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. 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.

Each lead has one free-form notes field, editable from both the list and the lead page. It saves when you click away; 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. Entries can’t be edited or deleted; the log is meant to be a trustworthy record, not a second notes field.

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 (3 days, 1 week).

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. Setting, moving, and clearing are all recorded in the activity log.

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, Sifter sends you a single email listing them: each business, its pipeline status, and whether it is due today or was due earlier.

A few deliberate design choices:

Each send is also recorded on the affected leads as a “Follow-up reminder sent” activity. 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 belong to the business, so they are available before, during, and after the audit.

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. A pitch written before you added the contact picks the name up the next time the audit runs.

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.

The business page lets you pick between all candidates. From there, Compose email opens a draft in your own mail client, pre-filled with the AI-written pitch for that business, its subject line included.

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. Log the send as an Email activity, set a follow-up, and you have a complete outreach loop.

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.