Not every opportunity is ready for a quote.

Many businesses have prospects who are still in the discovery phase — gathering ideas, exploring products, comparing options, or simply not ready to receive pricing yet.

A powerful way to manage these early-stage opportunities in Hoops is by creating a dedicated lead management workflow inside your SalesBoard.

Why Manage Leads in Hoops?

Using Hoops for lead management allows you to:

Keep leads and sales opportunities in a single platform
Track lead progression through your sales process
Collaborate with your team using comments and tasks
Store customer files, notes, and requirements in one place
Automate parts of your lead qualification process
Create dedicated SalesBoard Views for lead management
Maintain visibility of potential future revenue

Rather than managing leads in spreadsheets, inboxes, or separate systems, Hoops can become a central workspace for your entire sales journey.

Create a Lead Workflow

A common approach is to create a dedicated SalesDoc template called Lead.

The Lead template isn't intended to be sent to customers. Instead, it acts as an internal record that stores information about the opportunity while you're gathering requirements and qualifying the prospect.

Many customers combine this with a custom SalesBoard status column containing stages such as:

Discovery
Qualification
Follow Up Required
Stuck
Ready for Quote

You can customize these stages to match your own sales process.

Learn more:

Step 1 - Create a Status column for the Lead workflow.

Step 2 - Click Add New > Manage SalesDoc Templates > New Template
Set the Document Type to be "Lead" or something to your liking.

Step 3 - When creating your template, consider setting the Status settings to match the starting point of your Lead workflow

Capture Everything You Know

As information is gathered, use the Lead record to document everything you learn about the customer.

This might include:

Product ideas
Budget expectations
Brand guidelines
Decoration requirements
Event dates
Competitor information
Notes from discovery conversations

Many users simply add notes directly to the Lead record so that all information remains attached to the opportunity. Use the Additional Cost option as this is the simplest way to track free text only.

The goal is not to create a formal quote yet — it's simply to build a complete picture of what the customer needs.

Create a Dedicated Lead Management View

One of the most effective ways to manage leads is by creating a dedicated SalesBoard View.

A Lead Management View can:

Show only Lead documents
Hide unnecessary columns
Display lead-specific information
Surface upcoming follow-up dates
Highlight high-value opportunities

Additional custom columns can be used to track:

Potential deal value
Lead quality
Next follow-up date
Account owner
Probability of conversion

Because SalesBoard Views can be filtered and sorted, your team can quickly identify which opportunities require attention.

Collaborate With Your Team

Lead records can become a central collaboration point for your sales team.

Use:

Comments to discuss opportunities internally
Tasks to manage follow-up actions
Activity History to track changes
File Storage to collect customer artwork, briefs, and documents

This creates a complete record of the opportunity from first contact through to conversion.

Automate Your Discovery Process

Some businesses manually qualify every lead.

Others prefer to automate parts of the process.

Using SalesBoard Automations, you can automatically trigger actions when a Lead enters a specific stage.

Examples include:

Sending a discovery questionnaire
Requesting artwork or branding guidelines
Asking qualification questions
Sending booking links for discovery calls
Notifying internal team members

This can significantly reduce the amount of manual administration required during the early stages of your sales process.

Learn more:

SalesBoard Automations
Email Automations
Using Shortcodes in Automations

Moving from a Lead to a Quote

Once discovery is complete and you're ready to present pricing, products, or a formal proposal, you will typically create a new SalesDoc using a Quote, Estimate, Proposal, or SalesPresentation template.

⚠️ Important

In Hoops, a Lead is simply a SalesDoc created from a Lead template.

Because Leads and Quotes are both SalesDoc templates, one SalesDoc cannot be converted into another SalesDoc template.

For example:

A Lead cannot be converted into a Quote
A Quote cannot be converted into an Invoice
An Estimate cannot be converted into a Proposal

A SalesPresentation however, can be converted to being a SalesDoc.

Instead, when you're ready to move from discovery into quoting, create a new SalesDoc using the appropriate template and continue the sales process from there.

Many businesses use a Lead template as an internal discovery and qualification workspace, then create a separate customer-facing Quote or SalesPresentation once pricing and product recommendations are ready to be shared.

This approach keeps early-stage notes, discussions, and qualification information separate from the polished documents your customers receive.