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

In Bread & Butter, every visitor and contact 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—or their initial sourcing via Prospect AI—all the way to becoming a won deal.

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 Won/Closed stage.

The Power of the Success Factor

Marking a profile as a Won/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 LeadScore for all other visitors on your website and source new targets.

While Won/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:

Top of Funnel (The Entry Points)

These first two stages represent the two different ways a contact enters your ecosystem:

1. Anonymous (Inbound): Unknown visitors browsing your website. They are generating active heatmap data (mouse movement, scroll depth) but have not yet provided their email.
2. Prospect (Outbound): Fully enriched outbound targets sourced automatically by Prospect AI. They perfectly match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), but have not yet engaged with your website.

The Marketing & Sales Funnel (Slots 3 to 7)

Once an identity is engaged or a Prospect hits the site, they enter your customizable funnel.

3. Engaged Lead / Converted (Fixed Milestone): This is the critical convergence point. It marks the moment an Anonymous visitor interacts with a form, OR the moment a Prospect clicks your Nurture AI outreach email and lands on the site.
4. MQL: Marketing Qualified Lead (Customizable default).
5. SQL: Sales Qualified Lead (Customizable default). These leads typically populate your Focused Tab.
6. Opportunity: A meeting is booked, or a quantifiable deal is actively in the pipeline (Customizable default).
7. Custom Slot: An empty space for you to add a unique stage (for example, In Demo, Proposal Sent, or Negotiating).

How Escalation Works for Slots 4, 5, 6, and 7: You have complete control over how a contact moves through these mid-funnel stages. A lead 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 milestones. You can set up rules to auto-escalate a profile the moment they trigger a key event, visit a high-intent web page (like your pricing page), or fill out a specific form.

The Conclusion Stages (Slots 8 to 10)

8. Won/Closed (Default Success Factor): This is your final destination for won 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 or Nurture AI email to their final conversion—evaluating their specific industry, company size, career history, professional connections, and heatmap engagement. 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 anyone who shares those exact winning traits, and Prospect AI will source better matches. This creates a brilliant, continuous feedback loop.
9. Spam / Bad Email (Hardcoded): Caught by our Lead Integrity Firewall. Marking a lead as spam does more than just keep your own funnel filled with pristine data; it actively protects the entire Bread & Butter community. When a fake or malicious profile (like a bot or a disposable email) is identified, that intelligence feeds directly into a shared global index, creating a massive, crowdsourced shield against low-quality traffic across the entire network.
10. Dead - Do Not Contact (Hardcoded): A locked status for legitimate humans who are completely disqualified (e.g., hard bounces or strict opt-outs) to ensure ethical marketing and strict compliance.