Working the leads inbox — Help

Every submission from your lead forms lands in one place: the Leads inbox. It works like an email inbox crossed with a sales pipeline. You triage what comes in, qualify the genuine leads, reply to them, and move the real ones on to a booking, all without anything falling through the cracks of a shared mailbox.

This article covers the pipeline tabs, reading a lead at a glance, the actions on each lead, filtering the list, and how spam is handled. To see every lead laid out by how far the sale has got, one column per step, see The leads pipeline.

Where it is

Open Leads in the sidebar. It's near the top because it's where a venue's day often starts. When a new submission arrives, a red badge appears on the Leads link with the count of new leads waiting, so you can see there's something to work without opening the page.

The pipeline tabs

Leads move left to right through six tabs:

New. Untriaged submissions, fresh off the form. The count badge is red, because these are the ones asking for your attention.
Qualified. Genuine leads you've vetted but haven't booked yet. The badge is a softer green: on its way to becoming a booking.
Converted. Leads you've turned into an event. The badge is solid green.
Inactive. Converted leads you've filed away once the back and forth goes quiet. No badge, and they stay converted so your reporting is untouched; filing one just clears it off the busy Converted tab. Bring it back any time.
Lost. Leads that didn't proceed. No badge (dead leads aren't worth a number), and you can reopen one if it comes back to life.
Spam. Junk. No badge, and it clears itself out over time.

Click a tab to see the leads in that state. The tab you're on stays in the address bar, so a refresh keeps you where you were.

The shade of a tab's badge carries a signal of its own: a strong badge means something at that stage is waiting on a reply from you, a soft one means it's all handled. Hover any badge and it says which, in words: "2 qualified, 1 awaiting your reply", or "2 qualified, all handled". New is red until it's triaged, so its badge reads "3 to triage".

Two more tabs sit after those six, and neither is a pipeline stage. Both cut across every status, and both hide themselves when they're empty, so a quiet inbox stays a clean one.

Awaiting reply. Every conversation where the ball is in your court, newest reply first.
Follow-ups. Leads you said you'd chase today, plus qualified leads that have gone quiet with nothing planned at all. See Following up on leads.

Reading a lead at a glance

Each lead is a single compact row. The top line shows the person's name and email, with the time it came in. Where the lead is linked to someone in your address book, the row shows the contact's name rather than the copy the lead was created with, so renaming a contact anywhere in 1pm never leaves a row quietly showing the old one. The second line carries quick badges for the event type, the event date, and the guest count when they gave them, followed by a one-line preview of their message and any custom-field answers. If you run more than one form, the form's name shows at the end of the row so you know where the lead came from.

If a lead has replied to you and you haven't read it yet, a red "new" badge sits next to their name until you open the thread.

A small stage badge says how far the sale has got, such as Quote sent, Tentative or Awaiting payment. 1pm works it out from what has happened to the lead, so you never set it by hand. Hover it for a description of the stage. When a quote has passed its valid-until date the badge adds "lapsed", because the client can no longer accept it. The leads pipeline explains every stage.

If you've set a follow-up on a lead, the date shows as a badge on the second line: grey while it's still ahead, amber on the day, red once it's overdue. Click it to change or clear it.

Just to the right of the email there's a small badge saying where this lead's details actually live. Edit contact means the lead is tied to someone in your address book, and clicking it opens that contact. Edit lead means the name and email are the lead's own, and clicking it opens them for editing: first name, surname, email, phone, company, the event date and times, lead type, salesperson and category. Once the lead has an event, its date, times and Space belong to the event instead, so Edit lead leaves them out and links you to the event to change them. A linked contact's email carries a badge saying so, with a Clear button beside it if you need to break the link. A lead only shows a photo beside its name when it's tied to a contact, since that's the only place a photo can come from. Links between leads, contacts and events covers what the difference means in practice.

Working a lead

The buttons on each row change with where the lead sits in the pipeline:

On a New lead: Qualify to move it to Qualified, Create event to convert it straight away, or the bin icon to move it to spam.
On a Qualified lead: Create event, Lost to mark it dead, or move it to spam.
On a Converted lead: the name of the booking it became, and Mark inactive to file it away once things go quiet.
On an Inactive lead: Mark active to bring it back onto the Converted tab.
On a Lost lead: Reopen to move it back to Qualified. A quote you sent before marking a lead lost (or spam) can no longer be accepted by the client. If they try, you get a notification, and you can reopen the lead to let them accept.

To raise a quote, open the lead: Quote sits at the bottom right of the reply box, where you are once you've read the lead. It's there on New, Qualified and Converted leads (winning the work is often exactly when you need one, since a client-facing confirmation is built from a quote).

Once a lead has a booking, everything you can do to that booking sits in the ⋯ menu at the end of the row, which opens when you click it:

Edit event portal. The booking itself: the run of show, the crew, the requests. This is the live surface your crew and clients work in, which is why it carries a home icon and why it sits at the top.
Booking. The details form for the same booking: name, date, times, status, pax, Space, the briefing fields.
Billing. Straight to that booking's charges, invoices, and confirmations.
Lead details. The correctable fields on the lead itself: name, email, phone, company, lead type, salesperson and category, plus the event date and times until the lead has an event.
Move to qualified. Undo a conversion. The booking is kept and only the status moves.
Open the event portal for [their name]. Gives the client their own live link into the booking, so they can watch the run of show come together while the quote is still out. It appears only until they have one; after that a home icon sits beside their name on the row and opens exactly what they see. Covered in sharing the run of show with your client.
Mark inactive and Delete lead.

The first two are worth learning apart, because they are the pair people most often confuse. Edit event portal is the thing itself. Booking is the paperwork about it.

A lead also holds an optional start and end time alongside its date, and can be linked to an existing contact instead of carrying a typed name and email. Both pay off at conversion: the times flow onto the event, and a linked contact becomes the event's Client directly, skipping the email-matching step. An end time earlier than the start is read as finishing the next morning, which is what a late function usually means.

Qualifying isn't compulsory. If a lead is obviously real and ready, you can go straight from New to Create event. Qualify is there for the ones you want to hold and work on first. Converting a lead is covered in Turning a lead into an event, and raising a quote is covered in Quotes and invoices.

Replying without leaving the inbox

Click anywhere on a lead's row to open its conversation thread, where you can reply by email from inside 1pm and see everything they've sent back. That's covered on its own in Replying to leads.

The automated emails are in there too

The thread is not only what you typed. Every client-facing email 1pm sends against that lead is recorded in it and tinted, with an Automated badge, so it never reads as something you wrote by hand.

That covers the lead acknowledgement, automation emails, the event confirmation, and invoice sends including the deposit invoice. The point is that Leads holds the complete communication history: when a client says "nobody told me about the deposit", the thread answers it without a trip to your sent folder.

Two are deliberately left out. Appointment emails link to a contact and a Space rather than an event, so attributing one to a thread would mean guessing at which lead it belonged to. Payment receipts are not there because no such email exists yet.

Finding a lead you cannot place

The search box matches on name, email, phone, company, event type, and the name of the booking a lead became. That much it always did, but it only ever searched the tab you were standing on, which is no use when the whole problem is not remembering whether a lead went Qualified, Converted, or got marked as spam eighteen months ago.

Type into it now and a panel drops down under the field listing every matching lead from every tab at once, each badged with the tab it is actually on: New, Qualified, Converted, Lost, Inactive, Spam. Click one and you land on it, on the right tab and the right page of the pager. Press Enter instead and the current list filters exactly as it always did, and the "Also matching" chips are still there.

Spam and Inactive leads are in that panel on purpose. Those are the two places a lead you cannot find tends to be hiding, and leaving them out would make the panel useless for the one search that needed it.

Filtering by form

When you run more than one lead form, a form filter appears at the top right of the inbox. Leave it on All forms to see everything, or pick a single form to focus on just its leads. The filter holds as you move between tabs, so you can work one campaign's pipeline end to end.

Filtering by stage, and saved views

The Stage dropdown in the filter bar narrows the list to leads at one stage, such as everyone awaiting signature.

To keep a filter you use every day, open the Views menu at the end of the tab row and choose Save these filters as a view. A view saves the stage, lead type and Spaces under a name you choose, and looks across the New, Qualified and Converted tabs at once. The leads pipeline covers saved views in full, including opening one on the pipeline.

Leads whose event has already happened

The inbox shows the leads that are still work. A lead whose event has been and gone is not, so it is left out until you ask for it: tick Show past in the filter bar to bring them back. It is off by default, which mostly clears out the Converted and Lost tabs on any account with a season behind it.

Past means the last day of the event is before today on your account clock, so a party running to 1am is still current on the morning after. A lead with no event date is never treated as past: an undated lead has not happened, it just is not pinned down yet.

Once a lead has an event, the event's date and Space are the ones that count. The date on the lead's row, the event date and Space filters, and this past check all read the event, so moving an event to a new day or a different Space moves its lead with it.

The tab badges are unaffected. They stay the full stage totals they have always been, so ticking the box changes the list in front of you and never the numbers you report on.

Live updates

The inbox refreshes on its own. If a lead emails you back while you're looking at the list, their row updates with the unread badge without a reload. If you happen to have a thread open at the time, a small "new reply" prompt appears instead of refreshing the whole list, so your place (and any half-written reply) is never lost.

Keeping spam out

Forms filter bots before they ever reach you, so most junk never appears. For anything that slips through, the bin icon on a New or Qualified lead moves it to the Spam tab, where it's deleted automatically after 30 days. You don't have to clear it yourself, though the Spam tab does have a button to delete everything in it at once if you'd rather wipe it now. Marking something spam only hides it from your working tabs; it never emails the sender.

The leads pipeline covers the board of leads by stage, saved views and renaming the stages.
Capturing leads with a form covers building and embedding the forms that feed this inbox.
Replying to leads covers the two-way email thread and reply templates.
Turning a lead into an event covers converting a lead into a booking and a contact.
Sharing the run of show with your client covers the portal access you can grant straight from a lead row.