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Manage leads in Cut+Dry

Find out create and manage leads.

May 06, 2026

On this page:

  1. Overview
  2. Key Terms
  3. Watch a quick tutorial
  4. View your pipeline
  5. Filtering by sales rep
  6. Drilling into a lead
  7. Exporting your pipeline
  8. Who sees what
  9. The sales manager role
  10. Add a lead manually
  11. Pull a lead from Yes, Chef
  12. Change the lead status
  13. Understand the different statuses
  14. Log activity
  15. Create a proposal
  16. Add contacts

Overview

Leads Management is a single place to capture, qualify, and convert prospects without ever leaving Cut+Dry. Whether leads come in from your website, your sales reps, or trade shows, your team can now manage every opportunity from first touch to first order.

  • Track status, owner, and activity history for every lead in one view.
  • Connect a qualified lead with an active operator account instantly, keeping all records inside of Cut+Dry.
  • Measure where your best leads come from and how quickly they convert.

Who's this for? Distributor sales reps, sales managers, and admins who manage new-customer prospecting and need a single place to track lead status, contacts, notes, and proposals. Existing-customer activity is handled separately in the Customer Profile.

Follow these steps to find and add leads and manage your pipeline.

Key Terms

  • Lead. A prospective customer your team is working to win. A lead can be created manually or sourced from Yes, Chef Prospecting.
  • Owner. The rep responsible for moving the lead forward. Visibility flows through your sales hierarchy from the owner.
  • Status. The pipeline stage of the lead: e.g. New, Working, Proposal Sent, Closed Won, Closed Lost.
  • Activity. Any interaction logged against a lead - calls, visits, emails, samples, demos. Activities show in the lead's activity history and feed reporting.
  • Contact. A person at the prospect's business - buyer, chef, owner, AP. Multiple contacts can be attached to a single lead.
  • Proposal. A pricing or item proposal attached to the lead, including proposals built in Yes Chef.
  • Customer Code. The ERP identifier that connects a Closed Won lead to the customer record once the new account syncs into Cut+Dry.

Leads visibility honors your distributor's sales team hierarchy:

  • Sales reps see the leads they own.
  • Sales managers see leads owned by themselves and by the reps who report to them.
  • Admins see all leads across the organization.

If a lead isn't appearing where you expect it to, check the lead's owner and your sales team hierarchy in Settings → Team.

 

Watch a quick tutorial

View your pipeline

1. Select Leads from the navigation menu. The Leads page is your sales team's pipeline view. In one screen, you can see where every lead sits in your funnel, how many leads are in each stage, who owns them, and what's moving,

When you open the Leads page, the funnel summary at the top shows how many leads are in each status (Cold, Warm, Hot, Closed Won, Closed Lost, and Bad Fit). Click any status to filter the list below to just those leads.

This is the fastest way to answer questions like "How many hot leads do we have right now?" or "Which reps have leads sitting in Warm without recent activity?"

Filtering by sales rep

Sales managers and admins can filter the pipeline to a specific rep's book of business. This is useful for one-on-ones, ride-alongs, or coaching conversations.

  1. On the Leads page, click the Sales Rep filter.
  2. Select one or more reps.
  3. The funnel summary and lead list both update to show only leads owned by the selected reps.

You can combine the Sales Rep filter with the funnel (e.g. "show me Maria's Hot leads") to zoom in even further.

Drilling into a lead

Click any lead in the list to open its detail view. From the detail view, you can:

  • See all contacts attached to the lead (buyer, chef, owner, AP)
  • Review the full activity history and log new activity
  • Open any proposals attached to the lead, including Yes Chef proposals
  • Update the status as the lead moves through your pipeline
  • Convert the lead to an active operator account once it's Closed Won

Exporting your pipeline

Click Export at the top of the Leads page to download the current filtered view as a CSV. Whatever filters you have applied (status, sales rep, search) will be respected in the export.

Who sees what

The pipeline you see depends on your role: visibility on the Leads page follows your distributor's sales team hierarchy. 

  • Admins see every lead in the organization. Their funnel summary reflects the whole company pipeline.
  • Sales managers see their own leads plus the leads owned by the reps who report to them. Their funnel shows their team's pipeline.
  • Sales reps see only the leads they own. Their funnel shows their personal pipeline.

That means the same Leads page can serve a frontline rep tracking their day, a manager running a team review, and an admin checking the health of the whole funnel, without anyone seeing leads they shouldn't.

If a lead isn't appearing where you expect it to, check the lead's owner and your sales team hierarchy in Settings → Team.

The sales manager role

The Sales Manager isn't a standalone role at Cut+Dry. It's an existing Admin or Sales Rep user who has been granted broader access to other reps' leads.

That means a Sales Manager keeps everything they could already do in their base role (placing orders and managing accounts as a rep, configuring settings as an admin) and additionally gains the ability to view, work, and report on leads owned by other reps.

When you set up a Sales Manager, you decide whose leads they can see. There are two options:

  • All sales reps. The Sales Manager sees every lead owned by every rep in the organization. Useful for VPs of sales, regional sales directors, or single-territory distributors where one person oversees the whole team.
  • Assigned sales reps only. The Sales Manager sees leads owned by a specific list of reps that you assign — and nothing else. Useful for territory managers, district leads, or any structure where multiple managers each oversee a different slice of the team.

In both configurations, the Sales Manager also continues to see and own their own leads. Click here to learn more. 

 

 

Add a lead manually

1. Select Leads from the navigation menu, then click Add Lead.

2. Enter the lead information and click Create Lead.

3. The new lead appears at the top of the Leads page and in the owner's filtered view.

Pull a lead from Yes, Chef

1. From the leads page, click Find Prospects. 

2. Select one of the restaurants from the map or list. Then click Create Lead.

3. Confirm the details and click Create Lead.

The prospect is created as a lead in your pipeline with the Yes Chef data pre-populated.

Change the lead status

1. From the leads details page, click Status.

2. Select the new status. 

Understand the different statuses

Status is how you move a lead through your pipeline. The leads management feature comes with six standard statuses out of the box. They're designed to fit how most distributor sales teams work, while staying simple enough that a brand-new rep can pick them up on day one.

The six standard statuses:

  • Cold. A new or untouched lead. You've identified the prospect, but no real conversation has happened yet. This is the top of the pipeline, where most leads start.
  • Warm. A lead your team has engaged with at least once. There's been a conversation, a visit, or a back-and-forth, and the prospect has shown some interest, but isn't actively evaluating a switch yet. Warm leads need consistent follow-up to keep them moving.
  • Hot. A lead in active sales motion. The prospect is evaluating proposals, comparing options, or close to a buying decision. Hot leads are the ones to prioritize each week, they're where focused effort makes the biggest difference.
  • Closed Won. The lead has agreed to do business with you. Marking a lead as Closed Won also triggers the next workflow: adding the new account to your ERP and linking the lead's history to the resulting Customer Profile in Cut+Dry. 
  • Closed Lost. The prospect chose not to move forward. The lead is closed without a sale, but all the notes, contacts, and proposals are preserved in case you re-engage later.
  • Bad Fit. The prospect isn't a viable customer for your business: the wrong segment, the wrong geography, volume too small, or the product mix doesn't line up. Bad Fit is different from Closed Lost: it's a qualification call rather than a competitive loss, and tracking it separately keeps your win-rate reporting accurate.

Want a different pipeline? These six statuses are the standard set because they fit most distributors out of the box. If your sales team uses a different set of stages (e.g. Sample Sent, Proposal Sent, Pending Decision), reach out to your Cut+Dry Growth Partner to discuss customizing the statuses to match your workflow.

 

 

Log activity

1. From the leads details page, click Log Activity.

2. Enter the activity details, then click Add Activity. 

Tip: We recommend adding all activities here to keep a complete record of all interactions with this lead. 

 

3. The new activity will show up under Activity Log. 

Create a proposal

To create a proposal, follow the steps outlined here. 

Add contacts

1. From the leads details page, click Add Contact. A contact is a person at the prospect's business - buyer, chef, owner, or AP. Multiple contacts can be attached to a single lead.

2. Enter the contact information, then click Save. 

 

 

 

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