How Prospector Thinks About Leads

Prospector treats freelance lead management as a pipeline with distinct stages: discovery, scoring, filtering, proposal generation, submission, and post-win operations. Each stage has its own configuration surface, and you can automate as much or as little as you want.

Understanding these stages matters because each one feeds the next. A misconfigured scoring model produces bad rankings, which means your rules engine filters the wrong leads, which means your proposals go to jobs that are a poor fit. Getting the foundations right pays off at every downstream step.

Scoring

Every lead that Prospector discovers gets a composite score from 0 to 100. The score is built from multiple signals: skill match, budget alignment, client history (past hires, review ratings, spend), competition density, and timeline feasibility. Each signal carries a configurable weight, so you can emphasize what matters most to your business.

Scores are not binary pass/fail. They are continuous values that let you set thresholds, sort by quality, and make informed decisions about where to invest proposal effort. See Scoring for the full breakdown.

The Proposal Pipeline

The proposal pipeline is Prospector’s workflow from scored lead to submitted proposal. It covers template selection, variable interpolation, AI draft generation, human review (optional), and submission tracking. The pipeline supports both fully automated and semi-automated modes.

You control the pipeline through prompt templates, which define the structure and tone of your proposals. Prospector fills in job-specific details using data from the lead. See Proposal Pipeline for how each stage works.

Rules Engine

The rules engine sits between scoring and the proposal pipeline. It applies your custom filters to the scored lead list, removing jobs that do not meet your criteria regardless of their score. Rules can filter on budget, required skills, client verification status, job duration, and free-text keyword patterns.

Rules are evaluated in order, and the first matching exclusion rule removes the lead from consideration. You can also write inclusion rules that flag leads for priority review. See Rules Engine for syntax and examples.

Post-Win Operations

Prospector does not stop at proposal submission. When you win a contract, it transitions to post-win mode: tracking milestones, reminding you about deliverables, and prompting invoice generation at the right times. This keeps your active contracts organized without requiring a separate project management tool.

Post-win operations are optional and can be disabled per contract. See Post-Win Operations for configuration details.