One board for the whole sales side of the business — the operating system for post-frame and barndominium builders starts here. Columns run from New Lead to Ready to Start. A customer shows up as exactly one card, no matter how many places the lead came in from. Stage colours run red to green, so how close a deal is to signing reads without you opening anything. A lead that is waiting on an architect, a bank or next spring says so on the card, can stay out of sight until it is due, and comes back flagged. And it works the same on a phone: one stage at a time, swipe to the next.
Also called: kanban board · deal board · lead board · sales stages · opportunity board · waiting leads · follow-up reasons
Every deal you have, on one board
Nine stages from New Lead to Ready to Start, with a running total above each one. You see where the money is sitting, not just how many cards are in a column. Stages you aren't working fold down to a thin rail with the name on its side. That's how nine stages fit on a laptop without a sideways scroll you never reach the end of. The last column hands the job over to the one deliberate action that opens a build — nothing on this board starts a project by itself.
A stage setting drifted on one account and every card matched no column, so a hundred leads quietly stopped existing — nobody found out until a customer rang to ask why he'd never been called back.
One stage opens and the other eight fold to a named rail, so you trade seeing everything at once for reaching everything in a tap. And a card whose stage id matches no column parks in the first column instead of being dropped — showing a lead in the wrong stage is a five-second fix, losing it from view is not. An owner who can see where the money sits stops lying awake wondering — the week's worry turns into a column he can look at.
Every door onto the board
Try itLeads land from your website form, a Facebook or Google lead ad, your CRM, a spreadsheet, or the New Lead button — and each source can have its own branded form at its own link. Whatever door it came through, it arrives as one card, stamped with when it came in, to the minute, and starts counting how long it has waited.
The form comes in at 7:10 on a Tuesday, sits behind two other tabs, and by four in the afternoon the man already has a price from somebody who rang him back at 7:14.
The age tag shows only in the New Lead column and only until somebody has actually spoken to them — after first contact the clock means nothing, and a badge that never goes away turns into wallpaper. A lead you already graded Dead never wears it either, because STALE on a lead you wrote off reads as an argument with yourself. For the rep, one place to look is one less thing to remember — the morning starts on the board, not on five inboxes.
The card tells you what to do next
Name, value, what they want built, who owns it, where the lead came from, their number. The dots show how much of this stage's checklist is done, and the chip says whether this job needs a permit. On a New Lead, Call, Text and Email sit side by side — some customers say don't call me. The foot says when it came in, to the minute, whose it is in that person's colour, and how long it has waited — teal under an hour, amber under a day, red after. The figure on the face is the same one number the estimate and the customer's own page show. A card that says nothing until you open it is a card you open forty times a day.
Forty cards in a column and no way to tell which have been rung, so the rep opens every one and works the top of the list twice while the bottom ages.
Everything on the face is there because it answers a question you would otherwise open the card to ask — who owns it, where it came from, how far through the stage it is, whether a permit is in play. The trade-off is a busy card, taken deliberately: a rep scanning a column should be able to skip the ones that need nothing. Reps act on what is in front of them; a red clock on their own card is a nudge nobody has to give.
Say why they're waiting
Try itA customer off at the architect for six weeks looks exactly like a lead nobody is working. So the follow-up task asks Why are they waiting? — getting blueprints from an architect, future buyer, waiting on financing, waiting on land or permits, comparing quotes, building next season, asked us to call back later, your own reasons, or Other in the rep's own words. The reason names the task and becomes a tag on the card until the task is done. The task's date is when to reach out again, and its reminder fires as usual.
Ruth is getting plans drawn and asked you to call in November — and on the board she looks identical to a lead nobody has touched in a month.
Writing the reason down once replaces remembering it every morning. The rep stops carrying a mental list of who said what about when, and that end-of-day worry — did I forget somebody? — goes away because the board remembers for him.
The card wears the reason, and counts down to the call
A waiting card carries its reason and its date — ⏸ Blueprints · Nov 12 — and its foot stops counting how long it has waited and starts counting down: Follow up in 6 wk, in red once it is overdue. A wait with no date yet gets a Set follow-up date button in the same spot, so the hole is obvious. The card also shows who has tried them and how — calls and whether they were answered, texts, emails, and the last touch.
Without a date on the card, a future buyer is either forgotten or called every week until he stops answering.
A countdown tells the rep this lead is handled; a blank card tells him he forgot something. Seeing the date also stops the nervous over-calling that annoys a customer who already said not until spring — the rep can relax, and the customer feels listened to.
Out of sight until they're due
Try itThe Waiting leads filter decides how much of the wait you see. Hide waiting until 2 weeks out — or 1 — and a waiting lead leaves the board until its follow-up is close, with the count of what is hidden on the filter itself. Or turn it round: show only the leads due this week, this month, in the next two months or this year, the ones with no date yet, or one reason at a time. Each stage's own filter menu lists the reasons too.
Four hundred future buyers bury the twelve people you actually need to ring this week.
A board that shows only what is due feels doable, and a rep who can see the end of his list works it instead of staring at it. Nothing is deleted, so hiding a lead costs nothing — it is out of sight, not out of mind.
When a long wait ends, the card says so
A lead that was set aside for weeks and is now two weeks or less from its follow-up comes back with an amber ring and a banner: what they were waiting on, when it was set aside, and the follow-up date — whatever filter is on. The Waiting leads filter counts them under Back from waiting.
A lead that disappeared for seven weeks comes back looking like any other card, and the rep has forgotten why it ever left.
The banner is the reminder of why, which is the reminder of what to say — the call opens with how did the land closing go? instead of sorry, remind me who you are. The customer feels remembered, and that feeling is most of the reason people buy from the builder who called back.
Your own reasons — and the ones your reps keep typing
Under Settings → Pipeline SOPs → Waiting reasons: the standard list, your own reasons (add and remove), and everything reps typed under Other, most used first, with a count and when it was last used. Make it an option turns a reason that keeps coming up into a permanent choice. Removing one never blanks a tag already on a card.
A fixed list never quite fits how your customers actually stall, so reps pick the nearest wrong one or none at all.
The list learns from what reps really write instead of what somebody guessed on day one — so the reasons stay true, and reps keep using a tool that fits how they talk.
How far back the board reaches
Try itLeads: sits first on the second header row. Each person picks how far back their board reaches — the last 30, 60 or 90 days, the last 6 months, the last year, or all time — and it is remembered on their device. Older leads leave the board entirely: the cards, the stage counts, the search and the Total Deals and Pipeline Value tiles all follow the window.
Three years of imported leads make the board slow and turn the pipeline value into a number nobody believes.
A board that shows this season reads like this season's work, so a rep opens it with energy instead of dread. And numbers that match what people are actually working are numbers the team will believe and act on.
Search finds the person, in whatever stage they're in
A customer calls. You type his name. The search looks at every lead on the board — every stage — not just the one you had open, opens each stage with a match, and puts the layout back when you clear it. Phone numbers match however they were typed. People in the account who are not on the board — archived, say — are listed under Not on the board, with a link to their record.
He is on the phone saying his name for the second time while you click through stages looking for him.
Finding someone while they are still talking makes a rep sound organised, and feel it — and the customer hears a business that knows who he is.
See as one rep
Beside Mine and All, admins and sales managers get See as — every person who owns a lead, each with their count, plus Unassigned. Pick one and the board, the column counts and the totals become that person's pipeline. It is a view over what a manager can already see, never extra access, and the choice is remembered.
A manager trying to coach one rep has to scroll everybody's pipeline and squint for that rep's name.
A one-on-one goes better looking at exactly what the rep sees — the conversation is about his leads, not about the board. The rep feels coached rather than watched, and the manager gets through five reviews in the time one used to take.
What he wrote on the form is on the card
The answers he typed — size, budget, when he wants to start, what it's for — sit on the card, along with the ad, the campaign and the form they came off. Leads through our own doors keep those answers on the card row itself, so they render with the board instead of waiting on somebody else's API. The rest of what you know about the man — the phone and email you can fix on the spot, the address in four boxes — is on the contact record.
He wrote 40x60, needs it before harvest, budget seventy — and the callback opens with "so what were you looking to build?"
A rep who reads the answers before he dials asks better questions than a rep reading a name and a number, so the answers travel with the card rather than living a screen away. Persisting them at intake instead of fetching them on open is what makes the card open instantly on a phone in a yard. Not asking a customer what they already told you is the first sign you listen — and they notice.
Permits, checked before you quote — not after
Type the site address and the boundary gets drawn on a map: which city, which county, and whether a building permit is required there. This is the most expensive thing to get wrong in post-frame. Quote without checking and the permit cost lands after the customer has already agreed a price. Somebody eats it — their goodwill, your margin, or the rep's commission.
The quote goes out at $84,000 with no permit line, the county wants a permit and a stamped plan, and $2,600 comes out of somebody's margin — usually the rep's.
The panel names the governing office as well as the answer, because "permit required" sends a rep hunting while "permit required · Boone County" tells him which counter to ring — and whether this is a city job or an unincorporated-county job, which are two different processes. The street is part of the lookup on purpose: a rural parcel on the edge of town is exactly the one that gets answered wrong from a city name alone. Knowing before you quote takes the dread out of the call where you tell them the price.
The permit answer is there before you open the card
A card whose lead form carried an address gets answered on its own, as the board loads — city, county, whether a permit is required — and the answer is frozen against that opportunity. The chip on the card face names the office that rules before anybody has clicked into anything.
Nobody checks the four that came in overnight, and the one that needed a permit is the one quoted at six in the morning by whoever was up first.
It resolves the address against a jurisdiction table rather than geocoding, so running it across the whole board costs nothing — and it never re-answers a card that already has a recorded lookup, because that frozen snapshot is what the quote you already sent was priced on. An answer that changes underneath a live quote is worse than no answer. An answer that is already there gets used; one you have to go and fetch gets skipped on a busy day.
Each stage carries its own checklist
You decide what has to happen before a deal can leave a stage, and the checklist rides along with the card. Send a deal back through and it resets. Finished steps get written into that deal's history, so "did anyone actually call them back" has an answer instead of an argument. The steps are yours to write — putting them in order and changing them to suit how your company sells is covered on stage SOP protocols. A sales checklist is a list of things to do before the job is sold; the list of actual work inside a build stage is a different animal, on stage checkpoints.
"Did anyone ring them back?" gets three different answers in the same Monday meeting, and the only man who knows left the company in June.
When a card moves, both what got ticked and what the list was asking for that day are snapshotted onto the move — so editing an SOP next month cannot rewrite what a rep was told to do today. The cost is that old deals keep old steps in their history, which is the point of history. A written next step means a new rep acts instead of hesitating — and the owner stops repeating himself.
Every move is signed and timed
Drag a card and the move is written down — the stage it left, the stage it landed in, who moved it, how long it sat there, and the checklist exactly as it stood. Sales stages are meant to advance off real events: an estimate sent, an approval, a signature. So a hand move asks you to confirm and is recorded as a manual override. The one free move is New Lead to Contacted, because picking up a phone leaves nothing for the software to detect. If you want to know how long deals really sit in a stage, or which steps the team keeps skipping, that reading is done for you in the sales analytics tab.
The board says eleven contracts are out. Four of them were dragged across in a stand-up, and you find out which four when the invoices don't reconcile.
The confirm is friction on purpose, and it is one tap — the aim isn't to stop you, it's that six months later the board can say whether a deal reached Contract Sent because a contract went out or because somebody dragged it there on a Friday afternoon. When moves are signed, people move cards honestly — nobody drags a deal forward to look busy.
You can't drag a deal past a contract that was never sent
Move a card from before Contract Sent into that column or anything after it, and the board goes and looks for the agreement itself against that estimate. No contract on record, no move — and it tells you which one is missing rather than snapping the card back with no explanation.
A deal sits in Co-sign Pending for three weeks on somebody's word, a crew gets scheduled around it, and the agreement is still an unsent draft in a tab.
The stages after Contract Sent drive invoicing, kickoff and what the customer sees, so a card in the wrong one isn't cosmetic. The check reads the actual contract rows rather than trusting the column, which is the only version that survives a rep who is certain he sent it. A card with no estimate behind it is waved through — it was never in the contract flow. A gate that says what is missing feels like help, not a scolding, so reps fix it rather than work round it.
The conversation is on the deal, not in somebody's phone
Text and email go out from the card without leaving it, and the calls and voicemails on that lead sit in the same run of messages — playable, in order. Press Call and the phone built in comes up with the number already staged. It is the same thread that lives on the customer's record, so anything you send off a card drops into the one conversation per customer with the rest of the history.
The rep texts from his own phone at the yard and then goes on holiday, and the next person picks up a deal with no record that anyone ever spoke to the customer.
This panel is a deliberately light sibling of the full thread — two channel buttons, a box, the history — because the job here is answering a man in thirty seconds, not doing correspondence. What it can send is decided by what the company has connected, never by whether this card happens to have cached an address, so a button is never mysteriously dead. The rep who picks up a deal reads the history first, so the customer never has to repeat himself — and feels remembered.
It finds your duplicates and merges them
The same customer comes in twice — once off the website, once off a home show sheet — and now two reps are working one job. The board spots them by phone and by email, groups them, and asks you which record survives. You pick the one that stays. Nothing gets merged behind your back.
Two reps quote the same barn a week apart at different prices, and the customer works out which of them to play against the other.
Matching is on the two things a person rarely mistypes, and the merge is only ever proposed. Automatic merging is faster right up until it welds two different customers who share a shop landline into one deal, and unpicking that costs more than the duplicate ever did. Two reps calling one family is embarrassing for everybody; ending it protects the rep's pride and the company's name.
Working a list instead of a board
A board is for one deal at a time. When you're handing out a hundred leads you want a list. Filter by owner, budget, source, state, county, age or status. Tick the ones you want and hand the lot to a rep in one go. Bring leads in from a spreadsheet and map whoever owned them in your old system onto your real people — and who is allowed to see which of them afterwards is set per rep.
Six hundred rows land from an old CRM export on the Monday, and the only way to hand them out is opening cards one at a time.
The same leads get a second surface rather than a second system — same records, same stages, filters where the columns were. It looks like a spreadsheet, which is exactly the shape you want when the job is giving out work rather than working one deal. Handing out a hundred leads in one go turns a dreaded admin hour into five minutes.
Find anything, filter by anything
Search across name, building type, amount and date. When a card matches on something the card face doesn't show — an email address, say — the card tells you what it matched on instead of appearing for no reason. Filter down to barndominiums or pole barns, to a lead strength, to your deals or the whole company's. Open one stage at a time, or several side by side.
You search a phone number, four cards come back with nothing on them resembling it, and from then on nobody trusts the search box.
A result that turns up for a reason you cannot see reads as a bug, so a match on a hidden field names the field and shows the value it hit. Filters stack instead of replacing each other, so "my leads, barndominiums, strong" is three taps rather than a saved view somebody has to keep maintaining. Finding someone while they are still talking makes the rep sound on top of things, which is half of selling.
The numbers that decide your week
Total deals, what the pipeline is worth, how many are hot, how many estimates are out, how many are ready to start. Not a dashboard you have to go and visit — a strip above the board you can't avoid reading. The strip tells you the number; what it counts, how it's worked out and which way it has moved is all in the sales analytics tab.
The owner quotes a pipeline figure in the Monday meeting that still has eleven leads in it the reps wrote off in February.
The totals track what is actually on the screen, so filtering to one rep turns them into that rep's numbers — and dead leads are left out, because a ghosted lead inflating pipeline value is how a board starts lying to the person reading it. A number you cannot avoid seeing is a number the team starts to care about.
Grade the lead, then filter on the grade
Weak, Qualified, Strong, Ready to Close, or Dead. A rep's read on a deal is worth writing down. Once it's written down you can work the strong ones first. Mark one Dead and it comes off the board — the count sits on a toggle, the lead stays in the system, and you can pull a batch of them back into a live stage when the season turns.
The bottom of every column fills with last spring's leads nobody will admit are gone, and every list you pull for a forecast is a third fiction.
Nothing computes this for you. A rep's read after a phone call beats any scoring rule, and a score nobody believes gets ignored within a fortnight. Marking a lead Dead sits behind a confirm because it takes the card off the board, and a thing you can do by accident to a $90k lead should cost you one extra tap. Writing the grade down lets the rep stop carrying the whole board in his head and spend his best hour on his best leads.
On a phone: one stage at a time — swipe to the next
On a phone the board shows one stage at a time, named in the header with a dot for every stage. Swipe the cards left or right to move between stages — as fast as your thumb goes. Search, the numbers and the filters sit in one row of buttons, the rest under Options. Every sales card keeps Call, Text and Email in thumb's reach.
A nine-column board does not fit on a phone, and a rep standing in a customer's yard is working from a phone.
The thumb does what the eye wants — next stage, previous stage — so the rep works the board in the five minutes between site visits instead of saving it for the evening. That is follow-up that happens today.
On a phone: the conversation in the middle
Open a lead on a phone and the conversation fills the screen — every text, email and call in order — with Call at the top and Text and Email at the bottom. Details is a drawer to the left: the stage checklist, building type, lead strength, contact details, the lead form and the outcome. Follow-up is a drawer to the right. The chips in the header jump to the contact and the estimate.
Opening a lead on a phone used to mean scrolling past ten sections to find what the customer last said.
What they said last is what you need before you call them back — and a rep who has just read it calls with confidence instead of an apology. The customer hears someone who remembers him.
Everything for the next call is one swipe away
Swipe to Follow-up and every section is a card: Notes with the latest one, Tasks with the next one and when it is due (overdue in red), the Estimate, the Permit check, and More — owner, value, move stage, links, dates and materials. Tap a card to open it; tap the tab to slide back to the conversation. The same tasks live in your call list and the calendar.
On a phone the notes, the tasks and the estimate were three different screens away from the conversation.
Seeing the next task and the last note together means the rep never hangs up wondering what he promised — and a promise that is written down is a promise kept.
- 1Leads land on the board from your website form, a Facebook or Google lead ad, your CRM, a spreadsheet, or the New Lead button
- 2Every card is built fresh from one record, so the same customer never shows up twice
- 3Each card shows when the lead came in, to the minute, and how long it has waited
- 4Drag a card and the stage changes, that stage's checklist resets, and the move is logged with a time on it
- 5A follow-up task can say why the lead is waiting; the reason becomes a tag on the card and the board can hide it until it is due
- 6Each person picks how far back the board reaches — the last 30, 60 or 90 days, 6 months, a year, or all time
- 7A search looks at every lead in every stage; a manager can see as any one rep
- 8Each column header adds up the money sitting in that stage, and the strip on top totals the board
- 9On a phone, one stage at a time — swipe sideways to the next, and open a lead to the conversation in the middle
The board used to be stitched together from five places at once. The same customer showed up twice, and a card a rep had just built wouldn't appear for a minute. Then a stage setting drifted on one account and every lead on that board vanished — the cards matched no column, so they quietly stopped existing. Every card is now rebuilt from one record, and a card whose stage matches nothing parks in the first column where somebody can see it. A $100k lead in the wrong column is a five-second fix. A $100k lead you can't find is a job you never quoted.
- Duplicate cards for one customer across estimate, contact and CRM records
- Leads vanishing from the board when a stage name changes
- No shared view of where every deal actually stands
- Long waits that look exactly like neglect
- Leads that come back from a long wait with nobody remembering why
- Years of old leads slowing the board and blurring the numbers
- A search that only looked inside the stage you had open
- A nine-column board that could not be worked on a phone
The Nine Sales Stages
New Lead, Contacted, Create Estimate, Estimate Sent, Estimate Approved, Info Submitted, Contract Sent, Co-sign Pending, Ready to Start. Each stage matches one thing that actually happens — the estimate going out, the customer approving it, the intake form landing, the contract getting signed. Ready to Start is a pure work queue. The only thing left is to start the job, which hands the card over to the build board.
Rename and Reorder Your Own Stages
The nine stages are a starting point, not a rule. Rename them, reorder them, add or drop them. The board rebuilds its columns the second you save — no reload, no waiting. Any card left sitting in a stage you removed moves to the first column, so somebody can see it and deal with it.
One Stage at a Time
Open a stage and the others fold down. That's on by default. Flip it to show all nine at once when you're back at a desk. The board remembers your choice, your column widths and which stages are folded. It always reopens on New Lead when you come back to it.
Drop a Card Into a Folded Stage
Folding stages away made the board readable on a phone and made dragging hard, because the stage you want is shut. Hover a folded stage while you're dragging and it opens on its own after about a quarter of a second. Slide off and it leaves itself alone. A line shows you exactly where the card is going to land.
Every Open Deal Has Its Own Link
The card you have open is part of the link. Send that link to somebody and it opens the exact deal for them. Back and forward move between cards the way you'd expect. The link still works after the deal changes stage or gets renamed, because it points at the deal itself, not at the column it was sitting in.
Search That Tells You Why a Card Matched
One box filters every stage at once. Type more and the results always narrow, never widen. When a card matches on something the card face doesn't show — an email address, say — a small chip on the card names the field and the value it matched. The matched text gets highlighted so you can see it without hunting.
Sort a Stage by What Needs Doing
Sort any stage by hand, by value up or down, A-Z, newest or oldest estimate, start date, due date, next action soonest, or overdue first. Overdue-first pushes every past-due follow-up to the top of the column, then orders the rest by what's due soonest. Sorting works one stage at a time, so the rest of your board stays where you left it.
Filter a Stage by What's Already Been Done
Tap the funnel on a column header and you get filters made from that stage's own checklist. Contacted has hand-built ones: followed up once, twice, three or more, short-term nurture, long-term nurture, needs a callback, no response. Every other stage builds its own out of its checklist steps, plus needs-a-callback and overdue. Pick two and you get both groups, not nobody.
Mine or Everyone's, on One Switch
Two buttons above the board: Mine and All. Managers and owners get both, and the board remembers which one you left it on. A rep who's only allowed to see his own leads gets no switch at all, because he was never sent anyone else's in the first place.
Select Several Cards and Clear Them Out
A checkbox appears on every card and the header counts what you've picked. The button won't arm until you type delete. Each card is removed for good, so nothing reappears the next time the board refreshes.
The Deal Card
Open a card and the whole deal is in front of you. Stage, value, permit answer and the stage SOP sit right in it — no second window to open. Underneath: the lead's own form answers, call, text and email, notes, tasks, the estimate and the materials. On a phone it stacks into one column instead of shrinking to nothing.
Numbers and Leaderboard on the Board Itself
Three tabs above the board: Pipeline, Analytics and Leaderboard. You always land on the board first. Each of the other two only loads while you're looking at it, so opening the pipeline doesn't quietly drag in three screens of data. A rep with permission for neither just sees the board, with no extra tabs at all.
