Working your leads

Leads is where you work the sales inquiries InboxAgent finds. When an email is recognized as a sales inquiry, a lead appears here automatically with the original message attached, so you can read what actually came in without going back to your mailbox.

Find it in the left-hand menu, under Inbox activity.

What a lead is

A lead is the whole job, from the first inquiry until you win or lose the work. It is not a reminder to reply to an email. Nothing here counts how long something has gone unanswered, because a lead that has been sitting in Negotiation for a fortnight is not one anybody is ignoring.

The stages

Every lead starts at New and ends at Won or Lost. In between are three stages you can use as they are: Contacted, Proposal sent and Negotiation.

New, Won and Lost are fixed, because reporting needs stable ends. Everything between them is yours: rename, reorder, add and remove them under Customize. Removing a stage never deletes the leads in it: the confirmation tells you which stage they will move to, and they are moved there for you.

Two ways to look at the board

Table is the full list, with paging, and it is what you get by default. Board shows your pipeline as columns, one per stage, with each lead as a card you can drag from one column to the next. Whichever you pick is remembered on that browser, so you land back where you left off.

Dragging works with a mouse. On a phone, or if you would rather not drag, every card has a Move to control that does the same thing.

Group by changes what the columns mean. Leave it on Stage to see the pipeline. Switch it to Owner to see columns per person instead, and then moving a card hands the lead to someone else rather than advancing it.

The board shows your hundred most recent leads. If you have more than that it says so, and the table is where you page through all of them.

What you can do with a lead

Click any row to open it. From there you can:

• Move it through the stages. Every move is recorded, so you can see how long a lead spent at each stage and who moved it.
• Give it an owner. Anyone in your workspace can own a lead. Leave it unassigned until somebody picks it up.
• Add notes. What was said on the call, what you quoted, what happens next. Paste a link to a document and it becomes clickable, so you can point at a quote or drawing in whatever storage you already use.
• Read the original email, when the lead came from one.
• Add things to do, with a due date. Anything still open and past its date is flagged as overdue on the lead. InboxAgent does not email you a reminder; the list is the reminder.

Admins and Members can make these changes. Viewers can see the board but not change it, which is how Viewer works everywhere else in InboxAgent.

Making the board yours

Admins get a Customize button on the board. Two things live there:

• Stages — rename, reorder, add and remove the ones between New and Won.
• Fields — up to ten extra things to record on a lead, each one text, a number or a date. A job number, a site address, a survey date. They then appear on every lead. Removing a field also removes what was recorded in it, and it says so before you confirm.

Export gives you a CSV of the leads you can see, for a spreadsheet or an accountant. Any fields you added yourself come with it, one column each.

Admins can also delete a lead. That removes its notes, tasks and history with it and cannot be undone, so it is meant for something created by mistake, or a contact who has asked to be erased. A real inquiry that did not convert belongs in Lost, not deleted.

Leads that did not arrive by email

Plenty do not. Use New lead to add one that came in over the phone, by WhatsApp, or any other way, and record where it came from so your board reflects all of your inquiries rather than only the ones that happened to be emails.

You can put a value on a lead too, in whichever currency you quoted, though nothing requires it.

If you already use a CRM

Nothing changes. If you have Zoho CRM or HubSpot connected, your leads still go there exactly as before. They simply also appear here. InboxAgent is not asking you to move your sales process, and you can carry on ignoring this screen entirely if your CRM is where your team works.

If you have no CRM connected, this is where your leads live. Before, an inquiry we recognized had nowhere to go and Inbox activity said so. Now it has somewhere, and Inbox activity says it was handled.

Who sees what

Everyone in your workspace can see the board, and users are free.

One exception, and it is the existing one: if an admin has limited somebody to certain mailboxes, they only see leads from those mailboxes. Leads that somebody added by hand have no mailbox, so everybody sees them.

See also: Inbox activity, Categories explained.