A client fills in your website form on Tuesday. On Wednesday, a planner you've worked with before calls about a new job. On Thursday, someone forwards you an email from a client's new office manager. Then on Friday, the whole team heads off to run a three-day conference.
But here’s the big question: by the next Monday, how many of those got a reply?
In most B2B event businesses, inquiries turn up all over the place, and often these coincide with your busiest event months. That's exactly when they slip. This guide covers how to keep one list of every open inquiry, make it clear who owns each one, and keep things moving while the team is on-site. If you're still deciding whether you need a CRM at all, start with our guide to CRM for event companies.
Why inquiries go cold in peak season
Your busiest months for delivering events tend to be your busiest months for inquiries too. When you're choosing between the client in front of you and an email from someone new, the client wins every time. So the email waits.
The trouble is that corporate clients often don't wait with it. Events tend to be booked at fairly short notice, so by the time an inquiry reaches you, the client may want an answer within days. If you're slow to reply, there's a good chance they'll have booked someone else by the time you get back to them.
It doesn't help that inquiries arrive through so many different routes, and that nobody is quite sure who's picking each one up.
Keep one list of open inquiries
The first fix is to make sure every inquiry ends up in the same place, however it arrived. Here's how that works in practice.
Web forms
Send website inquiries straight into your list rather than to an inbox someone has to remember to check. In Capsule, website form lead capture does this for you.
Log emails against the client so the rest of the team can see them. If you connect Gmail or Outlook to Capsule, inquiry emails are saved to the right record automatically.
Phone
After a call, jot down who called, what they're after, and when they need an answer. It only takes a minute, and it means the inquiry doesn't live in one person's head.
Agency and planner intros
When an agency or planner introduces a client, log the inquiry and note who made the intro. You'll know who to thank, and over time you'll see which relationships bring in the most work.
Make it clear who owns each inquiry
If an inquiry lands in a shared inbox, everyone assumes someone else has picked it up. If it lands in one person's inbox, it sits there until they're back. Either way, nobody follows it up.
As soon as an inquiry comes in, give it to one person and set a next step with a date. "Call back Thursday to confirm numbers and dates" gets done. "Pending" usually doesn't. A five-minute check each morning for anything without an owner, or anything overdue, will catch most of what would otherwise slip.
A simple pipeline helps here too. Most event businesses only need a few stages, such as Inquiry, Proposal sent, Follow-up, and Booked, so everyone can see where each inquiry is and who has it.
What happens when the team is on-site
For a small team, the biggest risk is everyone being at the same event at once. A bit of planning before your busy season makes a big difference.
Before a big event, hand any open inquiries to whoever's staying in the office, and make sure they can see the full history. If nobody is staying behind, check the day's follow-ups from your phone during the quieter moments. If you use an out-of-office, tell people when they'll hear back, and make sure they do.
It's also worth agreeing your follow-up plan before peak season starts, because you won't have time to work it out in the middle of it. A simple version might be to reply and confirm the brief on day 0, send the proposal on day 2, check it's arrived on day 5, chase a decision on day 12 and send a final check-in on day 21.
How Capsule helps
You don't need a complicated sales tool built for a big sales team. Capsule gives you one list of every open inquiry, with an owner and a next step on each. Inquiries from web forms and email go straight in, and the iOS and Android apps let you log a call or check your tasks from the venue.
Tracks let you save your follow-up plan and apply it to a new inquiry in one click. On the Growth plan, Workflow Automation can also create a follow-up task as soon as a deal moves to Proposal sent. Find out more about follow-ups in Capsule.
Final thoughts
Any inquiry you win in peak season could turn into a client who books with you every year. Put all your inquiries in one list, give each one an owner, and agree how you'll cover things while you're on-site, and you'll lose far fewer of them. See how Capsule works for event companies.
Once those inquiries turn into bookings, our guide to winning repeat corporate event bookings explains how to get them back next year. And if you rent out equipment or book talent, take a look at our guides to event rental CRM and CRM for speaker bureaus.
Try Capsule free for 14 days, no credit card required. Or, if you'd rather start with a spreadsheet, download our free Inquiry-to-Booking Tracker.
Frequently Asked Questions
It's how an event business captures, assigns and follows up new inquiries, from first contact through to booked or lost. In practice, that means one list of open inquiries, with an owner and a dated next step for each one.
As soon as you reasonably can, and always with a clear next step. If clients book on short notice, a slow first reply can mean they've already moved on.
Yes. Website form lead capture adds inquiries straight into Capsule, and the Gmail and Outlook integrations keep email inquiries on the right record.
