We scaled back our use of leads significantly for several reasons. Namely, when a lead is Qualified it doesn’t carry over any information, forcing you to set everything manually. I’ve built a few workflows that will identify a specific type of lead, mark it as qualified, and create the new deal with all the information we know we want. When leads provide this functionality natively, we will consider expanding their use again.
For now, we’ve gone back to opening up deals in the “prospecting” stage for our biz dev outreach. Leads are still used to create automated data for inbound inquiries and cancelled subscribers for us to try and win back, but they are not robust enough for us to use them in enterprise sales prospecting yet.