Working the leads inbox — Help

Every submission from your enquiry 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 enquiries, 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 by form, and how spam is handled.

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 enquiries 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. Enquiries 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".

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. 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 enquiry 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.

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, Quote to raise a quote for it, or the bin icon to move it to spam.
On a Qualified lead: Create event, Quote, Lost to mark it dead, or move it to spam.
On a Converted lead: the name of the booking it became, Quote (winning the work is often exactly when you need one, since a client-facing confirmation is built from a quote), 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.

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 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 globe 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: email, event date and times, linked form, category.
Move to qualified. Undo a conversion. The booking is kept and only the status moves.
Add [their name] to portal. 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 globe 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 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 an enquiry 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 enquiry 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.

Filtering by form

When you run more than one enquiry 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.

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.

Capturing enquiries 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.