How do Lead Statuses work in Bread & Butter, and why is marking 'Customers' so critical?

In Bread & Butter, every visitor is tracked through a 10-slot Lead Status pipeline. This sequence is designed to mirror your actual buyer journey, from their very first anonymous click all the way to a closed deal.

While many of these stages can be customized to match your unique sales terminology, the single most important action you can take in this pipeline is marking a profile as a Customer.


Why the 'Customer' Status Changes Everything

Marking a lead as a 'Customer' is what feeds our machine learning model. This specific status acts as the ultimate 'Success Factor' 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 winning deal looks like. The machine then uses this perfect buyer profile to dynamically generate the 1-to-10 Lead Score for all other visitors on your website. Without marked customers, the AI has no baseline for success.

Here is how the 10-slot sequence breaks down:


The Starting Line (Hardcoded)

These first two statuses are locked in place and 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, like a gift card, but have not yet converted. At this stage, they are still unknown, and we are simply waiting for them to claim the offer. To actually get the gift card and move down the pipeline into the 'Qualified Lead' stage, they will be required to authenticate via our secure social login widgets. This status lets you track exactly how many visitors are currently sitting on a pending, high-intent prompt.

The Actionable Pipeline (Customizable)

Once a visitor's identity is captured, they enter your customizable sales pipeline. You can rename these labels to fit your specific workflow:

  • 3. Qualified Lead (Fixed Action Milestone): This marks the critical moment a visitor becomes a known lead. While you can rename this label (e.g., to 'Cold Lead'), its position as the entry point to your sales funnel is fixed.
  • 4. SQL: Sales Qualified Lead (Customizable default).
  • 5. SAL: Sales Accepted Lead (Customizable default).
  • 6. MQL: Marketing Qualified Lead (Customizable default).
  • 7. Custom Slot: An empty space for you to add a unique stage (e.g., "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 lead can be escalated to these statuses manually by a marketing or sales team member, or they can be upgraded automatically based on specific behavior. You can set up rules to auto-escalate a lead 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 Success & Conclusion Stages

  • 8. Customer / Success Factor (Fixed Action Milestone): The most critical slot in the platform. You can rename this label (e.g., 'Closed/Won'), but its underlying function is fixed. Anyone moved into this slot is fed directly into the machine learning algorithm to train your AI Lead Scorer.
  • 9. Custom Slot: An empty space for a post-sale stage (e.g., 'Churned', 'Renewed', or 'Upsell Target').
  • 10. Do Not Contact (Hardcoded): A locked, uneditable status to ensure ethical marketing and strict compliance with opt-outs and unsubscribes.
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