How do Lead Stages work in Bread & Butter, and why is marking a Win/Closed deal so critical?

In Bread & Butter, every visitor is tracked through a 10 slot Lead Stage funnel. This sequence is designed to mirror your actual marketing funnel, from their very first anonymous click all the way to becoming a loyal customer.

While many of these stages can be customized to match your unique terminology, the single most important action you can take is identifying your success factor. In our default configuration, that success factor is the Win/Closed stage.


The Power of the Success Factor

Marking a profile as a Win/Closed lead is what feeds our machine learning model. This specific Lead Stage acts as the primary training data for the AI. When a profile reaches this stage, the AI instantly analyzes their entire journey (over 1,000 data points) to learn exactly what a high intent prospect looks like. The machine then uses this data to dynamically generate the 1 to 10 Lead Score for all other visitors on your website.

While Win/Closed is the default success factor, each account or website can choose a different stage to act as their unique AI trigger depending on their specific business goals.

Here is how the 10-slot sequence breaks down:


The Starting Line (Hardcoded)

These first two stages are managed automatically by the system:

  • 1. Anonymous: Unknown visitors browsing your website.
  • 2. Incentivized: Anonymous visitors who have been presented with a high value reward but have not yet engaged.

The Marketing Funnel (Slots 3 to 7)

Once a visitor identity is engaged, they enter your customizable funnel.

  • 3. Conversion/Engaged (Fixed Milestone): This marks the critical moment a visitor interacts with a form or conversion tool.
  • 4. MQL: Marketing Qualified Leads (Customizable default).
  • 5. SQL: Sales Qualified Lead (Customizable default).
  • 6. SAL: Sales Accepted Lead (Customizable default).
  • 7. Custom Slot: An empty space for you to add a unique stage (for example, In Demo or Negotiating).

How Escalation Works for Slots 4, 5, 6 and 7:

You have complete control over how a visitor moves through these mid funnel stages. A prospect can be escalated to these stages manually by a marketing or sales team member, or they can be upgraded automatically based on specific user journey milestone. You can set up rules to auto escalate a profile the moment they reach a certain milestone, such as triggering a key user journey event, visiting a high intent web page (like your pricing page), or filling out a specific form.


The Conclusion Stages

  • 8. Customer (Default Success Factor): This is your final destination for closed deals. When you move a lead into this ultimate stage, you are actively training the intelligence of your LeadScore AI. The system immediately looks back at the entire journey of that specific user. It analyzes every single data point, from their very first website visit to their final conversion, evaluating their specific industry, company size, career history, professional connections, and even the activity of other employees within their organization. The AI then uses this pristine data to perfectly recalibrate your ideal customer profile. Moving forward, the platform will automatically assign much higher lead scores to any new anonymous visitors or Engaged leads who share those exact same winning traits. This creates a brilliant, continuous feedback loop that constantly sharpens your Focused tab and ensures your Nurture Action Queue is only filled with traffic mathematically proven to close.
  • 9. Spam (Hardcoded): Marking a lead as spam does more than just keep your own Funnel filled with pristine data. It actively protects the entire Bread and Butter community. When you identify a fake or malicious profile, that intelligence feeds directly into a shared global index. This means your single action helps prevent that exact same spammer from ever infiltrating the databases of all other customers, creating a massive, crowdsourced shield against low quality traffic across the entire network.
  • 10. Dead - Do not contact (Hardcoded): A locked status to ensure ethical marketing and strict compliance with opt outs.
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