How do Lead Stages work in Bread & Butter, and why does marking Won/Closed matter?
Every contact in Bread & Butter sits at one of ten Lead Stages, from the first visit to a closed deal. Most of them describe where someone is in your funnel. One of them teaches the product what a buyer looks like.
In short: Lead Stages run from 1 (Visitor) to 10 (Dead / Do Not Contact). Stages 1 to 3 and 8 to 10 are fixed milestones; stages 4 to 7 are yours to rename and can be escalated by hand or automatically on journey events. The stage that matters most is 8, Won/Closed. It is the default Success Factor, and each profile you move there teaches Focused Score what your real buyers look like, recalibrates your Ideal Customer Profile, and improves the matched prospects Bread & Butter finds for you. The Won/Closed tab appears in your dashboard the first time you mark a profile there. Profiles are never deleted: a lead you rule out goes to Spam or Dead, because what the model learns from non-buyers matters as much as what it learns from buyers.
The Success Factor
Marking a profile Won/Closed feeds the machine-learning model behind Focused Score. That stage is the primary training data.
When a profile reaches Won/Closed, the model reviews the entire journey and thousands of data points to work out what a buyer looks like on your site, then uses that to score every other visitor from 1 to 10 and to source new targets.
Won/Closed is the default Success Factor, though each account or website can select a different stage to match its own process.
Top of funnel: the entry points
The first two stages are the two ways a contact enters your account.
1. Visitor (Inbound). People browsing your website who have not yet given you an email address. They are already generating journey and heatmap data, meaning mouse movement, scroll depth, pages and time, and they already carry a Focused Score.
2. Prospect. Hasn't visited your site yet. Prospects arrive two ways: Bread & Butter finds them for you (matched prospects, each with a Match Score showing how closely they fit your Ideal Customer Profile), or you upload your own list, from a trade show for example. Either way they are researched before they ever land on a page, and each one's User Journey starts with a pill showing where they came from: Found for you, or the name you gave your list. They sit in the Prospects tab, and you can move them through the stages by hand like any other contact, even if they never visit.
The marketing and sales funnel: slots 3 to 7
Once a visitor converts, or a Prospect reaches the site, they enter your customisable funnel.
3. Engaged Lead (fixed milestone). The convergence point, where a Visitor interacts with a form, subscribes or buys, or where a Prospect clicks a Nurture email and lands on the site. From this stage forward the contact has a verified identity.
4. MQL. Marketing Qualified Lead. Customisable default.
5. SAL. Sales Accepted Lead. Customisable default.
6. SQL. Sales Qualified Lead. Customisable default.
7. Opportunity. A meeting is booked, or a quantifiable deal is in the pipeline. Customisable default.
How escalation works for slots 4 to 7. You control how a contact moves through the mid-funnel. A lead can be escalated manually by anyone on your team, or upgraded automatically on journey milestones. You can set rules to move a profile the moment it triggers a key event, visits a high-intent page such as pricing, or fills out a particular form.
Renaming slots 4 to 7. The four middle stages ship with defaults of MQL, SAL, SQL and Opportunity, and you can rename any of them to match the language your own team uses. You will find them under Settings, then Lead Stages, where the six fixed stages are also listed in funnel order so you can see the whole shape of it. Each one can be reset to its default.
Lead Stage and the Focused Tab are different things. The Focused Tab holds every contact who has converted, meaning stage 3 and beyond, plus any visitor scoring 6 or higher on Focused Score who has not converted yet. So someone can sit in the Focused Tab at stage 1 on behaviour alone, and a contact who has converted stays in it whatever their score does afterwards.
The conclusion stages: slots 8 to 10
8. Won/Closed (default Success Factor). The destination for won deals, and the stage that trains Focused Score. The system looks back at that person's entire journey, from first visit or first Nurture email through to the final conversion, across industry, company size, career history, professional connections and heatmap engagement, and recalibrates your Ideal Customer Profile from what it finds. From then on, visitors who share those traits score higher, and the matched prospects Bread & Butter finds are closer to your real buyers. The Won/Closed tab appears in your dashboard once you have marked at least one profile here.
9. Spam / Bad Email (fixed). Caught by the Lead Integrity Firewall. Marking a lead as spam keeps your own funnel clean, and when a fake or malicious profile such as a bot or a disposable address is flagged, that intelligence feeds a shared index across the Bread & Butter network, so every customer's firewall gets better at catching the same traffic.
10. Dead / Do Not Contact (fixed). A locked status for real people who are fully disqualified, such as hard bounces or opt-outs. Contacts in this stage are never contacted again.
Mark it, don't delete it
There is no delete for a profile, and stages 9 and 10 are the reason. A lead you've ruled out still teaches the model something: what a non-buyer looks like. Remove it and your Ideal Customer Profile only sees the buyers, so traits your rejected leads share start to look neutral, Focused Score drifts, and the matched prospects we find start to resemble contacts you've already turned down.
Move the lead to Spam / Bad Email or Dead / Do Not Contact instead. It leaves your Focused Tab and Nurture queue and is never contacted again, while everything it tells the model, good and bad, keeps refining your ICP over time.