Leads are arriving but nobody is calling them
Almost always one thing: the contacts have no owner. Here is how to confirm it and stop it happening again.
This is the most expensive silent failure in the product and it has one overwhelmingly common cause: the contacts have no owner.
The calling list is every contact assigned to you, whose stage is still open, that you have not called today. A contact with no owner satisfies none of that for anybody — so it is in nobody's list, generates no task, and produces no error. It sits there.
Steps
Confirm the shape on Home
The lead funnel shows New against Contacted. A large New count with a small Contacted count is this problem.
Filter Contacts to unassigned
If there are unowned contacts sitting at New, you have found it.
Check where those contacts came from
A form that does not set an owner, an import that skipped the owner column, or an API integration that creates contacts without assignment. All three produce the same result.
Assign the backlog
Filter, then bulk edit the owner. They will appear in the right calling lists immediately, because the list is derived rather than maintained.
Fix the source
Set the owner on the form. Map the owner column on import. Set it in the API payload. Otherwise the backlog rebuilds itself.
Add a workflow as a safety net
Trigger on contact created, condition on no owner, then assign. That makes the failure impossible rather than merely unlikely.
Check lead stage too
A contact created in a terminal stage will not appear in a calling list however it is assigned. Less common, but worth ruling out.
Check it worked
Submit a test lead through each of your real intake routes — form, integration, import — and confirm each one arrives owned, staged and in somebody's calling list within minutes. Any route that fails is quietly losing you leads.
The parts people get wrong
- Speed to lead has the most reliable relationship to revenue of anything in this product, and an unowned contact has infinite speed to lead.
- Agents cannot see unassigned contacts in a calling sense, so nobody will report this. It has to be checked.