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Custom fields and stages

Shaping the lead record around how your business actually qualifies.

3 min readUpdated 30 July 2026
How it works
The journey of one lead
  1. 01
    Capture
    Ad, form, WhatsApp or call
  2. 02
    De-dupe
    Phone and email matched on entry
  3. 03
    Score
    Signals become a probability
  4. 04
    Distribute
    Right agent, right centre
  5. 05
    Engage
    Call queue, WhatsApp, email
  6. 06
    Convert
    Deal, revenue, attribution back
Every step runs automatically unless a rule tells it otherwise. Lead Loss Protection watches all six.

Custom fields

Settings → Lead Fields. Add fields for anything your business needs to capture that is not already there — budget, product interest, admission year, property type.

Available types:

TypeUse for
TextShort free text
Long textNotes and descriptions
NumberQuantities, budgets
DropdownA fixed list of options
Multi-selectSeveral options from a list
DateDeadlines, preferred dates
CheckboxYes/no

Sections

Group related fields into sections so the lead form does not become one long column. A section can be collapsed by default, which is right for fields only some leads need.

Conditional fields

A field can appear only when another field has a particular value. "Which course?" appears only when "Interested in" is set to Education.

Use this rather than showing everything to everyone — a form with forty fields gets filled in badly, and badly-filled fields are worse than absent ones because reports treat them as real.

Required fields

A field can be required per role. Making something required for telecallers but not for the import path is often the right answer: you want the data captured on the call, without blocking a bulk import that legitimately does not have it.

Stages

Settings → Lead Stages. Stages are the spine of your pipeline and of every funnel report.

The flags that matter

Each stage carries flags that change how the whole product treats it:

  • Is entry — new leads land here. Exactly one stage should have this.
  • Is working — the lead is actively being pursued. Counts toward "contacted" in reports.
  • Is converted — a win. Drives conversion rate everywhere.
  • Is disqualified — a loss.
  • Is terminal — no further work expected; excluded from work queues.
  • Requires callback — moving a lead here forces the user to schedule a callback.
Important
If no stage has Is converted set, your conversion rate will be 0% in every report, forever, and nothing will tell you why. This is the single most common configuration mistake.

Keeping it short

Five to eight stages is right for most teams. Every extra stage is a decision a telecaller has to make forty times a day, and past about ten they stop making it carefully — at which point the pipeline data stops meaning anything.

If you need more granularity, use a custom field rather than a stage. Fields describe a lead; stages describe where it is in the process.

Lead scoring bands

Settings → Lead Workflow has two thresholds that decide the Hot / Warm / Cold band shown next to every lead:

  • score_band_hot_min — default 70
  • score_band_warm_min — default 40

The score itself comes from the model, trained on your own conversions. See Understanding your analytics.

Something unclear or missing? Tell us and we will fix the page — send us a note.

Custom fields and stages — Documentation — atomcrm.ai