Following up on leads — Help

Most event work goes out to three or four suppliers at once, and the one that stays in the conversation usually wins it. The problem is never that you meant to call back. It's that Tuesday's promise is buried under Wednesday's twelve new enquiries, and nothing on the screen remembers it for you.

A follow-up is 1pm remembering it for you. Put a date on a lead, say what the chase is for, and it appears on your Follow-ups queue on the day, next to every other lead going quiet without a plan.

This article covers setting a follow-up, the Follow-ups tab and its two halves, what counts as a lead with nothing scheduled, clearing the queue in bulk, turning the suggestions off, and how follow-ups show up on the rest of the inbox.

Setting a follow-up

There are two ways in, and they set the same thing.

From an open conversation. Expand a lead in the Leads inbox and look at the top right of the thread, next to the reply status. Click Set a follow-up. This is usually where you want it: you've just read what the client said, so you know when to chase and why.

From the row itself. Open the ellipsis menu on any lead row and choose Set a follow-up. Once a lead has one, its date shows as a badge on the row and clicking that badge opens the same box.

Either way you get three things:

Four shortcuts: Today, Tomorrow, 3 days and 1 week. Hover one and it tells you the day it lands on, so you're not doing the arithmetic yourself.
A date you can type. The box takes a date the way you'd say it: next thu, 15 may, fri, in 2 weeks. It writes back the day it settled on so you can see it took what you meant.
What for. One line saying why you're chasing: "call about the date clash", "send the revised quote", "check they got the menu". It's a note to yourself, and it's what makes the queue readable a week later when you've forgotten which lead was which.

Click Save. To call it off, open the same box and click Remove follow-up. That removes the note with it, and takes the lead off the Follow-ups queue rather than dropping it into the other half.

A lead carries one follow-up at a time. When you've made the call, set the next one or clear it.

The Follow-ups tab

A Follow-ups tab appears at the end of the tab bar in the Leads inbox as soon as there's something in it. If you've never set a follow-up and nothing has gone quiet, it isn't there at all.

The number on it counts everything in the queue. It's red when something is genuinely due, and amber when the only entries are leads with nothing scheduled. Hover it and it breaks the number down: "4 to follow up, 11 with none set".

The queue has two halves, in this order.

Due now. Every lead whose follow-up date has arrived or passed, oldest first. The one you promised to call on Friday sits above the one due this morning, because that's the order you owe them in.

A follow-up dated for the future is not here. Set one for next Tuesday and the lead drops off the queue until Tuesday, which is the point of setting it. You can still see it on the lead's own row in whichever tab it lives on.

Nothing scheduled. Qualified leads that have gone quiet with no follow-up planned. Nothing is wrong with any of them. Nobody has decided to do anything about them either, and that's the half of the pipeline that quietly disappears.

What puts a lead in "Nothing scheduled"

A lead lands here when all of these are true:

It's Qualified. New leads have their own tab with a red badge and are already the loudest thing on the page. Converted leads aren't in this list.
Nothing has moved on it for three days. That's counted from the last real step it took: the deposit, the signed agreement, the accepted quote, the client opening your quote, the quote going out, or, if none of those has happened yet, the day the lead arrived. A lead you quoted yesterday is not quiet, even if it first came in two months ago.
You don't already owe them a reply. If the client is waiting on you, the lead is on the Awaiting reply tab instead. It's the same job either way, and counting it twice would make both numbers untrustworthy.
No follow-up is set. Plan a chase and the lead leaves this half immediately.
You haven't already dismissed it. A lead you dismissed stays out until it takes a new step, and then goes quiet again.

Three days is fixed. It's short enough to matter when a client is talking to four caterers this week, and long enough that a lead you worked yesterday isn't nagging you.

Clearing the queue in bulk

Every row on the Follow-ups tab has a tick box beside it, and a bar above the list with Select all on this page.

Tick the leads you're done with and click Dismiss, and 1pm asks you to confirm before anything happens. Dismissing clears the follow-up date on those leads and takes them off this tab. Nothing is emailed, and the leads themselves don't change: they keep their status, their quotes, their thread and their place in whichever tab they live in.

When the queue runs past one page, a Dismiss all button appears next to it with the full number on it. That one covers the whole queue, not just the page you're looking at. If you have a search running, it covers what the search is showing and leaves the rest alone.

A dismissed lead comes back to the Follow-ups tab if it reaches a new stage, a quote going out or being opened, accepted, signed or paid, and then goes quiet again. A lead where nothing further happens stays dismissed. You can always set a follow-up on it by hand, and that puts it back on the queue for the day you name.

Turning off the suggestions

If you work by email and never set a follow-up date, the Nothing scheduled half is the only thing in your queue, and it grows on its own. You can switch it off.

Go to Leads, then Lead Types, and find the Follow-ups panel above your lead types. Turn Suggest quiet leads off and click Save.

With it off, the Follow-ups tab holds only the follow-ups you set a date on yourself. If you don't set any, the tab disappears from the inbox entirely. Everything else stays where it is: you can still set a follow-up on any lead, the follow-ups you've already set still come due, and nothing on your leads is changed or deleted. Turn it back on in the same place and the suggestions return.

The setting covers the whole account, so everyone working in it sees the same tab.

Follow-ups on the rest of the inbox

On the lead row. Once set, the date shows as a badge in the row's badge strip. Grey while it's still in the future, amber on the day, and red once it's overdue, with the day named: "Overdue, Fri 5 Sep". The note you wrote shows on hover. Click the badge to change or clear it.

On the sidebar. The red count on the Leads link in the sidebar includes leads with a follow-up due today, alongside untriaged leads and threads awaiting your reply. A lead that is more than one of those still counts once.

Leads with nothing scheduled are deliberately left out of that badge. They're a prompt to go and plan something, not a job for today, and a badge that never reaches zero because eleven old leads are quiet is a badge people stop reading.

Searching and filtering. The search box works on the Follow-ups tab like it does everywhere else. The Space, lead type and date filters don't apply here, the same as on Awaiting reply: this queue is about when you said you'd act, not about what kind of lead it is.

Working the leads inbox covers the tabs a follow-up sits alongside, and the rest of the row.
Replying to leads covers the conversation the follow-up control sits above, and the Awaiting reply tab.
Automations covers the chases 1pm can send on its own, which run alongside the ones you plan here.