How to add qualified leads to Pipedrive

To add a qualified lead to Pipedrive, you create the person, link them to their organization, and add a lead in the Leads Inbox that points to both. Pipedrive keeps leads apart from deals on purpose. The Leads Inbox holds prospects your team hasn't committed to yet, and a rep converts a lead into a deal once it's ready for the sales pipeline. That keeps your pipeline stages and your forecast limited to real opportunities.

Pipedrive gives you a few ways to do this yourself. You can add a lead from the Leads Inbox and fill in the person and organization as you go. For a batch, you can import a spreadsheet, map each column to a Pipedrive field, and decide how rows that match existing records are handled. If you pay for the LeadBooster add-on, its chatbot, live chat, and web forms bring leads in from your website, and its Prospector tool searches a database of companies and people. You can mark how promising a lead is with lead labels, which come set up as Hot, Warm, and Cold.

Those tools move records into Pipedrive, but they don't decide which records belong there. An import adds every row in the file, including the person who changed jobs last month, the company that's already your customer, and the contact a rep is already talking to. A lead that holds only a name and an organization also gives the rep nothing to go on, so the first call starts with research the rep has to do from scratch.

A good result is a short Leads Inbox of people sales would want to call. Each one fits your ideal customer profile, still holds the role, and isn't already in your pipeline. Each one sits with the right rep under the right label, and carries the reason it qualified along with a scheduled next step. Kite does that work. It checks each lead before it reaches Pipedrive, reads your account to see who's already there, and writes the person, the organization, the lead, the note, and the first activity together.

Start by telling Kite which leads you want in Pipedrive and who should work them:

"Add the people from yesterday's webinar to Pipedrive. Keep only the ones who fit, assign them to me, and book a first call for the best ones."

You can also ask Kite to find the leads itself:

"Find 30 heads of operations at logistics companies in the Midwest with 100 to 1,000 employees, and add the best ones to Pipedrive for our sales team."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Because it has already researched your company, it knows your ideal customer profile, your current customers, and your competitors, so it can judge fit without a long brief. You can work with Kite in the Kite web app or in Slack.

Kite can start from leads in several places. You can paste them into the conversation, share a CSV file in a Slack thread, or point Kite at a Google Sheet you've connected. It can work from inbound leads that arrive through a form on a site Kite hosts or by email to your team's Kite address. It can also find new leads through its built-in research sources, such as Apollo, so you don't need a separate data provider.

You'll need to connect your Pipedrive account through OAuth so Kite can read and write your records. When the job first needs Pipedrive, Kite sends you a link to connect it. Kite then reads your account and tells you which rep, which lead labels, and which activity type it plans to use. Once you confirm, it adds the leads and tells you what it did. If you'd like to see the list before anything reaches Pipedrive, say so in your request.

Kite checks every lead against your ideal customer profile before it writes anything, because a lead that qualified last quarter may not qualify today. Qualifying a lead comes down to three questions. Does the company fit, by industry, size, and location? Does the person hold a role that owns the problem you solve? And is there a reason to reach out now?

Kite answers each one. It confirms that the person still holds the role at that company, using their public professional profile or the company's own pages, and it drops anyone who has moved on. It checks the company against your profile and removes your competitors. It also researches recent events that make now a good time to get in touch, such as a funding round, a new leadership hire, or open roles on the team your product serves.

Each lead that passes gets a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason a rep can read at a glance. When the batch is large, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so sales knows where to start. If fewer leads qualify than you sent, Kite tells you how many passed and why the rest fell short.

Kite reads Pipedrive before it creates anything, so it can leave out people your team already handles and avoid duplicate records. It searches your persons by email address for an exact match, checks your organizations for the company, and looks for leads and deals already linked to that person or organization.

That reading drives four decisions:

• A lead whose organization has a won deal is already your customer, so Kite leaves them out.
• A lead whose person or organization has an open deal stays with the rep who owns that deal. Kite mentions them in its summary instead of adding them again.
• A lead who already has an open lead in the Leads Inbox keeps that lead, and Kite reports it rather than adding a second one.
• A person who's already in Pipedrive with no open lead or deal gets the new lead attached to their existing person record, and Kite updates their email address or phone number if the research found a newer one.

Kite reads how your account is set up so each lead lands with the right rep under a label your team already uses. It reads your Pipedrive users and assigns each lead to the rep you named, or to the rep who already owns that organization when there is one. It reads your lead labels and chooses one from each lead's score, so your strongest leads carry Hot and the rest carry Warm or Cold, or whatever labels your team uses instead.

If you tell Kite your typical deal size, it also gives each lead a value. That lets reps sort the Leads Inbox by what a lead could be worth, alongside its label.

Kite writes the organization first, then the person, then the lead, so every lead arrives linked to both records. When the company isn't in Pipedrive yet, Kite creates the organization with its name and owner. When the person isn't there yet, Kite creates them with the following:

• Full name
• Work email, labeled as work
• A business phone number, when the research source has one
• A link to their organization
• The rep who owns them

Kite then adds the lead to the Leads Inbox, linked to the person and the organization, with its owner, its label, and its value when you've given one. The lead's title is the first thing a rep sees in the Leads Inbox, so Kite writes a title that names the person, their company, and what makes them worth contacting. Every record follows your account's default visibility settings.

Kite attaches a note to each lead and pins it, so the research stays at the top of the record. The note gives the person's job title and LinkedIn profile, the fit score and the reason behind it, and the recent event that makes now a good time to reach out. It also records the verification status of the email address exactly as the research source returned it, whether that's verified, catch-all, or unverified, and it cites where each fact came from. A rep who opens the lead has the context for the first conversation without redoing the research.

For each primary lead, Kite adds a Pipedrive activity for the rep who owns it, so the follow-up shows up in that rep's activity list and calendar. Kite picks the activity type from the ones your account uses, such as Call or Email, and writes a subject that says what to do. It sets a due date, links the activity to the lead with the person as a participant, and adds talking points to the activity's note. You can set the deadline in your request, such as "within one business day" for inbound leads.

When you ask for it, Kite takes leads that are ready for a sales conversation straight into your pipeline. A person who requested a demo is a good example. For each one, Kite creates a deal in the pipeline and stage you name, linked to the same person and organization, with its owner and value. It then archives the lead, so the Leads Inbox doesn't show someone your team is already working as a deal.

When the work is done, Kite posts a summary in the conversation where you asked, in the Kite web app or in Slack. It says how many leads it added, how many it attached to people already in Pipedrive, and how many activities it scheduled. It also lists who it left out and why, including customers, people already in an open deal, and anyone who no longer held the role. The full set of leads comes with it as a table, so you can scan the result without opening Pipedrive.

From there, Kite can write a personalized email to each primary lead and send it with your approval. If leads arrive regularly, ask Kite to run the same job on a schedule, such as every Monday morning, and it will post each batch's summary in the same place.

When Kite finishes, your Leads Inbox holds a set of qualified leads your reps can work right away, and your conversation with Kite holds the record of what changed.