Managing your leads

Any business can be added to your pipeline with the + button next to it in search results, or from its business page. Once added, the button turns into a checkmark that links straight to the lead. Each lead is yours alone: your statuses, notes, and follow-ups are private to your account, even though the underlying audit data is shared.

The Leads page lists your whole pipeline. It opens sorted by follow-up date, soonest first, so overdue and due leads sit on top and leads without a follow-up stay at the bottom in most-recently-updated order. The header chevrons show the active order; click Business, Status, or Follow-up to re-sort. Each row shows the business, its opportunity score, its rating, its status, its next follow-up, and your notes, with status, follow-up, and notes editable inline without leaving the list.

Clicking a business name opens the lead page, which adds the full activity timeline and a link back to the audit. Its top line says where the deal stands, for example “Opened your report 2 days ago · No follow-up set”, with Compose pitch email and Log a call right below. The arrows above the business name step to the previous or next lead in the list’s order (or press K and J), so you can work through the leads that are due without going back to the list. Open a lead’s audit from there and the same arrows step through your leads’ audits, with a link back to the lead (a lead opened from a search keeps that search’s arrows instead). Use the list for quick triage; use the lead page when you are actually working the deal.

Search results know about your pipeline. Each row ends in a Lead status column: an Add button for fresh prospects, and the pipeline status (New, Contacted, Lost, and so on) once the business is one of your leads, so a saved search can be re-run without wondering “have I talked to these people already?”

Whenever at least one result is already a lead, a Hide existing leads toggle appears above the table with a count of how many rows it covers. Flip it and the table shows only fresh prospects; flip it back and everything returns. The toggle is per-visit and never changes the underlying results, so nothing is lost either way.

This is what makes re-running saved searches safe: the businesses you already contacted, won, or wrote off stay visibly marked instead of resurfacing as if they were new, and an embarrassing double outreach becomes hard to do by accident.

Every lead has one status, and together they form a simple pipeline: new → contacted → replied → meeting → won or lost. The status is just a dropdown; there is no enforced order, so you can jump straight from New to Won if a deal moves that fast.

Every status change is recorded automatically in the activity log (“Status changed from New to Contacted”), so the lead page always shows how the deal actually unfolded, with timestamps. When you change the status on the lead page, it offers the follow-up that goes with it: in 3 days for Contacted, by tomorrow for Replied, the meeting day for Meeting, and clearing a pending follow-up for Won and Lost. Take it in one click or dismiss it.

Each lead has one free-form notes field, editable from both the list and the lead page. It saves as you type; there is no save button to forget.

Notes work best as a pinned summary of where the lead stands right now: the price you quoted, what they said they need, why the deal is or isn’t moving. Names, roles, and phone numbers belong in the lead page’s Contacts card, and for the play-by-play (calls made, emails sent), use the activity log below; it keeps the history with timestamps so the notes field can stay short.

The lead page keeps a timeline of everything that happened on the lead, newest first. Some entries you write; others are recorded for you:

Adding a lead also writes the first entry (“Lead created”), so the timeline records the full life of the deal from the day you found the business. Forgot to log a call last week? The day picker next to “Add entry” says Today; pick the day it happened and the entry sorts into its place in the timeline, shown with the day only since no time was chosen. Any entry already on the timeline, including an automatic status change, can be moved the same way: hover it and click “Change day”. Move “Created” back when the work started before you added the lead to Sifter. Only “Report opened” stays put, since it records what the prospect did. There is no edit for the wording: remove the entry (hover it and click Remove) and enter it again. From the keyboard, Tab from the text to the entry type, choose Note, Call or Email with the arrow keys, and press ⌘ Enter (Ctrl Enter on Windows) to add the entry.

Most prospecting dies from silence, not rejection: the deal that needed a third nudge never got one. Follow-ups are how the tracker keeps that from happening. Every lead can carry one next follow-up date, set from the list or the lead page with a date picker or the quick presets (In 3 days, In 1 week), which count from today and stay available once a date is set, so pushing a follow-up out is one click. On the lead page they sit beside the date; in the list they are at the top of the date picker.

Dates are calendar days, and the state is always one of three:

A follow-up never fires and disappears: an overdue follow-up stays overdue until you clear it, move it, or follow up. After you reach out, set the next date in the same motion (that is what the presets are for) or clear it if the thread is truly done. Each date you set is recorded in the activity log; changing it again the same day, with nothing logged in between, updates that entry instead of adding another.

You shouldn’t have to open the app to know that follow-ups are waiting. Each morning, if at least one of your follow-ups is due or overdue, a prospect opened one of your shared reports in the last day, or an opened report link expires within a week, Sifter sends you a single email listing them: each business, its pipeline status, and whether it is due today or was due earlier, which reports were opened and when, and which links to extend.

A few deliberate design choices:

If you’d rather live in the app, turn the digest off under Settings → Notifications; the badges and list ordering keep working either way.

A lead is a business, but a deal is closed with a person. The Contacts card on the lead page is where the people go: each contact has a name, and optionally a role, an email address, a phone number, and a note about where the information came from (their website, a call, a mutual acquaintance).

One contact is always the primary one, marked with a badge. The first contact you add becomes primary automatically; use Make primary to switch, and if you remove the primary contact the oldest remaining one takes over. Contacts are yours alone: another Sifter account working the same business never sees them, and has its own.

With no contact yet, the Add contact button at the top of the lead page opens the form, filled in with the listing’s phone number and the best email address found on the business’s website.

The primary contact does real work: the AI-written pitch opens with their first name (“Hi Maria,”) instead of addressing the business as a whole, which is a small change that reads very differently on the receiving end. The greeting is added wherever you see or send the pitch, so it uses the name as soon as you add the contact.

During the website audit, the crawler also looks for the business’s email addresses (on the homepage, contact pages, and so on). Each address found gets a confidence dot: green for high, amber for medium, red for low. Hover the dot to see the evidence, for example “High confidence: mailto link on /contact”. A form-only contact page or an address that only appears in fine print scores lower than a prominent mailto link.

When you add a contact, you can pick between all candidates. On the lead page, Compose pitch email opens a draft to the primary contact in your own mail client, pre-filled with the AI-written pitch for that business, its subject line included, the report link (created on the spot if the business has none yet) and your signature: your name plus the agency profile from Settings.

Sending from your own mail client is deliberate: replies land in your inbox and your outreach comes from your real address instead of a shared sending domain, which keeps deliverability and compliance in your hands. Sifter never emails prospects on your behalf; the only email it ever sends is your own digest. Once you compose, the lead page asks Sent it?: Log it records the email, marks a New lead Contacted and sets a follow-up three days out unless one is already scheduled, which closes the outreach loop in one click.

A pitch tells the owner what is wrong; a report lets them see it. On the business page, Create a report link (or simply Compose pitch email on the lead page, which creates one if needed) turns the finished audit into a public page with the website score, the phone and desktop screenshots, the findings you choose and a personal note (it starts as the pitch). The header carries the agency name, contact line and website from Settings.

The Export CSV button on the Leads page downloads your entire pipeline as a spreadsheet (named leads-2026-07-10.csv, dated the day you export). It opens cleanly in Excel, Numbers, and Google Sheets.

Each lead is one row with these columns:

Use it to hand a call list to a colleague, run a mail merge, or move deals into a heavier CRM once they’re real. The export is a copy, not a sync: changes you make in the spreadsheet don’t flow back.