How To Capture Leads and Convert Bookings

Leads are the bread and butter of what we do in the event and entertainment industry. Leads are prospective clients that are interested in your services but haven’t yet made a formal booking. 

How To Capture New Leads

We have designed a system to funnel your leads straight into BOS and then extract the proper information for future communication, invoicing and contract creation. It all begins with a simple lead form that captures all your new lead's details:

Here, on the lead page, you can clearly see the number of new leads that you have collected.

By clicking on any name on the list, you will get to see all the essential information captured by the Lead Form. This information is now ready to be used as auto population Tokens to create a new booking.

You can also see the progress of your Auto Follow-Up emails as well as past email exchanges. And yes, you can reply to their email directly on BOS.

Let's learn how to set your lead funnel up for success.

Customize Your Lead Form And Embed It On Your Website

The Lead Capture Forms is essentially a fancy contact form you embed on your band website that gathers all the essential information of your new Leads, including name, event location, and date of the event, as well as a list of your services they are interested in. It is a powerful tool to help you turn your leads into sales.

When you click “Edit Lead Form” on the main Leads page, you can customize your Lead Form and embed it on your website. When prospects submit your form, you’ll get a notification and your sequence of auto follow-up emails will begin.

Here, you get to select what information you would like the client to fill out for their initial inquiry. The name and email address fields are always mandatory, but you can choose to include or hide any other fields. 

You can also show your leads a selection of services you offer here in the "Services Selection". This will display a dropdown list of all your available services that propective clients can select from. You can even opt to display price ranges beside each service option so your clients can get a rough idea of your pricing.

If you need help setting up different Services, you can visit How to create a new member/role/service in the BOS Academy.

After you’ve created your Lead Capture Form there are three simple ways to make it work for you:

1. You can copy the share link and text/email it directly to your prospective client using the URL provided in the "Share or Preview" section.
2. You can copy & paste the HTML "Embed Code" directly into your website to display the form on any page you choose to collect leads from there. Reach out to our friendly chat support if you need help with this
3. You can click on the “preview” link and fill in the form yourself (maybe you’re talking to someone at your show and they are interested in booking your band) 

Automatically Follow Up With New Leads (Auto Follow-Up)

In order to secure new leads and turn prospective clients into paid customers, it is essential that we keep a timely stream of communication with them. BOS lets you set up a sequence of emails to be sent to each prospect after they submit your Lead Form. 

You can set up as many follow-up emails as you want, but the sequence will PAUSE if a prospect replies or if you pause it manually from any lead page.

Create Your First Auto Follow-Up Email

Before we jump into creating emails, let's go over our email creator options:

1. Subject: set a subject as you would for any email you send
2. Token: these are placeholders for key lead details, like client name or event date. Put your cursor where you'd like a token and choose one from the dropdown menu
3. Message Body: use this area to compose and format your message
4. Attachements: you can add any other document attachements, like pricing sheets, stage plots etc
5. Send email after: set a delay interval between email sends

If you need further help on working with new leads, be sure to check out our blog on running a music business.

Best Practices For Email Follow Sequences

First impressions are half the game. This is the first time you get to say hi to your client, so make it count! Here's how to make a simple but killer email template that will give you exactly what you need to get a conversation going.

We like our initial email to contain:

1. A hook
2. A welcome message
3. What my company sells
4. A sales pitch/call to action
5. A link to demo

Try not to be too wordy though as you don’t want to turn them off with a 2000 word essay to read. If you do it right, you should have plenty of chances to make a sales pitch later on in the game. And make sure you include some samples of your service (i.e. links, pdf, or videos) so they can get a taste of what’s in store for them.

MAKE IT SOUND PERSONAL! Although nowadays people generally take it for granted that these emails are “computerized automatic responses”, it’s still important to consider wording and the timing of delays because we don’t want it to sound like just another spam email. You can use the Tokens here to make sure you’re always calling new leads by their first names.

Here's what ours look like

How Many Follow Up Emails Should You Send And When?

From the experience of running event bands, we feel that the 3 - 3 - 3 - 5 - 7 - 7 model really works well for us.

It is a series of 6 emails sent with delays:

1. the first email sent 3 minutes after customer submits Lead Form
2. the next one in 3 days
3. then another one 3 days later
4. followed by another 5 days later and then
5. two more spaced out with 7 days between each

The middle set of emails are usually short and simple friendly invitations to get back into conversations. Something along the lines of “Hey, haven’t heard from you in a while, are you still interest?” with an attached link to your demos would usually do the trick.

By the last two emails, we are pretty sure that this client is either not interested or your message just got lost in the sea of their emails. (or they don’t know how to open emails… haha) So we can try to have some fun with these emails in hopes of grabbing their attention.

Try to give it a creative title that stands out from what they usually get in the mailbox. We’ve managed to salvage the occasional unresponsive lead by giving our message an eye catching subject line like “Oh no, did you get eaten by attack bunnies?”

Take a look at ours:

IMPORTANT: Remember the auto email sequence will PAUSE once the prospect replies or if you pause it manually from any lead page. Don’t worry, if your lead becomes inactive again, you can switch this on at anytime.

Convert A Lead To A Booking

Kind of the point of having leads, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could take this lead data and convert it into a booking with the click of a button?

Well, with Back On Stage, you can!

From any Lead page, just click the “Create Booking” button and all the current lead information will be copied into a new booking. But wait, we still need more information from the client, don’t we?

As soon as you click the “Create Booking” button, you will be asked if you want to enter the booking details manually or send the client a questionnaire. If you’re like most musicians, you’d rather go practice your instrument than spending more time on your computer, so go ahead and choose “Send Client Questionnaire”.

Now the Client Questionnaire creator will open and you can build a custom set of questions to send to you client. This way, they can fill in the rest of the gig details for you. As soon as they submit the form, all their answers will automatically inject into the booking and be immediately visible to you and any other musicians or staff that you have booked for that gig.

There’s more on using the Client Questionnaire feature inside How To Create A Booking tutorial.

In a hurry? Here's the short version.

1. Create Lead Form
2. Send link to new leads via text or email
3. Put Embed Code onto your website
4. Set up Auto Follow-Up email sequence