Status, lifecycle stage, grade and score
What this page is — an explanation of the four different indicators of lead quality that Pulse keeps: status, lifecycle stage, grade and score.
What it is for — knowing which one you are looking at, which one you should be setting, and why two screens can show different answers for the same lead.
The problem it solves — the four look interchangeable and are not. They are set by different things, stored in different places, and they disagree routinely — the list computes a grade from the score while the record shows the grade you typed. No single screen explains this, which is why it is a page.
The four signals: status · lifecycle stage · grade · score
1. What each one is
| Status | Lifecycle stage | Grade | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question | Where in the pipeline? | How far through the funnel? | How good, in letters | How good, in points |
| Example | Contract Negotiation | qualified | A - Hot | 75 |
| Holds | A status of one pipeline | One of five fixed values | A letter, e.g. A | A whole number |
| Belongs to | One pipeline | The org | The org | The lead |
| Set by | A person, or a conversion rule | Whatever wrote the lead | A person, or a recalculate | Scoring rules, on recalculate |
| Drives | The board column | The funnel report | Nothing automatic | Assignment rules, the quality report |
In Figure 1 the panel shows a score of 75 chipped as B - Warm, and directly beneath it a Lead Grade of A - Hot. Both are correct readings of different data:
- the chip is calculated from the score each time the screen is drawn
- the Grade field is the value saved on the lead
The leads list shows only the computed one, so a grade set by hand never appears there. If you grade leads manually, the list will not reflect your work. Section 4.
2. Status — the only one tied to a pipeline
A status belongs to exactly one pipeline. It carries a category, and the category — not the status name — is what the funnel report groups by:
| Category | Meaning |
|---|---|
new | Not yet worked |
working | In progress |
qualified | Worth pursuing |
converted | Terminal, won |
lost | Terminal, lost |
So Discovery Call and Initial Contact are two statuses in the same new category, and the funnel
counts them together. See pipelines and statuses.
A status also carries is_final. A lead in a final status is not automatically read-only — nothing
prevents editing it.
3. Lifecycle stage — free text against a five-row table
A lead's lifecycle stage has exactly five valid values: new, contacted, qualified, converted and
lost. The picker on the lead record offers those five and nothing else.
The lifecycle stage is stored as free text and is not checked against the five valid values. Anything that creates a lead through the import, the webhook or the API can therefore store any value at all.
Older data can still hold values outside the five — lead, won or negotiating — created before the value was checked on the way in. The UI cannot produce those values, so they arrived through an unvalidated write path.
The consequence is quiet: any screen that groups or filters by lifecycle stage silently omits or
mislabels those leads, and a funnel total will not reconcile with the list. lead and won look
entirely plausible, so nobody notices they are not real stages.
Contacts have their own set of lifecycle values — customer, opportunity, subscriber, lead — which are not the same five. Leads and contacts do not share a vocabulary, so do not expect a report to line them up.
4. Grade — stored, editable, and largely ignored
Grades are configured for the whole organisation. A typical set is four:
| Code | Name |
|---|---|
A | A - Hot |
B | B - Warm |
C | C - Cold |
D | D - Very Cold |
The lead stores the CODE, not the display name. A rule or an integration that writes A - Hot
instead of A produces a value no picker will match.
Scoring maintains the grade automatically from the score, but a grade you choose yourself is treated as deliberate: a later recalculate leaves it alone, and the list, the record and the Lead Quality report all show the same value.
What the grade thresholds are
When no matching grade range is configured, the fallback bands are:
| Score | Grade |
|---|---|
| 76 and above | A |
| 51 – 75 | B |
| 26 – 50 | C |
| 0 – 25 | D |
5. Score — computed, but only when asked
The score is the sum of the points of every scoring rule whose conditions the lead matches.
A lead is scored when it is created and again when it changes, so scoring keeps up with day-to-day work without anyone doing anything.
What it does not do is reach backwards. Add or change a rule and the leads already in the system keep their old scores until you run Recalculate on the Scoring Rules tab.
And recalculating has a cost of its own:
It refreshes the grade only on leads whose grade is still the automatic one, so hand-graded leads keep what you gave them.
See scoring rules for the rule shape and its own validation gaps.
6. Which one should you use?
| If you want to… | Use |
|---|---|
| Track progress and work a board | Status |
| Report on funnel conversion | Status category — not the status name |
| Prioritise a call list automatically | Score, after confirming Recalculate has run |
| Label leads by hand | Grade — but expect the list to show the computed letter |
| Segment by funnel stage in a report | Lifecycle stage, after checking for values outside the five |
7. Don't confuse this with…
| This | Not this |
|---|---|
| A lead status | A deal stage — different table, different pipeline |
| A status's category | Its name. The report groups by category |
| The grade chip beside the score dial | The Grade field below it |
lead_grade holding A | A grade's display name, A - Hot |
8. Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause |
|---|---|
| Every lead scores 0 | Recalculate has never run. Section 5 |
| Grades all became D | A recalculate ran with rules that match nothing. Section 5 |
| A grade set by hand is not in the list | The list computes it from the score. Section 4 |
| A funnel total does not match the list | Leads carrying a lifecycle stage outside the five. Section 3 |
| A lead sits in no board column | It has no status, or one from a pipeline the project cannot see. See the board |