Moving a lead through the pipeline

A status is how your team says, in one word, what is happening with an enquiry. Solar Desk ships eight of them and takes no view on how you use them, beyond knowing which two mean the job is over and which one means money in the bank. The full table is in the status reference.

Changing one

You change a status on the lead itself, with the two buttons at the top beside the customer’s name. The queue has no control for it: picking a lead there only opens it.

The dark button makes the usual next move, and says which. It reads Move to Contacted on a New, Reviewing or Asked to call later lead, Move to Interested on Contacted, Move to Accepted on Interested, and Record the sale on Accepted, which moves the lead to Bought. On Bought and Lost there is no usual next move, so it greys out and reads Nothing due.
Move to… opens a row of every status on your account, with the current one marked. Pick any of them.

Either way the change saves as soon as you click. There is no Save button and no confirmation, because a confirmation on something you will do forty times a day is a tax rather than a safeguard.

The dark button is labelled with the move it records, never with a task. Move to Contacted records that contact happened; it rings nobody, sends nothing and writes no note. A button reading “Send the quote” that only moved the status would let a rep believe a customer had a quote they never received. Record the sale is only a move too: the lead goes to Bought, and nothing is stamped on any quote. Recording a sale against a quote is a separate control, covered in when a quote is accepted.

If a move is refused, the lead keeps the status it had and the reason appears under the buttons. The ones you are most likely to see are “Your session has expired. Sign in again.”, “That lead is no longer available.” and, on a suspended account, “This account is suspended.”. None of them leaves the lead in a half-changed state.

In Move to…, picking the status the lead is already in just closes the row. Nothing changes, and no line is added to its history.

Every member of your team can change a status. This is not an admin-only action, because a rep who cannot record what happened on their own call will simply not record it.

There is no order to follow

Any status can move to any other. Nothing has to pass through Contacted on the way to Bought, and nothing stops you moving a lead back from Lost to Interested when they ring you in March about the quote you sent in November.

This is deliberate. Enforced pipelines are built on the assumption that sales happen in a fixed sequence, and solar sales do not: a customer who went cold comes back, a survey uncovers something that sends a confirmed job back to Reviewing, and somebody clicks the wrong status. A pipeline that argues gets worked around, usually by not being updated at all.

The one thing you cannot do is set a status that does not exist on your account.

Changes are recorded, not overwritten

Each move writes an entry to the lead’s History: what it moved from, what it moved to, the date and who did it. The lead carries one current status and a complete record of how it got there.

That means a mistaken change is not destructive. Put it back, and the history shows both moves rather than pretending neither happened. It also means the history answers questions the current status cannot: how long something sat in Contacted before anyone rang, or whether a lost lead was ever actually contacted.

A brand new enquiry has an empty history. What is recorded is changes, and arriving is not one, so the first line appears the first time somebody moves the lead off New.

Two moves happen without you

Almost every status change is somebody choosing one. Two are automatic, and they are deliberately different from each other.

A customer accepting a quote in their account moves the lead to Accepted. They clicked “yes” on a quotation you sent them, from their own account, having confirmed a form of words that says explicitly it is not a contract.

An admin recording a sale on a quote moves the lead to Bought. That is the Mark accepted control on a sent version in the lead’s Quote panel.

The distance between those two is the point. A customer clicking a button has had no survey, no deposit and no contract. Treating that as a won job would put money into your confirmed total that nobody has agreed to spend, and would tell you that a deal is done when what has actually happened is that a homeowner is keen. So Accepted counts towards pipeline value, and Bought counts towards confirmed value, and only a person at your company can move a lead into the second one.

Both automatic moves are written to History like any other, without a name against them where nobody at your company made the change. When a quote is accepted covers the two routes in full.

What a status changes elsewhere

Beyond its own label, a status affects four things:

Where the lead sits in the queue. New, Reviewing, Contacted and Interested go under Needs you. Asked to call later and Accepted go under Waiting on them, because the next move is the customer’s: a callback time they gave you, or a yes that still waits on a deposit. Bought and Lost go under Closed, which only the Everything tab shows. The status also sets the line under the lead’s name, such as “Never contacted” or “Callback due”, unless the customer has written to you and the line says so instead. A move counts as touching the lead, so its wait starts again from Today.
The figures. Open statuses feed Open pipeline, Bought feeds Confirmed, Lost feeds neither.
The Excel export, which follows the queue’s tab, so under Open it leaves out Bought and Lost. Like the queue, it works off the current status, not the history.
What the customer sees, if they have an account. The status label is shown beside each job in the homeowner portal. Not the colour, not the history, not your notes, but the word itself. Rename with that in mind: “Asked to call later” reads fine to a homeowner, and a label like “Time waster” does not.