The Journey of a Lead
From a search result to a contact in conversation
What It Is
A Lens lead moves through a fixed sequence of stages. Each stage either adds information or makes a decision, and the stage a lead has reached is recorded as its status.
Why It Matters
Understanding the order is worth a few minutes, because it answers two questions that come up constantly: why a particular lead was never emailed, and what exactly you paid for.
How It Works
1. Found. On its schedule, the stream searches for people matching your criteria. Anyone already in your CRM, or already acquired by this stream, is filtered out before anything is spent.
2. Revealed. The lead's email address is looked up and verified, and depending on the data quality tier, their company is enriched and intent signals are gathered. Premium targeting also reveals a direct phone number. The lead is now a record you can see, with the status discovered.
3. Scored. An AI qualification pass evaluates the lead against your stream's targeting objective, the audience segments you selected and the offerings you attached. It produces a score out of 100 across ten weighted criteria, written reasoning for each, a one-paragraph verdict, and a suggested angle for the conversation.
4. Decided. The score is compared against your threshold.
- At or above the threshold, the lead is qualified, then pushed: a contact is created in your CRM, allocated to an owner, and queued for a personalised first-touch email.
- Below the threshold, the lead is quarantined. Nothing is sent. It waits for you.
5. In conversation. A pushed lead is now an ordinary CRM contact. Its first-touch email goes out as your chosen AI communicator, and if you attached a sequence, the follow-ups begin.
Examples
A stream targeting Canadian mortgage broker principals acquires the founder of an investment placement firm.
The company's profile mentioned private mortgage lending as an asset class, so it matched on keywords. The qualification pass caught what the search could not: she does not originate mortgages or hold a book of clients, so the campaign's entire premise does not apply to her. She scored 33 and was quarantined. No email was sent.
A lead scores 91 against a threshold of 80.
It is pushed immediately. A contact appears in your CRM with the company enrichment attached, owned by whoever the stream allocates to, and the first-touch email is composed and queued without anyone touching it.
A lead is quarantined, you move it to a feeder stream, and it scores 84 there.
The move cleared its old score and re-ran the qualification pass against the feeder's broader objective. Because it cleared the feeder's threshold, it is pushed from there and enters conversation normally. The lead was a poor fit for a narrow stream and a good fit for a general one, which is exactly what feeders are for.
Info: The qualification pass runs on every lead, before the threshold decides anything. That is why it is charged on every lead — including ones that end up quarantined and never contacted. See What a Stream Costs for the full picture.
Warning: Nothing is ever sent to a quarantined lead. If you are expecting outreach that has not happened, check the Quarantined tab on the stream before anything else — a lead held there is working as designed, not stuck.
