked to a person or organization in Pipedrive. 

When adding a Lead through the Add Lead dialog, all fields are optional except either the Organization name or the Person name. Your new lead must be linked to a contact. Through the Add lead modal, you can link your lead to an existing contact, or add a new contact.

Sorting and filtering your Leads

The Leads Inbox screen will display the name, activity status, label(s), source, creation date, and owner of your existing Leads. You can sort your leads by any of these fields by clicking on the column header of the field you want to sort by. 

You can read more about setting up Lead Labels in this article. 

Filtering your Leads 
On the left-hand side of your inbox, you can filter your Leads by activity status. This refers to the status of the next activity linked to your Leads, and can fall under Overdue, Planned, or No Activity if there are no activities planned for that lead. 

On the top right corner, you can filter your Leads by source, label, owner (or team), and a set of predefined filters. When you click on each filter dropdown, you will be able to search for the filter you are looking for. 

You will be able to filter by the following sources:

• All sources
• Chatbot
• Import
• Web visitors 
• Live chat 
• Web Forms 
• Deals
• API

Or by one of the predefined filters: 

• Leads added more than three months ago
• Leads with a linked contact
• Leads with email
• Leads with phone number
• Leads with value 
  

 You can also favorite any owner, team or predefined filter options to access them more easily. 

Viewing Lead details 

You can click on any Lead to bring up a panel on the right-hand side of the screen where you can view your Lead details or update your Lead with the latest information. You will also have the options to convert the Lead to a Deal or archive the Lead in the bottom left corner of the panel. 

The following details will be shown in each Lead panel:

• Lead details— Labels, value, owner, source
• Person— Person name, email, phone number
• Organization— Organization name, address. Clicking on the entered address will bring up the location geo-located on a map. 
• Notes— Any notes added to your Lead. 
• Planned activities— Any upcoming activities you have planned related to this Lead. 
• Changelog— When the Lead was created and other updates made to the deal. This will also include any done activities. 

If Pipedrive recognizes a potential duplicate contact, you will be prompted to review and select an existing contact if applicable. You can then link the Lead directly to the existing person or organization. 

Scheduling activities for your Leads

You can schedule an activity directly from the Lead panel by clicking on +Schedule an activity. 

Converting Leads to Deals 

When you've qualified the Lead and are ready to pursue it as a deal in your pipeline, you can click Convert to deal. This will bring you to a new dialog, where you can define the pipeline, visibility, and value of your new deal.

Any person and organization information from the Lead will automatically be populated in the Convert to deal dialog, so you can easily add them to your contacts lists.  If Pipedrive recognizes a potential duplicate contact, you will be prompted to review and select an existing contact if applicable.

Any notes added to Leads will also be transferred over to the deal detail view.

Once completed, hit Save to convert the Lead into a new deal. The Lead will be removed from your Leads inbox and moved into the Pipeline specified.