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, 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 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 (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 by scouring the web for people matching 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, where a Visitor interacts with a form, subscribes or buys, or where a Prospect clicks a Nurture AI outreach 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 separate views. The Focused Tab is driven by Focused Score, not by stage. 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, and the stage that trains Focused Score. The system looks back at that person's entire journey, from first visit or first Nurture AI 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 Prospect AI sources better matches. 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.