Links between leads, contacts and events — Help

Three things in 1pm hold the people you work with, and they sit in a line: a contact is a person or business in your address book, a lead is an enquiry from one of them, and an event is the job you booked off the back of it. Most of the confusion people run into with 1pm is really one question wearing different hats: when I change a name, an email or an address, which of the three am I changing?

This article draws the line between them, shows how to tell at a glance which one a lead is using, and explains what happens to all of it when a lead becomes an event.

The short version

Contacts is your address book. One record per person or business, used everywhere.
A lead either points at a contact, or holds its own name and email typed straight onto the enquiry.
When a lead becomes an event, one contact ends up as that event's Client, and the lead is tied to that same contact from then on.
Money documents (quotes, invoices, confirmations) address themselves to the event's Client. Change the Client, and future documents follow.

If you only remember one thing: the lead is the enquiry, the contact is the person, and the event's Client is the join between them.

Contacts is one book, not several

Open Contacts in the sidebar and you have every person and business you deal with: clients, crew, suppliers, celebrants, the AV company, the couple getting married. There is no separate "clients" list and no separate "suppliers" list. The same record can be the client on one event and crew on another, which is exactly what happens when a caterer books their own job with you in March and works one of yours in April.

Open a contact and it carries tabs across the top: Details, Events, Appointments, Emails and Requests. That is the whole history of your relationship with that person in one place, which is the payoff for keeping one record per person rather than three.

A lead starts life one of two ways

From an enquiry form. Someone fills in your form and 1pm creates a lead from what they typed. It is not linked to anything, because 1pm has no way to know whether the person typing is already in your book. The name and email live on the lead itself.

Added by hand. When you add a lead yourself, the Add lead modal has an Existing contact field at the top. Search and pick someone and the lead is linked from the moment it is created. Leave it blank and type the details instead, and you get the same shape as a form lead.

Both are legitimate. A linked lead is the tidier one, but it is only available when the person is already in your book.

Telling which is which, on the row

Every lead in the inbox shows a small badge to the right of the email address, and it says which of the two you are looking at:

Edit contact, with the Contacts icon, means this lead is tied to a contact. Clicking it opens that contact so you can fix a name, an email or an address without leaving the lead.
Edit lead means it is not tied to anything. Its name and email are the lead's own, so clicking it opens the lead's details.

The avatar to the left of the name says the same thing more quietly. A lead only shows one when it is tied to a contact, because a photo can only ever come from a contact record. A lead with no avatar has no contact behind it yet.

What changes when a lead is linked

The contact becomes the source of truth for who the lead is. Three fields move house:

Email
Phone
Company name

They disappear from the Edit lead modal, because editing them there would be editing a copy. Change them on the contact instead, which is what the Edit contact badge is for.

Everything else stays on the lead where you would expect it: the event date, start and end times, the Space, the category, which form it came from, and the salesperson who owns the sale.

Behind the scenes the lead does keep its own copy of the name and email, as a fallback. You never edit that copy directly, and it is only there so that deleting the contact leaves the lead readable rather than blank.

Turning a lead into an event

Click Create event on a lead and what happens next depends on whether it is linked.

If the lead is linked to a contact, there is nothing to decide. 1pm tells you who the client will be and you confirm.

If it is not linked, you get a short matching step. 1pm looks for contacts that already have the lead's email address and offers them, alongside Pick a different contact (a search over your whole address book) and Create a new contact. Take a match where there is one, search for the person where you know you already have them, and create a fresh contact only when they are genuinely new.

Either way, one contact comes out the other end, and it does two jobs:

It becomes the event's Client.
The lead is tied to it, so the lead's badge now reads Edit contact and the two agree from then on.

The same thing happens when a client accepts a quote, which creates the event for you without anyone clicking Create event.

The lead also hands over its date, its start and end times, its Space, its guest count and its salesperson. A lead and its event are strictly one to one: an event belongs to at most one lead, and a lead points at one event.

Client, Organizer and crew on the event

An event names contacts in three different roles, and they are not interchangeable:

Client. Whose event it is. This is the one money and portals key off, and the one conversion sets for you.
Organizer. The operational point of contact, when that is somebody different: an in-house coordinator, or the planner running the day on the client's behalf. Optional, and often left blank.
Crew. Everyone working the event, added on the event itself and given filtered access to the run of show.

All three come from the same Contacts book. Someone can be Client on one event and crew on the next.

One thing that is deliberately not a contact: the salesperson on a lead or event is one of your own 1pm users, not an address-book entry. It records who owns the sale internally.

What the Client contact drives

Once an event has a Client, that link is doing real work:

Quotes, invoices and confirmations are addressed to the event's current Client, including the free-text Address & To details on that contact (a postal address, a "make out to" name, a tax or business number). If you re-point an event's Client, later documents follow the change.
The client portal link, when you issue one, goes to that contact.
The Emails tab on the contact shows what has been sent to them.

Before an event exists, a quote raised straight off a lead is addressed to the lead's own name and email instead. That is the one place the copy on the lead is used rather than the contact, and it is why a quote raised very early can carry a slightly different address to one raised after the event exists.

Watch out for duplicate contacts

Matching at the Create event step is done on the email address, and nothing else. That is deliberate, since an address is the only thing that identifies somebody reliably. But it means a client who enquires from a work address one year and a personal one the next matches nothing, and taking the default would give you two contacts for one person with their history split across both.

Three habits avoid it:

When the matching step offers you an existing contact, take it rather than creating a fresh one. 1pm says so at that step for a reason.
When it offers you nothing but you know you have the person already, use Pick a different contact on that same step and search for them by name.
On a lead from someone you recognise, you can also link them up front with Existing contact in Edit lead, before you get anywhere near creating the event.

Deleting a contact

Deleting a contact does not delete anything they were on. 1pm unhooks them first: events lose them as Client or Organizer, and any lead tied to them falls back to the name and email it was keeping. The events, leads and their documents all survive. What you lose is the link, so anything that depended on it (invoice addressing, portal access) needs pointing at somebody again.

Fixing a wrong link

Wrong contact on a lead. Open Edit lead and use Clear contact in the Existing contact field, then either link the right one or type the details by hand.
Wrong event on a lead. Use Unlink in the lead's overflow menu. The event is kept, and both sides are free to be linked elsewhere. A converted lead has to be moved back to Qualified first. Unlinking the event leaves the lead's contact link alone, so clear that separately if it was wrong too.
Wrong Client on an event. Change the Client field on the event. Documents you have already sent keep the details they were sent with; new ones use the new Client.

One thing to know about replies

Replies you send from a lead's thread go to the address stored on the lead. When you change the email on a contact, that change reaches the lead the next time the lead's details are saved, not instantly. If you have just corrected a client's address on their contact record and the thread still looks wrong, open Edit lead on that lead and save it, and the two line back up.

Turning a lead into an event covers the conversion step itself, including the contact-matching screen, in full.
Adding contacts into 1pm covers what a contact record holds and the ways to get people into the book.
Working the leads inbox covers the pipeline tabs and reading a lead row.
Tagging and filtering contacts covers keeping a large address book navigable.
Capturing enquiries with a form covers the forms that create unlinked leads in the first place.