[Video Walkthrough] All About Leads

INTRO: WHAT IS A LEAD?
Before we get into the specifics, let’s first talk about what a LEAD is!

In short, a lead is an individual or company who is interested in your products or services and has given you contact information but has not booked you yet!   Now, the ultimate goal for your leads is that they would love the entire experience of their initial contact with as they navigate through your site and interact with Pixifi and decide to give you lots of money, at which point you would convert all that information they filled out for you into a CLIENT.  (mention the pre-req video too somewhere in that).

Before we start teaching you how to create a lead, we want to let you know (without stressing you out) that we have created multiple ways of automated lead creation (meaning you don’t have to create them manually like we’re about to show you because we are going to teach you how to get your leads to fill out all the information you need through inquiry forms on your sites that will feed the data they input into your Pixifi studio management software), but we still want you to know how to create a lead manually just so you can see how it fits into the big picture and so that you do know how to do it manually in case you ever have to make manual adjustments to an existing lead, take a lead while you’re on the phone with a client or (as I always recommend Pixifi users do), if you want to run test leads to be able to see from a client’s perspective what it’s like to interact with you via Pixifi, etc.

CREATING A LEAD MANUALLY (01:35):

In the left navigation bar, you will go to contacts, and then leads and you will see the leads module where all your leads will appear and in the top right corner you’ll see an “actions" button where you can add two types of leads.  The “add new lead" will create a lead that has all of the possible fields.  The “add quick lead" will only add the bare minimum fields when you’re just trying to add a quick lead.  Let’s add full lead:

On the add leads screen, you’ll see it’s broken into 4 distinct quadrants.  In the contact info section, it’s broken into 4 different contacts within this one lead record.  It is set up this way so that each client (bride, groom, emergency contacts, etc.) associated with this lead/eventual client are together in one profile but can still be contacted individually.  Even though, you are viewing all 4 quadrants together on one plane, you will see eventually when we get into the “all about events" section that many separate events with their own powerful functions all tied to the same event.  Hopefully they will come back to book multiple events with your company.

ADDING A (full) NEW LEAD: (02:01)

I’m going to fill in some sample data and create a new lead. Once you hit create leads it takes you to the create leads profile.  You can edit your lead at any time by clicking this edit button up here on the top right and anywhere you see the dotted lines is an in-line edit for time saving purposes.   For example, let’s say you have a newborn session scheduled for 1/1/2020 and oops, the baby had different plans and now your session is being held on 12/5/2019.  You can simply locate the event date, click on the section with the dotted lines, and a date picker will drop down for you to update the event date.  We added this little time saving feature throughout the site so that you don’t always have to take the long route, by clicking EDIT>> changing the data, and then clicking update to take you back to the lead profile screen.  So, just remember, any time you see those little dotted lines throughout our software, you should take advantage of in-line editor because it’s a huge time saver.  Imagine you take 2 minutes to change a client’s event date or phone number or start time, end time, etc by opening up the edit screen rather than just using the in-line editor, and you do this a few times a day which is very possible.  Over the course of one month, you will have spent 5 hours a month just tweaking lead data and anyone who can do basic math can see the value in saving themselves 60 hours a year that they could have doing something more productive, or better yet spending almost two weeks on vacation with your family or friends!  

For the sake of minimizing your stress level as you continue to follow along, we are going to breeze over these tabs you see within the leads profile and jump right into the CONTACT tab for now.  You’ll see a big compose button where a pop-up email composition window will appear.  The way this functions should be very familiar, but we’ll go over some details real quick.  When you click the recipient field, all possible contact emails associated with this lead will drop down and you can click to choose who you want to include.  If you need to send an email or cc someone on any specific email who doesn’t appear within this drop down menu, you can simply type in whatever email address you wish to contact and click COMMA or SPACE to let the system know that you’re done typing the email address.  If you don’t do this, it won’t send it to them, so make sure you don’t skip that step.

Next, the email templates in the editor will only show up if you have created email templates designated to be sent to leads.  We’re gonna pause learning about leads for the moment for me to just show you what I mean by that, which is also something you will learn more about in Class 105 which goes in depth about email templates and how they function.

So follow me on this little rabbit trail real quick.  On your side navigation bar, we are going to click on “TEMPLATES" and then select “EMAIL TEMPLATES."   All email templates are assigned a type.  For the purpose of this video, you can see that there are a few template emails of each type including “LEADS"  These templates are going to be emails that you find yourself writing over and over again within your workflow and in order to save time, you can type out your typical message with variables which we will get into in much more depth in video 105, but they basically just auto-fill certain portions of each email sent with data that is attached to each client’s profile, such as their name, event date, invoice balance, and so many other things that make each email sent very personalized and relevant, even though the overall message is a generic one for that stage or purpose in your workflow.  So, the reason we showed you this real quick right now is to explain that ONLY templates that are assigned the “LEAD" type will show up in your drop down menu when you are composing an email from within a LEAD.  This helps to keep templates organized and even fool-proof if there are many hands in the cookie jar in your studio.

Once you select the email template you want, you’ll notice that those variables have been replaced with client-specific data without you having to do any of that work.  Just click send.

Let’s talk about the “OTHER EVENTS" section you’ll find below EVENT INFO within the LEAD INFO tab of your lead profile.  This section is intended for any other type event other than your main event.  For example, phone consultations, in-person appointments, or any other pre-booking meetings that you want on your calendar and in your client record once they officially book their event with you.

Let’s just pretend that you’ve done everything right and this lead just isn’t responding.  Instead of deleting the lead to remove clutter on your dashboard, you should instead archive the lead so that you maintain a clean listing while also being able to track the reason why a lead has not converted into a client/sale for your own analytics for growth and improvement.  Along with these drop-down archive reasons, you can also create your own custom archive reasons.  LEADS>>ARCHIVE REASONS>>CUSTOM REASONS

Another action that we get into more depth about in EXTRA CREDIT is the option to share leads with other studios that use Pixifi.  You can just send the lead along to their account, which creates a copy of the lead information that appears within the other studio’s lead dashboard.

The optimal fate of one of your leads is to be converted into a paying CLIENT!  We aren’t going to get into the fastest way of converting a lead into a client right now, which would be to create a proposal where the client selects what services and products they want which populates their invoice, prompts them to sign a contract, and make their retainer payment all from one link, subsequently converting them automatically into one of your paying clients.  For the sake of learning how some of these pieces fit together, we will actually book this lead manually.

Go up to the top right corner, click ACTIONS, convert lead into client manually.  Then a screen will pop up explaining what will happen and also giving you the option to automatically apply a workflow to your event.  We’ll get into workflows in the Junior level, class 301.

Click convert lead, and it will bring you to the brand new event.  You’ll notice up at the top right navigation you will see those familiar VIEW/EDIT and ACTIONS buttons, but now, below them you will also see what I call a breadcrumb trail showing you where you’ve been and where you are now and you can click on any of these items within it to quickly navigate back to where you just were without going all the way back out to where you started.  You can even right click and view any of your previous steps in a new tab so you don’t even have to leave the screen you’re on!

Your client is booked!  You’ll see all these tabs within their event profile but we aren’t going to get into all of those pieces just yet.  We know you’re salivating but just bear with us, we are still focusing on leads!

So, now we’re going to talk about the leads module.  I want to show you how to filter your leads which is important for your ability to focus on what you’re trying to work with.  For example, let’s just say you pulled up your leads list and saw 200 leads in a massive list but only wanted to analyze your wedding leads for the upcoming year.  How would you do this?  It’s EASY!  This interface should feel familiar to you because it functions similarly to any filterable database like iTunes Library, Spotify playlists, or even something as simple as your contacts app on your phone!  You can click on FILTER OPTIONS on the top of your screen and you will be presented with a list of all the possible ways that you can filter your leads listing.  For example you can say show me only the leads that have a event date in the next calendar year who specifically had a referral source set as “The Knot."  Boom.  Now you’ve got a very specific segment of your leads right in front of you!

Speaking of referral sources, when a lead is entered, whether manually or automatically, there is a field for referral source where either you or your lead can tell you how they found you.  This information doesn’t really do anything for you until you link it up with your mini-database of referral sources which can then become useful to your analytical and organizational purposes.  For example, if someone writes “facebook" how they found you, you want to link that up with your FACEBOOK referral source record so that you can analyze this data later to know how you’re getting the most business and where you may need to focus your efforts or stop focusing your efforts!

So now we’re going to show you how you can manage that mini referral source database.  Go to contacts, then leads, then you’ll see the referral source tab.  Here you will see charts and a listing of all your documented referral sources so you can get a handle on how your business is coming to you!

If you scroll down past the charts to the listing of referral sources, you can view how many referrals you have from each source on any given year which you can specify by changing the calendar year in the little “change year" drop down menu.  From here you can view a detailed list of all the clients or leads linked to a referral source in any given year.  (CREDITS)

One very frequently asked question that I’d like to go over here for you is when a current client inquires about another session with you and either they or you create another lead for the event they’re attempting to book with you.  As long as it has the same email address, the system will warn you that this email address is already attached to an existing client within your system and prompt you to merge your lead info with your existing client info.  When you convert this linked lead, it won’t update their client information with any of the lead information…. It will only add their event to your existing client’s record.  For example, say you have Jane Doe as a bride one year and she has a whole elaborate client record with her apartment at the time of her wedding and all of her pre-wedding information, and Jane inquires about one of your fall mini-sessions with her family two years later as Jane Adeer and cites her new home as her new address, none of this new information about her will automatically update your old existing information, so you will want to do this before you “convert" her lead over.  This may seem inconvenient but imagine if Jane Adeer, confident that you will remember all of her necessary information when she books her mini session, only fills out her name and email address as she submits her inquiry form.  If these fields were to automatically update to her newest lead info, her empty fields would actually replace all the existing client data you had for her, resulting in a loss of data within Pixifi with no way to recover it!

MANAGING LEADS (08:24)
When you’re viewing your main lead listing, you’ll notice there are little “NEW!" icons next to each of your leads which are new.  To mark any lead as not new, you’ll click on the button at the top right of the screen to edit it.  In this section you’ll see a toggle button to mark the lead “READ" and the listing will no longer show up as “NEW" when you adjust this.

In addition to READ and UNREAD, you also have an option called PRIORITY, no, low, medium, and high and those can be adjusted under “ACTIONS" and “change priority".  Each priority level is color coded accordingly.

One of the first tools you will probably want to use within the LEADS module is the STATUSES.  When you click the Top tab to open STATUSES, you will be prompted to allow Pixifi to set up some “Dummy Statuses" for you; we recommend you allow this because you can change them at any time and this at least gets you started.  You can change or rename any of these statuses (and add your own) as you begin refining your process!

CLOSING REMARKS (20:02)

Thank you for taking the time to learn all about LEADS.  In this video, we covered what a lead is, how to create leads manually, and managing leads.  We also talked about archiving leads, lead statuses..  If you’re feeling extra studious and ready to tackle LEADS more in-depth, please check out the EXTRA CREDIT section for this video where you will learn about the lead statuses in more detail and the pipeline tool, sharing leads, importing leads, lead automation, and more.
If you’d prefer to move on to the next lesson, check out “All About Clients: 102."  

EXTRA CREDIT FOR THIS “CLASS" (00:18)
Welcome to extra credit for “ALL about leads."  All of the things we are going to cover in this video aren’t required to function within the LEADS module, but if you learn how to implement them, you’ll be managing your leads like a boss.

First, we want to talk about Lead statuses.  Lead statuses work like tags or labels like you can say “this is a new lead" nothing special about it.  We’ve defaulted this to green because it’s new (like grass) in the sample lead statuses that we populate for you.  Keep in mind you can fully customize this at any time to your preferences.

When you click on the pencil you’ll see the normal properties associated with that lead status but you will also see “AUTOMATION ACTIONS" below where you can do some really cool stuff within each status.

So, when a lead status is applied to a lead you can have it automatically fire off a workflow template.  This template can generate tasks for you to complete, schedule emails to be sent off, and even select questionnaires to be sent automatically without you doing anything manually!  For example, if you are out to dinner with your kids and an eager bride fills out your inquiry form (along with 5 other studios’ forms), your software can immediately touch base with them with a custom-written (in your voice) personalized email, complete with an attached questionnaire to get some preliminary information from the client about their day, or even send them pricing guide PDF, etc.  Statistics show that the more engaged you can get a potential client to be with your company as early as possible in their search for a vendor, the more likely you are to seal the deal.  When they are making the effort to scour websites and fill out out inquiry forms, they are invested in the process IN THAT MOMENT, and that’s where you want to catch them, while they’re still emotionally invested in you and your brand.

In addition to applying a workflow template automatically, you can also have a lead status switch to another lead status automatically.  The value of that action is that the lead automatically begins moving through YOUR customized and organized process of becoming a client without you having to do anything manually.  In other words, you are organized and methodical as you control every aspect of their experience as they interact with your brand BEFORE you even tip your waitress!  Whether you have one inquiry or a thousand within a day, they each get the exact same uniform and wonderful experience as they interact with your brand!!!  Giving all of your leads and clients the same (predictable) experience is HUGE when it comes to brand consistency, confidence in your professionalism, and even word of mouth down the line!  TWERK IT like Miley  (tweak it)

Extra Credit: Lead Management using Lead Statuses + pipeline (00:41)
The pipeline tool lets you visually manage your leads and drag and drop them into different statuses!!!  If you choose to or simply need to manage your leads manually, this makes that process way easier and quicker!

Extra Credit: Sharing Leads (01:28)
In the event that you are booked or don’t desire to do the type of session that is inquiring about your services, you can SHARE your lead with another Pixifi studio, while saving all of this lead’s information.  
BEFORE you can do this, you’d have to make contacts within the pixifi group and share your pixifID numbers.  Once you have this, you can go to SETTINGS, Sharing, and you can create a one-way sharing of that specific lead’s information.  You would also have to give this friend YOUR pixifID number if you want them to be able to share leads with you!

So, after you have them listed within your sharing studios, you go back to the lead, and to the actions button on the top right and click “SHARE LEAD."  A drop down  box of all the studios you share with will appear and you can select your preferred studio.  Once the studio is selected, you will see a second drop down box containing the lead types that the OTHER studio has set up for themselves.  You will want to select whichever lead type they have to choose from that most closely resembles the event-type this lead chose for their event.  

Extra Credit: Importing Leads (02:36)
Some of you attend Bridal Shows or other events where you receive spreadsheets worth of names of leads or you may want to import your entire database of contacts from before you began using Pixifi into your new Pixifi database.  To do this, you would go to LEADS then click the ACTIONS button and click Import Leads.  From here you can select your file from your computer but it MUST be in .CSV format (there is a little information bubble that will drop down instructing you how to do this!).  Once you choose your file, the column mapper will try to guess how your file’s columns best match database fields for each lead.  Some may link up perfectly, while others may need some direction from you, but the whole purpose of this is so that your information from your external file is pulled into pixifi correctly.  Once you link up the fields the way you want them to populate, they will do so for your entire document, creating as many individual leads as you have rows in your spreadsheet!   Click “import data" and watch it work it’s magic!

Extra Credit: Automatic Leads (03:35)
There are two ways to acquire automatic leads.  The first way is to use our pixifi inquiry form which you can embed on your website (you can customize this form which we’ll you in a minute).  The second way is for those of you who already have a beautiful form that sends lead info to your email that you really love and want to continue using but don’t want to have to manually input the information from those emails (or better yet, want pixifi to begin it’s automated contact process for you!).  

Pixifi Inquiry forms:
Under SETTINGS, BRANDS, select the brand you want to create an inquiry for.  Next, select the “INQUIRY FIELDS" tab and you will be able to control which fields are visible and which ones are required.  At the top, you will see the link to two versions of your inquiry form.  The top one is meant to to be imbedded into a website or facebook page and the bottom one has your logo and is meant to be a stand alone page.  

In the text fields below, you can change the Contact Field Names and toggle whether it’s visible or not visible or require or not required for the form to send.    It defaults to the large calendar for the date picker so you might want to change it to the small calendar (some people prefer the smaller calendar).

Since these processes are often website-specific depending on your hosting website, and subject to change fairly frequently, we will actually provide written instructions on how to imbed this link into various different websites.  You will find these in the written transcripts of this video below.

Settings>>External Integrations if you want to stick to your existing inquiry form, you can use external integration by clicking SETTINGS, then select External Integrations, and that first tab you come to is your lead email address where you’ll send results to for pixifi to sort out for you into a lead.  We recommend you thoroughly read the how-to document imbedded on this page before implementing this tool.

Extra Credit: Lead Automation: Advanced Features (05:19)
You may be wondering by now if you haven’t noticed this yet, that you are able to have multiple “BRANDS" which are like mini-companies within your one pixifi account, depending upon your subscription level.  The benefits of this are that if your studio reaches a point where you feel the need to specialize to meet the needs of different types of client bases such as Weddings and Engagements versus Maternity, Newborn, Family, etc, you can do this while still sharing one huge database of client history and information.  Instead of having to create multiple pixifi accounts for each of your sub-brands you are instead able to all function from within the same large database while still being able to filter to your specific brand and what you want to see.

From within each of your brands, you can determine the path your automated leads take, guiding

their overall experience as they interact with your brand.  

When you go to SETTINGS, EDIT BRAND, and choose which brand you’d like to work on, you can control your inquiry automation by selecting that tab on the top of this section.  The first thing you see is an inquiry form success message which you can customize to say whatever you’d like.  This message alerts the lead upon submission that it has successfully gone through!  The inquiry form success URL (found below this box) can actually send your lead to a desired page within your site and let them know their inquiry form went through.  The benefit of this is that you can control the next part of their experience by redirecting them to what you want them to look at next, be that your pricing guide, a gallery of gorgeous images, or a page of testimonials from your past (thrilled) clients!  :-)

You can also have Pixifi send an automatic email to your leads either generally or sending out event-specific lead responses.  To edit these Response types you can select from the dropdown menu, but you will have to set these up as email templates first which you will do in CLASS 105.  You can also automatically apply event-type specific workflow templates as well to these leads, which will teach you how to do in CLASS 301.  

You can also automatically apply a lead status that goes to those leads here (which what we taught earlier in this video). (Extra Credit: Lead Management using Lead Statuses + Pipeline).  You MUST set this up if you want to use the automated lead status feature.

Extra Credit: Lead Archiving and Tracking Archivals (07:32)
If a lead for whatever reason does not book you and continue on, rather than just deleting their data you can archive the lead to remove them from your main listing and track the reason why they didn’t book you so that you can gather data about your leads and how to possibly improve your process in the future to retain any future leads who may not book for similar reasons.

The system comes with 13 default reasons for archival but you can add your own.  To manage those archive reasons you would just go to CONTACTS, Leads, “Archive Reasons" tab, and if you want to add a new one you just click on the “[+] add new reason" button

Now that you’ve created all these reasons Let’s show you how to archive a lead.
Just navigate to CONTACTS, Leads and then you can archive them 2 different ways.
You can either click on the “Actions" button here in the listing, and then click on “Archive Lead"  

Or you can click on the lead you want to archive, go into their profile, and then at the top right, click on the “Actions" button and then click on “Archive Lead" .
Both options will then prompt you to choose the reason for archiving the lead. Then click save, and the Lead will be archived ;)  This may seem like unnecessary work for you but it is useful for many reasons.  1) sometimes a lead is on the fence about using your services, tries another studio and then comes to you and if they were deleted you would have to recreate all their data.  That’s just one example.  Also, it’s very helpful to be able to visualize the trends that seem to be emerging regarding your lead losses so that you can begin to analyze how to improve your practices for better lead retention (aka MORE BOOKINGS = MORE MONEY!)   If you start to see that a lot of your leads are hiring competitors you can try to figure out why like is it price point or could you be offering something more that you’re currently not?  Are you taking too long to respond to your initial contact?  (perhaps because you’re not using the automation feature?  :-))  etc…

Just like it is helpful to analyze where your leads are coming from (referral sources) it is also very helpful to understand where they are going and why.

Thank you for taking the extra time to explore this extra credit section!  We hope that these little extra tools and tips help you to acquire the skills and confidence to continue killin’ it!