Leads Manager

Turn a list of B2B leads into a product your clients buy from inside Blesta, paying with credits to unlock the contact details they want.

What it does

If you sell or broker sales leads, you're probably handling delivery by hand today: exporting a spreadsheet, emailing it over, chasing payment separately. Leads Manager turns that into a self-service product inside your existing Blesta client area. You load a pool of leads once, price them individually or by the batch, and sell access through ordinary Blesta packages. Clients buy a block of credits, browse the pool, and spend credits to reveal the contact details of the leads they actually want - nothing is handed over until they choose to pay for it, and nothing is delivered by hand.

Key features

• Sell Leads For Credits: Clients browse your lead pool in their client area and spend credits to reveal a lead's contact details, so your list becomes a self-service product instead of a manual delivery job.
• Credit Packages Sold as Normal Products: Map any Blesta package to a number of credits and clients simply order it. Credits land on their balance the moment the order is paid, and you can set an expiry in days per package so unused credits do not sit on your books forever.
• Bulk CSV Import With a Dry Run: Load leads by uploading a CSV or pasting one in. Columns are matched by their header names, you can correct the mapping by hand, and a preview of exactly what will be imported is shown before anything is written.
• Price Each Lead Individually: Give every lead its own credit cost, so premium or exclusive leads cost more than the rest of the pool.
• Reveal in Bulk: Clients can tick several leads and reveal them in one go, with the total credit cost confirmed up front. If the balance is short, nothing is spent at all.
• Keyword and Facet Filtering: Clients narrow the pool by keyword and by industry, location, company size and revenue, and can switch between everything, only what they have revealed, and only what they have saved.
• Client-Side Pipeline and Notes: Revealed leads can be saved to a personal list where each one carries a status of New, Contacted, Qualified, Won or Lost plus private notes.
• One-Click CSV Export: Clients export every lead they have revealed to CSV whenever they want, and staff can export the full pool the same way.
• Credit Ledger and Manual Adjustments: Staff can add or deduct credits for any client with a required reason, and every purchase, reveal, adjustment and expiry is recorded in a per-client ledger.
• Automatic Expiry and Low-Balance Emails: A daily background task voids credit lots that have passed their expiry date and emails clients whose balance has dropped low, once per crossing rather than every day.
• Usage Reports: See your most revealed leads, credit spend per client and the leads nobody has ever revealed, over any date range.
• Per-Staff-Group Access Control: Viewing, importing, editing and deleting leads, managing credit packages, adjusting balances, reading the ledger and viewing reports are each separate permissions granted per staff group.

Installing Leads Manager

Before you start

• If you are on the leased (subscription) licence, the Blesta Club Subscription Manager must be installed and your subscription active. The owned and owned-source licences have no such requirement.

1. Upload the files

Upload the extension folder into your Blesta installation so it lands under your Blesta directory at:

plugins/leads_manager/

For example, on a typical install: /var/www/html/blesta/plugins/leads_manager/

2. Install it in Blesta

1. Log in to your Blesta admin area with a staff account that has the Plugins permission, including Install Plugin and Manage Plugin (found under the Settings group in Manage Staff Groups).
2. Go to Settings > Company > Plugins and click the Available tab.
3. Find Leads Manager in the list and click Install.

3. Grant staff access

Blesta registers a plugin's permissions switched off, and a plugin is not allowed to grant its own, so right after installing only the staff account that ran the install can see it. Go to Settings > System > Staff > Staff Groups, edit each staff group that should have access, and tick the permissions under the four Leads Manager sections:

• Leads Manager - Leads: View, Import, Edit, Delete and Export Leads (Export is separate from View, so tick it explicitly for anyone who should be able to download the full pool).
• Leads Manager - Credit Packages: View, Add, Edit and Delete Credit Packages.
• Leads Manager - Client Credits: View Client Credits, Adjust Client Credits and View Credit Ledger.
• Leads Manager - Reports: View Reports.

Save each group. Skip this step and staff in those groups will not see the Leads navigation entry at all.

4. Set up what you want to sell

There are no API keys, no external accounts, and no cron tasks to configure by hand - the daily credit-expiry task registers itself. Two things to do before clients can buy anything:

1. Load your leads. Go to Leads > All Leads > Add Leads and paste or upload a CSV of the leads you want to sell. See the usage guide for the exact column format.
2. Create a credit package for each bundle you want to sell. Create a normal Blesta package (any module works, since no service is provisioned) and add it to a package group your clients can order from, the same way you would for any other product. Then go to Leads > Credit Packages > Add, select that package, and set how many credits it grants and, optionally, how many days until those credits expire.

You're ready to go - see the usage guide for a walkthrough of day-to-day use.

Updating Leads Manager

Upgrading works just like installing: upload the new files over the old ones, then run the upgrade from the same page you installed it on.

1. Back up your current extension files first - good practice before any upgrade.
2. Upload the new version over the existing folder, replacing the old files at plugins/leads_manager/.
3. Log in to your Blesta admin area and go to Settings > Company > Plugins.
4. Find Leads Manager and click Update to run the upgrade.

Version-specific notes

• v1.1.0: Adds this plugin's first staff permissions. Blesta registers new permissions switched off for every staff group, so after updating, go to Settings > System > Staff > Staff Groups and tick the Leads Manager permissions for each group that should keep access - otherwise those staff will lose the Leads navigation entry and see "not authorized." This update also fixes credits never being granted when a credit package's invoice is paid, and fixes the purchased service never actually being canceled - if you were on v1.0.0, credits purchased before this update may need a manual adjustment to correct.
• v2.0.0: Adds three new permissions (covering the new Credit Packages, Client Credits and Reports pages) - grant them per staff group the same way as above. Uninstalling the plugin now permanently deletes this company's leads, credit balances, ledger history and client-saved notes when you remove it (the database tables themselves are only dropped once the last company on the install removes it) - export anything you want to keep first. Imports are now all-or-nothing, and CSV uploads are limited to 5 MB and 5,000 rows; paste larger data instead, or split it across files.

Any other breaking changes will be communicated to clients.

Using Leads Manager

For your staff

Everything lives under the Leads menu in the staff navigation, which opens a dropdown of four pages: All Leads, Credit Packages, Client Credits and Reports.

Adding leads

Go to Leads > All Leads and click Add Leads. Paste your CSV into the text box, or upload a .csv/.txt file - either way the first row must be a header row. Columns are matched by header name, not position, so the order of your columns doesn't matter.

Required columns: Name, Website, Email, Phone Number Optional columns: First Name, Last Name, LinkedIn, Location, Industry, Size, Revenue, Asking Price, Credit Cost

Click Continue and you'll land on a preview screen before anything is written: it tells you how many leads will be imported, how many duplicates or invalid rows will be skipped, and how many blank rows were ignored, and it shows the column mapping it guessed from your headers. Correct any column that didn't map right using the dropdowns, then click Confirm Import. The whole import either applies in full or not at all - if anything goes wrong partway through, nothing is written.

Managing leads

Back on All Leads, the list shows every lead's ID, name, website and email, with Edit and Delete next to each. Use the filter icon to search by keyword or narrow by industry, location, size or revenue. The download icon exports every lead in the company to CSV.

Click Edit on a lead to change any of its details, including its Credit Cost - the number of credits a client spends to reveal that specific lead (the default is 1, and you can price individual leads however you like). Deleting a lead also removes it from any client's revealed or saved lists.

Setting up credit packages

Clients buy credits by ordering a normal Blesta package - this plugin doesn't provision anything itself, so any package works. Create the package the usual way (Packages > Add Package), then come back to Leads > Credit Packages and click Add Credits Package. Choose the package, enter how many credits it grants, and set an Expiry (days) - the number of days after purchase before those credits expire, or 0 if they should never expire.

The list shows every mapped package with its credit amount. Once a package is mapped, the mapping itself can't be pointed at a different package - only the credit amount and expiry are editable afterward.

When a client's order for a mapped package is paid, Leads Manager automatically adds the credits to their balance and closes out the underlying service - there's no manual step on your side.

Managing client credit balances

Leads > Client Credits lists every client who holds a balance. Click Adjust to add or remove credits by hand - enter a positive number to grant credits or a negative number to deduct them, along with a reason (required, since it's recorded permanently). Click Ledger to see that client's full history: every purchase, manual adjustment, reveal and expiry, each with its date, type, amount, reason and (for purchased lots) when it expires.

Reports

Leads > Reports covers a date range you choose (From/To, both in UTC) and shows your most-revealed leads, credit spend broken down by client, and the leads nobody has revealed at all in that period - useful for seeing what to buy more of and what isn't earning its keep.

For your clients

Browsing the lead pool

Clients reach the pool from their own navigation. The page shows their available credit balance at the top, a filter panel (keyword, industry, location, size, revenue, and a "Reveal status" toggle to show everything, only revealed leads, only not-yet-revealed leads, or only saved leads), and the full list below.

A lead they haven't revealed shows a Reveal link in place of its contact details, labelled with its credit cost (for example "Reveal (2)"). Clicking it asks them to confirm spending that many credits before revealing the email, phone number, LinkedIn and website. Clients can also tick several leads and use Reveal Selected to reveal them all in one action - the total cost is confirmed up front, and if their balance is too low nothing is revealed and nothing is spent.

Once a lead is revealed, its contact fields show for good, each with a Copy button, and a Save button appears to add it to the client's personal shortlist.

Saved leads and pipeline notes

Clicking Saved Leads opens a page listing everything the client has saved. Each row has a Status dropdown (New, Contacted, Qualified, Won or Lost) and a notes field, so clients can track where they are with each lead without leaving Blesta. A saved lead can be unsaved at any time, which just removes it from this list - it stays revealed.

Exporting

The Export Revealed (CSV) button, available from both the main pool and the saved list, downloads every lead the client has revealed so far.

Good to know

• Revealing the same lead twice never charges twice - once revealed, a lead stays revealed for that client at no extra cost.
• A bulk reveal is all-or-nothing: if the balance can't cover every selected lead, none of them are revealed and no credits are spent.
• Setting a credit package's expiry to 0 means credits from that package never expire; any other number is the number of days after purchase before that batch of credits is voided by the daily background task.
• The Export Leads permission is separate from viewing the list, so a staff group that could already browse leads may still need it ticked explicitly before their CSV export button will work.