Key Terms
Workflow: Consider this the largest group of your leads. Workflows hold a collection of numerous statuses which are similar in nature. For example, a Workflow of Attempting Contact which groups a number of Attempting Contact statuses.
Status: A status is a sales milestone that is important to your organization. For example, you may have a status of Final Contact, or Appointment Set.
System Status: Special way to tag your sales milestones to mean certain things. This is another way to group your statuses together and these system statuses can be used when building Distribution Strategies.
Pipeline % to Sale: Used when working with Products. When a lead enters a certain Status, you can denote the likely percentage outcome of a sale.
Max Allowed Assignment Time: If Enable Pull From Other Agents is enabled via your System Settings, you can set your max assignment time to denote how long a lead can stay in this status before it can be pulled by another agent. This is an Advanced Distribution option.
Category: Groups together and improves navigation of all Actions your sales team will need when working a lead. You may decide to have a Category of Contact Attempt with the actions No Answer, Left Message, Left Voicemail.
Action: A disposition that controls and automates what happens to a lead. This could be moving a lead between workflows and statuses, scheduling a callback, denoting contact made or marking a lead DNC.
Considerations
Did you call and leave a message? Did you make contact and the lead asked for a second phone call scheduled for a later time? An action is all the outcomes that could happen to a lead during a particular portion of the sales cycle. You more than likely won’t find all the same Actions in a Sold Status as you would a New Lead Status.