How to find the leads going cold in your Salesforce

Why it matters

When a team says it needs more leads, it's worth checking what happened to the last batch first. In most Salesforce orgs, a good share of open Leads had a single call or email logged against them and then went quiet. Nobody decided to drop them. The rep got busy, a warmer deal came in, and the Lead slid down the list view until it was out of sight.

That is the leak worth fixing. These people already showed interest, or matched your profile closely enough for someone to create a record. Reaching them again costs far less than finding someone new. The only thing in the way is that nobody can see them. The report below fixes the seeing part.

Step by step: build the report

1. Start a Leads report

1. Open the Reports tab and click New Report.
2. Choose the standard Leads report type and click Start Report.
3. In the Filters panel, set Show Me to All leads and the created date range to All Time, so you see the whole team's Leads rather than just your own.

2. Keep only Leads that are still open

1. Add a filter: Converted equals False.
2. Add a filter on Lead Status and tick your open statuses, for example Open, Contacted and Working. Leave out anything that means closed, such as Unqualified. Every org names these slightly differently, so check your own picklist.

3. Find the ones with no recent activity

This is the filter that does the real work. You want Leads whose last activity is older than 14 days, plus Leads that have never had any activity at all.

1. Add a filter: Last Activity less than 14 DAYS AGO.
2. Add another filter: Last Activity equals, with the value left blank. This catches Leads nobody has touched.
3. Click Filter Logic and combine them so either date rule can match, for example 1 AND 2 AND (3 OR 4), where 1 and 2 are your Converted and Lead Status filters.

One thing to know: Last Activity is based on tasks and events logged in Salesforce. If reps send emails from their inbox without logging them, those Leads will look colder than they are. That's useful to learn in itself.

4. Group by owner

1. In the Outline panel, add Lead Owner under Groups.
2. Add the columns you'll want when you act on the list: Name, Company, Lead Status, Lead Source, Created Date and Last Activity.
3. Add a horizontal bar chart of record count by owner, so the size of each pile is obvious at a glance.
4. Save it as something plain, such as “Leads going cold (14 days)”, in a folder your team can see.

5. Add it to a dashboard

Open your sales dashboard, add a component and choose the new report. A bar chart by owner works well, with a table underneath if you want names. If reps will look at the dashboard too, check who it runs as: running it as the person viewing means each rep sees only the Leads they have access to.

6. Get it every Monday

On the saved report, click Subscribe. Choose weekly, Monday, early morning. You can add a condition so the email only arrives when the record count is above zero, and, if your permissions allow, add your team leads as recipients. Now the list finds you, rather than the other way round.

The same idea for Contacts and Opportunities

• Contacts: use a Contacts and Accounts report with the same Last Activity rule and group by Contact Owner. Contacts have no standard status, so narrow it with whatever your team uses to mark people you're actively pursuing, such as a record type or a custom field.
• Opportunities: use an Opportunities report, filter to open stages (Closed equals False), apply the same Last Activity rule and group by Opportunity Owner with the Amount summed. An open deal with nothing logged for two weeks is a forecast risk, not just a follow-up.

What to do with the list

The report shows the problem; it doesn't fix it. A short weekly routine does. Each owner goes through their group, closes the genuinely dead ones with an honest status, and puts the rest into a short follow-up sequence. Three emails over about a week is plenty, and our guide to follow-up emails covers how to write them.

Next Monday's list should be shorter. If it isn't, that's useful too: it usually means a rep has more Leads than time, which is a conversation about capacity rather than effort.