Respond to and qualify inbound leads

Kite can only respond quickly if it hears about a lead the moment it arrives. You can set up a workflow that starts whenever your form tool calls a webhook, which is a web address a form tool notifies each time someone submits. Every submission then starts a fresh run in which Kite reads, researches, qualifies, and drafts.

Leads also reach Kite in a few other ways:

• Your team's Kite email address. Email sent to that address reaches Kite directly, and Kite decides whether to reply in the same thread, bring in a colleague, or tell the team.
• Your own inbox. If you connect Gmail or Outlook, Kite checks new mail every two hours and sends the team owner one message about what matters, so a lead that lands in your inbox doesn't get buried.
• A connected form tool. With Typeform connected, Kite reads your forms and their responses directly.
• Slack. You can paste a lead or forward a message into a thread and ask Kite to qualify it and draft a reply.

Kite researches each lead just far enough to qualify them and write a reply that doesn't guess. A response that arrives quickly is worth more than a perfect dossier that arrives tomorrow, so Kite stops once it has enough evidence to judge fit and personalize the message.

It starts from what the person gave you, which is usually a name, a work email, a company, and an answer or two on the form. From there, Kite looks up the person's current role, seniority, and professional profile. It also checks the company's industry, size, location, funding, and hiring, along with recent news such as a launch or a new executive. If your CRM already has history with this person or company, Kite reads that too, so it knows whether this is a brand-new contact or someone your team already met at a conference.

A work email alone is often enough. From the domain, Kite can identify the company, its products, and its industry. When someone signs up with a personal Gmail address and no company name, Kite says so plainly instead of inventing details.

Kite compares what it found with the ideal customer profile in your wiki and places each lead in one of three groups: strong fit, partial fit, or poor fit. Each one comes with a one-line reason. For example, Kite might write, "Strong fit: VP of Marketing at a 120-person B2B software company that just raised its Series B and is hiring two marketers."

The reason matters more than the label. A salesperson who reads "Partial fit: right industry, but a 6-person company and the form asks about enterprise pricing" knows exactly what conversation to have. A bare score from one to a hundred doesn't tell them that.

When the details are too thin to judge, Kite marks the fit as unconfirmed and names the missing evidence. That way, your team knows which leads need a quick human look and which ones Kite has already sorted out.

Kite's reply answers what the person asked before it says anything else. If someone asks whether you integrate with their CRM, the first line of the reply tells them. The pitch comes second, and only if it helps.

Each reply is short, written in your brand voice, and uses only facts Kite has verified. It ends with one concrete next step that suits the lead. For a strong fit, that usually means proposing two meeting times or sharing your team's booking link. For a partial fit, it might be a relevant case study or a short question that clarifies what they need. A poor fit still gets a polite, useful answer, because the student researching a class project may well be your customer in three years.

Kite keeps an email reply in the same thread as the original message when the sending account supports it. Replies go out from your Kite-managed team address or a connected email account, and Kite reports whether each one was delivered.

When a lead is a strong fit or needs a human decision, Kite sends your team a two-line summary in Slack. It covers who the person is, why they fit, and what Kite proposed as the next step. Your salesperson can pick up the conversation without opening five tabs first.

Kite then records the lead in your connected CRM, along with the fit, the reason, the reply, and the next step. In HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Attio, that means creating or updating the person and company and attaching the research. In Salesforce, Kite adds the person as a lead or updates the contact and account your team already has. If you haven't connected a CRM yet, Kite keeps the complete record in its result and shows you how to connect one.

Once leads are flowing through your CRM, Kite can check which ones became opportunities. It compares where each lead came from and how it answered the form with what happened afterward in your pipeline.

That comparison often shows something useful. One form might bring in fewer leads but many more opportunities. A single question, such as team size, might predict fit better than anything else on the form. Kite uses what it learns to refine how it judges the next lead and to suggest changes to the forms themselves.