Lead Settings is where you shape Leads around how your practice actually sells. Your pipeline stages, where your work comes from, what shows on your cards, and when to worry about a lead going quiet.

It's a set-up-once job rather than something you'll come back to often, and it's worth twenty minutes early on. Go to Settings, then Lead Settings under Leads & Engage. There's also a button on the Leads board that opens it in a new tab, so you don't lose your place on the board.

The columns on your board are yours. Add stages, rename them, drag them into the order you work in, and delete the ones you don't use, up to ten active stages.

If you go straight from an enquiry to sending a proposal, delete the stages in between. If you want somewhere to park a proposal you've sent and chased twice, add it.

Click a name to rename it in place, drag to reorder, and use the row at the bottom to add one. Names can be up to 50 characters and need to be different from each other. The lead count against each stage shows you what you'd be affecting before you change anything.

Four stages carry an Automatic chip: Proposal Draft, Pending Approval, Won and Lost. Leads move into these on their own as you send, revert, win or lose a proposal.

You can rename them to your own language, but you can't delete them, because Socket needs somewhere to put a lead when its proposal moves on. Everything else, including the Enquiry and Discovery stages you start with, is yours to change or remove.

There's more on how that works in our Working Your Pipeline guide, including why you sometimes can't drag a lead where you want it.

Socket won't leave leads stranded. Delete a stage with leads in it and you're asked where to move them, then they all move together. An empty stage just goes.

You can only move them into one of your own stages, never into a proposal-driven one, since a lead's place in those has to be earned by its proposal rather than assigned in a tidy-up.

Every new lead lands in your leftmost stage, whether it comes from a form on your website, an AI assistant, Zapier, or you adding one by hand. So make the first column the one you'd want a new enquiry to appear in.

The Lead Sources section sets the list people choose from when a lead is created, so you can answer the question every practice owner asks: where is our work actually coming from?

You start with Ads, Event, Other, Outbound, Referral, Social Media and Website. Rename them to match how your firm talks about its channels, remove the ones that don't apply, and add your own with Add a source. Changes save as you make them.

Two things on each row are worth knowing about.

The star marks the source used when nobody picks one. Other is starred to begin with. It's worth pointing that at whatever your most common route in actually is, so an unpicked source is still roughly true.

The notes icon asks for detail when that source is chosen. Referral comes set up with "Who referred them?", and that's the obvious use, but you can put a prompt on any source. "Which event?" or "Which campaign?" turn a source into something you can actually act on.

Underneath, system sources sit with a padlock. Socket applies these itself so they can't be renamed, removed or chosen by hand. A lead that arrives through one of your forms is recorded as Form.

At the bottom of the page, Card Layout controls what appears on each card on your board, and in what order.

Drag the sections into the order you want:

Two preview cards sit underneath, one busy and one sparse, so you can see the effect on a full lead and a bare one before you save. Hit Save Changes and your board updates.

The four-field limit is to keep cards readable. The list view isn't capped, so anything you add here is also available as a column there via Manage Columns, which is the better place to go when you want everything at once.

A lead ages when nothing has been logged against it for a while, and turns fragile when it's been longer still. This section is where you decide what counts as too long, for each stage separately.

Per stage matters, because the stages aren't comparable. A new enquiry sitting for a week is normal. A proposal you sent a week ago and heard nothing about is not. So Enquiry starts at 10 days and 21 days, while Pending Approval starts at 3 and 7.

A line at the bottom tells you where you stand as things are, such as "10 of your 56 open leads are fragile today and 23 are ageing", so you can see the effect of a change before committing to it.

These thresholds are what your reporting uses to group leads as fresh, ageing or fragile. Our Leads Reporting guide covers reading that, including exactly which actions reset the clock.

Lost Reasons are what your team picks from when closing a lead or a proposal as lost. Worth setting up properly, because it's the difference between knowing how much work you lose and knowing why.

Add your own reasons and star one to make it the default. Keep the list short. A long list gets skimmed and everyone picks the top one, which tells you nothing. Changes save as you make them.

Whoever closes the lead can also add a free-text explainer alongside the reason, and it's worth encouraging: "price" is a fact, "price, but they asked us to come back at year end" is something you can do something about.

System reasons are applied by Socket rather than chosen by anyone, and can't be renamed or removed:

Those three happen without anyone marking anything, which is exactly why they exist. Otherwise your reporting would only cover the deals someone remembered to close off by hand.

This is how Socket works out what a lead is worth, which drives the totals on your board and lets you sort your pipeline by size.

Choose whether your deal sizes represent monthly or annual revenue, and whether one-off and alignment fees are counted. Save with the button at the bottom of the section.