Customise lead stages, sources, tags and custom fields

Leadnote starts with a working set of lead stages, so you can add leads on day one. Customising is about making the words match how your team sells: stages describe your pipeline, sources say where leads come from, tags label them, potential rates how likely they are to buy, and custom fields hold any extra detail you need. This page is a map. Each item links to the full guide.

Where to find these settings

Open Settings from the sidebar. You can also press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on a Mac) and search under Menu & Settings.

Manage Qualifiers is the one page that gathers all of these: Product Groups, Customer Groups, Custom Fields, Tags, Lead Potential and Lead Sources, each on its own tab. Lead Potential and Lead Sources have no card of their own in the Settings overview, so you reach them from this page or from the Tags card.

Lead stages

A new account starts with six stages: Open, Contacted, Qualified, Customer, Inactive Customer and Deal Lost. Each has a state of New, In progress, Won or Lost, which tells reports what the stage means. You can add stages, rename and reorder them, change their colour, and set the number of days a lead may stay in a stage before it counts as stagnant. Start by renaming the defaults to your own words and removing steps you will not use. Five to seven stages is plenty. See lead stages for the rules on deleting stages.

Lead sources and tags

Sources record where a lead came from. Leadnote fills the source in from the way the lead arrived, and the list in Settings is the catalogue you filter and report by. Tags are free keywords such as "Hot lead" or "Trade show 2026", and you can create them while you add a lead. Decide on a naming style first so that similar labels do not split into two. See lead sources and lead tags and qualifiers.

Lead potential

Potential rates how likely a lead is to buy, in four fixed levels: High, Medium, Low and Not Relevant. The levels are fixed so that reports stay comparable. Leadnote also uses potential when it calculates the lead score. See lead potential and score.

Custom fields and groups

Custom fields capture details Leadnote does not have by default, such as a decision date or team size. You pick a type, such as text, number, date or dropdown, and can make a field mandatory or limit it to selected lists. The type cannot be changed once the field exists, so choose carefully. Product groups categorise what you sell and customer groups segment your customers. Both appear in filters and imports. See custom fields, products and product groups and customer groups and addresses.

Who can change them

Changes apply to the whole account, so only the account owner and, by default, managers can make them. Other users can still see the stages and apply existing tags to leads. The account owner can adjust who may edit settings in the permission matrix.

A sensible order

1. Rename your lead stages to match your sales steps.
2. Add the tags and lead sources you already use.
3. Add the custom fields your team asks for most.
4. Import your first leads, and map spreadsheet columns to your stages, tags and fields.

Then invite colleagues so they work with the same vocabulary: Invite your team.