matt-easy-win-bitrix-triage/

Junk and Out Of Scope at Meridian Display Co.

Meridian closes leads with one of several terminal reasons. This skill covers the two that pull a record out of the sales funnel rather than recording a sales outcome: Junk and Out Of Scope.

Getting these right matters because both are routinely misfiled as Unconverted Lead, which inflates the "opportunities we lost" number with records that were never opportunities. A phone provider's billing notice counted as a lost sale is noise in every report downstream.

Source of truth for the definitions: the team's lead-management SOP (the internal guidance doc on managing leads in Bitrix24). Where this skill goes beyond the SOP it is marked as practice rather than policy.

Two naming traps, both involving the word "junk"

Trap 1: the stage ID. In Bitrix's data model the internal stageId for Unconverted Lead is the literal string JUNK. The real Junk close reason is stage 3. Whenever you're reading raw field data or an API response, JUNK means Unconverted Lead. Never reason from that string; use the table below.

Trap 2: the button. In the Bitrix UI, closing a lead means opening the last stage in the top bar, Complete Lead, then pressing the red button labelled Junk Lead. That button does not junk anything; it opens the close dialog where you pick the actual reason. Pressing it is a step on the way to every close, including Converted Lead. Someone reading over a colleague's shoulder, or reading the SOP quickly, can easily come away thinking every close is a junking.

Lead stage IDs (verified against the Bitrix UI)

Converted Lead has a separate ID that hasn't been identified yet; look it up before writing to it rather than assuming it's CONVERTED.

Older triage output compounds the confusion: a board tag reading [→Unconvert] has repeatedly been applied to records that are really Junk or Out Of Scope, because whoever wrote it hit Trap 1. Treat those tags as unverified and classify from the record itself.

Reading current state: use list_records, not pipeline_summary

pipeline_summary collapses every closed status into one reported bucket, Unconverted Lead [JUNK], at a count far below reality: in one check it reported 412 against a true 3,870 in Junk and 216 in Out Of Scope. Anything built on it will mis-sort.

list_records with an explicit stage reads each column correctly and at its true count, and get_record returns a single lead's real stageId. Use those:

• list_records(entity_type="lead", stage="3"): everything in Junk
• list_records(entity_type="lead", stage="UC_R4TQ2N"): everything in Out Of Scope
• get_record(entity_type="lead", record_id=...): one lead's actual close reason

stage wants the ID, not the label; passing "Out Of Scope" returns nothing rather than erroring, which reads as "no such leads" and is easy to misread as an empty column.

Junk

Per the SOP: the lead is not viable, either due to incorrect information or promotional emails, disinterest. In practice this covers:

• Promotional email, marketing blasts, newsletters
• System, service and billing notifications: expiring trials, delivery-failure bounces, automated privacy notices
• Spam and irrelevant requests
• Vendor and agency solicitations, cold sales calls into our line
• Recruiting traffic: job applicants, application status chasers, staffing firms
• Records whose contact information is wrong or unusable
• Phone calls that never got through the phone menu, including our own callbacks that land in another company's IVR
• A prospect who never replied to our first reply

That last one is the SOP's own criterion and it is easy to get backwards, so it gets its own section.

"Never replied to first reply" versus "went quiet"

These sound alike and close differently.

Junk is for a contact who never engaged at all. We replied; nothing ever came back; there was never a conversation, a requirement, or a quote. There was no opportunity here to lose.

Unconverted Lead is for a real prospect who did engage: we learned what they wanted, we answered or quoted them, and then they went silent or went elsewhere. Bitrix largely handles this on its own: a lead sitting in Quote Sent for 16 business hours moves to No Reply, and 178 hours in No Reply moves it to Unconverted Lead. Don't race that automation by junking a quoted lead.

The dividing question is whether a real exchange ever happened, not how long the silence has run. A prospect who described a job in chat and received pricing is Unconverted no matter how quiet they've gone; an address that received our reply and never responded at all is Junk on the SOP's terms.

Where a record sits close to that line (a short call with an untranscribed recording, or a single inbound with an ambiguous body), hold it rather than guessing. Someone needs to listen to the call or read the thread.

Age and silence otherwise don't apply to Junk. A promotional email is junk the moment it lands; there's no waiting period and no follow-up owed.

Out Of Scope

Per the SOP: the lead's request falls outside the company's services or capabilities. A real inquiry from a real prospect that we decline because we can't produce what they need. Typical shapes:

• The spec isn't feasible in the material they need, such as an over-the-street banner requiring a mesh openness we can't print
• Hardware we don't stock, such as an odd-length replacement bar
• Graphics for another manufacturer's frames; ours fit our own hardware
• A compliance or code requirement our substrate doesn't meet
• A service we don't offer at all, asked in good faith

Against Junk: a person genuinely wanted to buy something from us. Against Unconverted Lead: we're the reason it ended, and not through any failure: we gave them a straight answer and it was no.

Out Of Scope requires that we actually can't produce it. Declining on price, lead time, or stock availability is a lost sale, not a capability limit, and belongs in Unconverted Lead.

Like Junk, this doesn't age. Once we've declined on capability it's Out Of Scope whether they replied or not.

What is not covered here

Leave these alone; they belong to other close reasons or to follow-up:

• A prospect quoted or answered who then went quiet: Unconverted Lead, and the automation usually gets there by itself.
• Anything that became an order: Converted Lead, or Reorder Completed for a returning client rebuying prior work.
• A client who asked for time: that's Parked, not a close.
• Anything where we owe them something. This is the big one. A great deal of what looks like a dead lead at Meridian is our own silence: a quote we promised and never sent, a callback never made, a question never answered. That is an open task, not a close of any kind. In particular, a lead cannot be junked for "never replied to first reply" if our first reply was an autoresponder; the SOP criterion assumes a human actually replied. If the ball was ours, route it to follow-up and say so.

Producing the worklist

Default output is a review table, not a write:

## Junk (N)
| Lead | Who / source | Which junk criterion it meets |

## Out Of Scope (N)
| Lead | Who | What they wanted | Why we can't make it |

## Hold: ask Matt (N)
| Lead | Who | What's unclear |

Name the specific criterion in the Junk table rather than writing "not a lead". "Promotional email", "IVR, never reached us", "no reply to first human reply" are checkable; a bare assertion isn't.

Put anything ambiguous in Hold with the specific question. The cases worth naming rather than guessing:

• A short call with a recording nobody has transcribed: it may be a real inquiry. Don't call it a dead call until someone has heard it.
• A decline that was really about price, lead time or stock: Unconverted, not Out Of Scope.
• A lead whose only outbound was an autoresponder: our silence, not theirs.
• Internal, test, or staff-created records: flag, don't close.

Also flag, rather than silently correct, any lead whose existing close reason or title tag disagrees with the evidence.

Writing back

Closing leads is a bulk write to production CRM. Confirm the specific list before anything executes, and re-verify current state at that moment. Worklists drawn from a triage board go stale within a day or two as the team works the queue, so drop anything already closed rather than re-closing it.

Two things to establish before trusting set_lead_fields for this:

Does the write land on the right stage? Unverified. Reading works, so the write path is plausible, but the failure mode that matters is silent: a write accepted while the lead quietly lands in Unconverted Lead, recreating at scale the exact problem this skill exists to prevent. Test on one throwaway lead, then read it back with get_record and confirm stageId is 3 or UC_R4TQ2N. The read-back is the check; a successful-looking write response is not evidence.

Do stage qualifiers block it? The SOP notes that certain stages are gated: Bitrix refuses to move a lead there until required fields are filled, once per lead. Whether those gates apply to these two close reasons, and whether the API enforces or silently bypasses them, is unconfirmed. A refusal is the good case; a bypass that skips required data is worse than a manual close.

If either check fails, deliver the worklist and let Matt apply the closes through the UI: Complete Lead → red Junk Lead button → pick the reason → Save. It takes a few seconds per lead and is not worth a risky automation.