Read a Lead's Research

A lead is one candidate answer to your pipeline's question: one company, one person, one organization. Every lead on your board arrives already researched: summarized, evaluated against each of your criteria, with evidence attached. This page shows you how to read that research fast and act on it well.

(For the board itself, and what each column does, see Your Pipeline & Board. This page is about the lead in front of you.)

A lead is a researched answer, not a database row

Leads are born two ways, discovered by Pioneer or imported by you, and both get identical treatment: Pioneer reads the lead's web presence, researches evidence for every criterion, writes a summary, and fills in your properties. What lands on your board is the finished dossier, not a name to go research yourself.

Watch it arrive in Incoming

While Pioneer works, the lead sits in the Incoming box directly above the Leads column, with a live progress indicator. When research finishes, it lands in the Leads column, sorted by how well it matches, with leads that are relevant (all MUST criteria met) highest, strongest matches first.

If research on a lead stalls or fails, Pioneer tells you instead of hiding it: a warning icon appears next to the lead. Hover to see what went wrong, and click Retry to run it again. Retrying is safe; it re-runs the research without creating a duplicate. Failures stay visible because a lead that silently vanished would make you doubt every lead that remained.

Open the card: read the summary first

Click any lead to see its detail view. Start with the Summary, a concise overview of who or what this lead is. It's the TL;DR that answers "is this worth another 60 seconds?" before you dig into the verdicts.

The summary's first words tell you where the lead stands. "Relevant because…" means it met every one of your MUST criteria: the same rule as the recommendation. "Mostly relevant because…" and "Partially relevant because…" mean at least one deal-breaker failed; the difference between them is how much of your criteria the lead did match. The opener is computed from the criteria results, not written freehand, so it always agrees with the verdicts below it.

Check the verdicts, not just the badge

Below the summary sit the criteria results, one verdict per criterion, each with Pioneer's reasoning and the evidence it found:

• Met: evidence found that this criterion is satisfied
• Not Met: evidence suggests this criterion isn't satisfied
• Inconclusive: not enough public information to determine

The verdicts are where the actual intelligence lives. A lead's badge tells you what Pioneer concluded; the verdicts tell you why, and reading the why is what lets you catch a mis-written criterion, spot the evidence worth citing in your outreach, and trust the leads you didn't have time to double-check.

Inconclusive deserves special attention. One inconclusive verdict on one lead is noise. The same criterion inconclusive across many leads means the rule isn't answerable from public information; rewrite it around a signal the web can verify. See Write rules the web can answer.

Relevant, mostly relevant, or partially relevant: mechanical, from the criteria

A lead is relevant if every MUST criterion is met, mostly relevant if it meets most of what matters, and partially relevant otherwise. The tier is mechanical: every MUST passed = relevant; below that, the share of criteria the lead satisfies decides mostly vs. partially. The opener you see on the card ("Relevant because…", "Mostly relevant because…", "Partially relevant because…") follows from the tier, and the rule never changes it: no AI override, no fuzzy weighting of your deal-breakers. You wrote the standard; the standard decides.

The mechanical rule makes disagreements easy to diagnose: open the lead, find the MUST that failed, read the evidence. Two different conclusions follow:

• Pioneer was right: the lead genuinely fails your rule. Your criteria are working; trust the badge a little more.
• Your criterion is wrong: the rule is stricter than what you actually believe. Fix the criterion, not the lead: Refine Your Pipeline.

Make the call: nothing is ever deleted

From the board or the detail view:

• Approve leads worth pursuing. They move to the Relevant stage, the first custom stage every pipeline is seeded with.
• Reject leads that don't fit. They move to Rejected, fully recoverable, and the card remembers which stage it was rejected from.
• Drag approved leads through your custom stages as you work them.

Reject freely: no board move deletes anything, and clearing the barely relevant leads keeps your Leads column focused on decisions you haven't made yet. Every one of these calls is also feedback: your approvals and rejections shape Pioneer's refinement suggestions and directly steer what the next discovery run searches for. See how the board teaches. Your judgment outranks the algorithm's score.

Track outreach state with notes

The right-hand pane of any open lead shows the Notes Bar: a place to write outreach drafts, track activity, and record anything that keeps a deal moving. Notes are instant: write one, save, and it's on the lead, with no workflow run, no loading state, and no credit cost.

Notes are grouped by name, your choice: a draft email lives under "Draft email", a to-do under "Next call", and anything you leave unnamed goes to the lead's running updates. The name decides how a second note behaves:

• Named notes are versioned. A new note under the same name replaces the previous one. Your working email draft stays current; older drafts are hidden but kept.
• Unnamed updates are a log. Every note appends to a running record: "Sent intro email. Scheduled a meeting for Tuesday."

Notes are also in the API and MCP, so agents working on your behalf can read and write them through the same endpoints (API reference). A draft started in the app and a draft started by your agent converge on the same lead.

Check notes before acting. Whether you or an agent is working the lead, reading the notes first prevents contradicting or repeating what already happened.

The lead vs. its data

Leads are the items themselves: companies, people, organizations. Properties are the data fields researched about each one: LinkedIn URL, headquarters, employee count, the person in the role you care about. When a lead is right but you need more from it, that's a properties job: Enrich Leads with Properties. And when a researched value is wrong or missing, you can fix it in place: Correct Pioneer's Research.

Next steps

• Your Pipeline & Board: the columns these leads flow through
• Refine Your Pipeline: turn your approve/reject calls into better batches
• Find the Right People: from a good company to the human you'll talk to

Need help?

If you have questions, reach out to us at support@pioneerclimate.com