The active prospect pipeline

What the Active Prospects row shows

The Active Prospects row is the working list of people who want to join your network as a franchisee: everyone you are currently talking to who has not yet signed and has not been closed out. It sits on the Recruiting page, one tile per person, ordered newest inquiry first. Verinode does not run your sales process here. It gives your team one place to log an inquiry, see how long it has been sitting, and move it forward, the same way a fractional COO would keep a hiring board current instead of letting leads go stale in someone's inbox.

This is not the same list as your franchisee roster. Everyone on this row is a prospect, someone outside the network, until the day they sign. Nothing here is a current member's operational data, so the usual franchisee privacy boundary (franchisees own their data, HQ sees aggregates) does not apply to this row, these are HQ's own recruiting leads. What the boundary does apply to is the benchmark numbers you might hand a prospect in a deck; see Generate the prospect recruitment deck for how those figures are gated separately.

Where to find it

Open Recruiting from the HQ sidebar, under the Expansion group, at hq.verinode.ai/recruit-grow. The Active Prospects row is the third row on the page, below the network footprint hero and territory map, and below the Take Action and Coverage Gaps rows, and above Network Hiring Flow and Territories. For the rest of the page, see Recruiting & Growth: section overview and the territory coverage map.

The four stages

A prospect moves through a fixed sequence: inquired, qualified, negotiating, signed, or exits as dropped. Only the first three, inquired, qualified, and negotiating, count as active and appear as tiles in this row. The moment a prospect is marked signed or dropped, its tile disappears from Active Prospects, because it is no longer active pipeline: signed means the franchise agreement is done and the person converts to operator onboarding elsewhere in Verinode, and dropped means the inquiry closed without signing.

Each stage carries its own accent color down the left edge of the tile, so you can read the pipeline's shape at a glance without reading every label:

• New Inquiry, copper, first contact logged, no qualification yet.
• Qualified, teal, meets your franchisee fit criteria, ready to move into negotiation.
• In Negotiation, gold, the FDD has been delivered and counsel review or terms negotiation is underway.
• Signed (green) and Closed (gray) share the same color coding elsewhere in Verinode, but you will not see them as tiles in this row, they have already left active pipeline.

Reading a tile

Every tile in the Active Prospects row carries the same five pieces of information:

• Stage label, the colored badge in the corner (New Inquiry, Qualified, or In Negotiation).
• Headline, the contact's name. If no name was captured, it falls back to the contact's email, and if neither exists it reads Anonymous.
• Location, city and state on the line below the name, or Location pending if neither was entered.
• Days since inquiry, a small line reading, for example, "12d since inquiry." This counts full calendar days from the original inquiry date you logged, every time the page loads, not from the last time someone touched the record.
• Inquiry source, a short line in the corner showing wherever the lead is tagged as having come from, for example "franchise-expo," "Discovery Day pack," or "broker referral." It only appears when a source was entered; there is no default value.

Up to 12 tiles show at once, the 12 most recently inquired. If your pipeline runs deeper than that, the remaining prospects are not hidden, they are one tap away in the Active Prospects tab described below.

Clicking a tile opens the Move to stage panel for that prospect (covered next), not a detail page, this row exists to move people forward, not to browse a profile.

Adding a prospect

Click + Add Prospect in the page header (top right, next to the Recruiting title) to log a new inquiry. This opens the Add prospect form:

1. 1Contact name, required. This is the only required field.
2. 2Contact email, optional.
3. 3City and State (two-letter), optional, entered as separate fields; State auto-uppercases as you type.
4. 4ZIP, optional.
5. 5Status, a dropdown defaulting to Inquired. The form's own note explains it plainly: "Defaults to inquired; pick a later stage if you're logging someone you've already qualified or are negotiating with." The dropdown lists Inquired, Qualified, Negotiating, Signed, and Dropped with no extra description, just the five names.
6. 6Inquiry source, optional free text. The field's placeholder gives you the pattern to follow: "e.g. franchise-expo, Discovery Day pack, broker referral." Type whatever your team actually calls the channel, there is no fixed list.
7. 7Notes, optional free text, placeholder example: "Met at IFE 2026. Currently runs an HVAC operation in DFW; looking to add water mitigation."

Click Add prospect to save (the button reads "Adding…" while it saves). If Contact name is blank, the form blocks the save with "Contact name is required." Only group admins can add a prospect; the action is rejected for any other role.

Moving a prospect through the pipeline

Click any tile in the Active Prospects row to open Move to stage. The panel opens with a one-line summary: the prospect's city and state (or "Location pending"), how many days since inquiry, and the stage they are in right now, for example "Austin, TX · 12 days since inquiry · currently In Negotiation."

Below that sits a fieldset labeled Move to stage, five radio options, each with its own explanation:

• Inquired, "Initial contact; no qualification yet."
• Qualified, "Meets the franchisee fit criteria; advance to negotiation."
• Negotiating, "FDD delivered; counsel review or terms negotiation underway."
• Signed, "Franchise agreement signed; convert to operator onboarding."
• Dropped, "Inquiry closed without signing. Notes capture the reason."

Pick the option that matches where this prospect actually stands and update the Notes field (placeholder: "What changed? Anything counsel needs to see?") to capture what changed. A footnote under the form explains a side effect of saving: "Saving also stamps the prospect's last-contacted timestamp so the pipeline ages from the most recent touch, not the original inquiry date." Click Save (grayed out until you change the stage or the notes) to commit the update.

Moving a prospect to Signed or Dropped removes its tile from Active Prospects on your next view of the row, since only inquired, qualified, and negotiating prospects count as active.

The Active Prospects tab (read-only slider)

Clicking a tile in the Coverage Gaps or Territories rows opens a full-screen card view with three swipeable tabs across the top: Coverage Gaps, Active Prospects, and Territories. Swipe or click over to the Active Prospects tab to see the complete pipeline as a plain list, one row per prospect, with the same contact name (or "Anonymous inquiry" if none), location, stage label, days since inquiry, and inquiry source you see on the tiles.

Two differences from the row on the Recruiting page itself:

• No 12-tile cap. The slider tab lists every active prospect, so it is the place to check the pipeline when it runs deeper than the 12 shown on the page.
• Read-only. Rows here do not open the Move to stage panel or anything else, they are for reading the full list, not editing it. To advance a prospect, close the slider and click its tile back on the Recruiting page.

Empty states

No active prospects at all. The Active Prospects row on the page shows a single tile reading "+ Add the first inquiry," with the note "Track a new prospect through inquired → qualified → negotiating → signed without leaving Verinode," tagged ADMIN. Clicking it opens the same Add prospect form described above.

In the Active Prospects tab of the slider, the equivalent empty state reads: "No active prospects in the pipeline. Inquiries land here when they come through /inquire or are added manually." Today, the reliable way a prospect lands in this specific pipeline is the manual + Add Prospect flow above; treat that line as pointing at where inbound leads are meant to flow in as your intake channels mature, not as a guarantee that every public inquiry form is already wired to this exact list.

How this fits with the rest of Recruiting

The count of open prospects, inquired plus qualified plus negotiating, also drives the "Open prospects" figure in the network footprint hero at the top of the page, so the number you see there and the number of tiles you can count in this row always agree. Prospects with a city and state also appear as pins on the territory map above the rows; see the territory coverage map for how those pins read alongside your existing member locations. And the recruiting-specific stage medians in the Network Hiring Flow row, just below Active Prospects, are a separate, aggregate read on how fast prospects typically move stage to stage across your whole network; see Network Flow for how those medians are built.

For the funnel context around this row, disclosure obligations and the deck you can generate from this same data, see Discovery Day, Item 19, and Generate the prospect recruitment deck.

Best-practice example

Say your Active Prospects row shows nine tiles. Six read New Inquiry, two read Qualified, and one, a prospect in Boise, reads In Negotiation at "41d since inquiry." That single Negotiating tile is the one to click first, 41 days sitting in negotiation without a stage change is worth a status check. Open Move to stage, confirm whether it should move to Signed, stay in Negotiating with an updated note, or move to Dropped if the deal has gone quiet, and log why in Notes either way. Meanwhile the six New Inquiry tiles are your intake queue, work through them toward Qualified before they, too, sit long enough to need explaining.

Data sources