Remove Lead status from Sales path but not from Lead status field

Question

I have to remove Lead status value from sales path of the lead but not from Lead status picklist field. For example if lead status having picklist value:

1. New
2. Nurturing
3. working
4. Dead
5. converted

Then i have to show only New>>Nurturing>>working>>converted on the sales path of the Lead in salesforce lightning. But need to make "Dead" value available from picklist field. On removing "Dead" value from Lead process it get removed from the sales path but also become unavailable from Lead status picklist field. How can i achieve this?

Answer 1

I'd expect "Dead" to be the equivalent of a "Closed-Lost" Opportunity and would use the "Dead" value similarly as a means of closing the record for a Sales Path. You could also "hide" the value by using a record type in which you don't include the value of "Dead" for the Lead in your Sales Path.

If you do need to still include it, move the value in your picklist to below "Converted" so that it's in the equivalent position of where you'd locate "Closed-Lost" for an Opportunity. In that manner it will appear after "Converted" in your Sales Path and won't be one of the "stages" that your Sales Path must move through in order to reach "Converted".

Answer 2

Old thread, but I thought I would share one option that we implemented. Basically, we created a new Lead Status called "Unqualified". We then reordered the Lead Status options so the new "Unqualified" status was before "New". The key here is to make sure that "New" is your default status. This way, when you create a new lead record either manually or via an import, it automatically assigns it is a Lead Status of "New". So here's what the Kanban looks like:

Unqualified -> New -> Nurture -> Outreach -> Engaged -> Converted

This allows you to move these unqualified leads out of the natural lead process flow as we didn't want to do any further follow-up with these leads. Also, moving the Unqualified status after Converted still puts it as the last stage before Converted in the Kanban - which isn't the desired outcome we wanted.

The other solutions include converting these unqualified leads to Contacts & Accounts and then create a custom field in these Objects and then mark them as Unqualified in there -- but that clutters up the database. Or you could just delete the unqualified leads, but that isn't a great solution because you've now lost the history of that lead and you can't de-dupe them from coming back as "New" in the future.

Hope this helps someone!