It’s a smart checklist your AI receptionist follows when someone reaches out.
It helps you:
- Ask the right questions
- Find out who’s serious
- Book good leads into meetings
- Gently turn away people who aren’t a fit
You set it up once, and your AI handles every new lead for you.
Lead Intake Flow Video
Step-by-Step Guide: How Do Lead Intake Flows Work?
1. Lead Capture – What info should the AI collect first?
Think of this as the “basics” you need from someone.
Use this to get the structured data needed for follow-up, CRM syncing, and future sales automation (You will soon be able to automate followups with Central!)
Ask for things like their name and phone number or email, like so:
Pro Tip: Keep it short. If it feels like a long form, they’ll quit.
2. Lead Qualification – Ask smart questions to see if they’re a good fit
Now you want to figure out: Should we talk to this person?
AKA: Do we want to spend more time and resources speaking to them?
This is what you use Lead Qualification for.
This is optional, and you can just use the “Lead Capture” section if you just want to capture their contact info.
Here’s how: Ask qualification questions that tell you if the person is ready to buy, or just browsing.
Some examples of strong qualification questions would include:
- What's your budget for this project?
- When are you looking to get started?
- Are you the decision-maker?
You may also add Good Answer Examples, that are used to tell the AI, “Yes, move them forward.”
If their answer does not match the Good Answer, then AI would mark them as “Not a fit”.
For example, if you set the Good Answer to be “$5,000 or more” for “What’s your estimated budget?”, if the caller answered “Under $1,000”, they would be marked not qualified.
Pro Tip: If you don’t tell the AI what’s good or bad, it won’t know what to do. You have to spell it out clearly.
3. Lead Actions – What should happen next?
Once the AI knows if the person is qualified or not, you choose what it should do.
You have 2 choices:
- Same action for everyone → Simple, easy
- Different action depending on their answers → Smarter, more advanced
Based on the actions that you define, your AI can offer to book a call and transfer to a human, or say thanks and end the conversation.
4. Trigger Mode – When should your AI start asking questions?
You have 2 choices:
- Option 1: On Every Call
- AI asks for info on every call, no matter what.
- Use this if you want to capture everyone, even if they’re not a good fit.
- Option 2: Let AI decide (Recommended)
- In this option, AI listens first. If the caller sounds serious (e.g. asks about pricing or booking), it starts intake.
- If not, it skips it.
- Use this if you only want to collect info from real leads.
- If you choose “Let the AI decide,” you can tell it what to look for by clicking on “Fine tune”. Think of this like giving the AI common sense.
So why does this matter?
Because maybe you don’t want to book a meeting with every single lead.
Maybe you don’t want to transfer or spend time and resources on every single caller.
This is why Triggers + Qualification + Actions work together.
They help your AI decide who’s worth your time — and who’s not.
Lead Intake Flows are the foundation of automated lead handling.
Set them up once, and your AI acts like a trained sales assistant — greeting, qualifying, and following up 24/7.
Ready to streamline your inbound process?
Go to Lead Intake in your dashboard to get started, available on both the Central Voice Receptionist and Chat Agent.
