How do Lead Stages work in Bread & Butter, and why does marking Won/Closed matter?
In Bread & Butter, every visitor and contact moves through a 10-slot Lead Stage funnel. The sequence mirrors a real marketing funnel, from a first visit to your website, or a first appearance in your prospect list, all the way to a won deal. Most of the middle stages can be renamed to match your own terminology, and one of them, your Success Factor, is what trains Focused Score.
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, if you use Prospect AI, improves the outbound targets it sources. The Won/Closed tab appears in your dashboard the first time you mark a profile there.
The Success Factor
Marking a profile Won/Closed is what feeds the machine-learning model. That stage is the primary training data for Focused Score. When a profile reaches it, the model looks back over the whole journey, thousands of data points, to learn 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, but each account or website can choose a different stage as its Success Factor to suit its own process. The mechanics are covered in Why does marking leads Won/Closed make Focused Score more accurate?
Here is how the 10 slots break down.
Top of Funnel: The Entry Points
The first two stages are the two ways a contact enters your account.
- 1. Visitor (Inbound): Visitors browsing your website who have not yet given you an email address. They are already generating journey and heatmap data (mouse movement, scroll depth, pages and time), and they already carry a Focused Score.
- 2. Prospect (Outbound): Contacts who have not yet visited your site. They arrive one of two ways: you upload them through your lists, or Prospect AI finds them for you by scouring the web for people who match your Ideal Customer Profile. Either way they are fully enriched before they ever land on a page.
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. A Visitor interacts with a form, subscribes, or buys, or a Prospect clicks a Nurture AI outreach email and lands on the site. From here the contact has a verified identity.
- 4. MQL: Marketing Qualified Lead. Customisable default.
- 5. SQL: Sales Qualified Lead. Customisable default.
- 6. Opportunity: A meeting is booked, or a quantifiable deal is in the pipeline. Customisable default.
- 7. Custom slot: An empty stage for something specific to you, such as In Demo, Proposal Sent or Negotiating.
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.
Note that Lead Stage and the Focused Tab are separate views. The Focused Tab is driven by Focused Score, not by stage, so a visitor can be Focused at stage 1 and an SQL can fall out of it if they stop engaging.
The Conclusion Stages: Slots 8 to 10
- 8. Won/Closed (default Success Factor): The destination for won deals. Moving a lead here trains Focused Score. The system looks back at that person's entire journey, from first visit or first Nurture AI email to final conversion, across industry, company size, career history, professional connections and heatmap engagement, and recalibrates your Ideal Customer Profile. From then on, visitors who share those traits score higher, and Prospect AI sources better matches. The Won/Closed tab in your dashboard appears once you have marked at least one profile here.
- 9. Spam / Bad Email (fixed): Caught by our Lead Integrity Firewall. Marking a lead as spam does more than keep your own funnel clean. When a fake or malicious profile, such as a bot or a disposable email 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, so they are never contacted again.