Lead Inbox: Capture Inbound Requests and Turn Them Into Clients

Why leads go cold before anyone replies

Inbound rarely arrives in a tidy stream. One prospect fills in a contact form, another emails the address on your site, a third asks for access to the portal a past client showed them. Each one lands somewhere different, and none of those places is where you actually run client work.

The damage is not usually dramatic. It looks like a reply that took four days because the form notification sat under a newsletter, or a promising inquiry that got answered but never written down, so nobody remembers the budget hint the prospect dropped. By the time you build a proper record, the context has thinned out. We covered the wider version of this problem in how to turn inquiries into clients.

There is a second, quieter cost: retyping. Someone described their project in detail, and then a person on your team paraphrases it into a CRM field, drops half the nuance, and the proposal gets written from the paraphrase. Intake that starts with manual re-entry loses information every single time.

What the Arpixa Lead Inbox is

The Lead Inbox is a dedicated intake queue that lives inside your agency workspace. It gathers two kinds of inbound interest and treats them as one triage job:

• Public Lead — a work request submitted through your public agency profile, with the details the prospect wrote.
• Access Request — a client asking to be connected to your workspace so they can see their own projects, invoices, and files.

Both appear in the same list, newest first, each tagged so you know which is which. The header carries a count of what is still pending. Because the queue sits in the same workspace as your clients, projects, and proposals, accepting something does not mean exporting it somewhere else.

What you can do in the Lead Inbox

The view is built around one decision, made quickly and with enough information: is this worth pursuing?

Your public profile gives prospects two doors, and both feed this flow. They can send a work request, which arrives here as a Public Lead, or book a call, which goes straight to your booking page and reserves a real slot in your availability. Some people want to write a brief; some want fifteen minutes. Neither should have to email you first.

From accepted lead to client record

This is the part that saves the most time. When you accept a public lead, Arpixa does the setup for you:

• Creates a client in your workspace with the submitted name, email, and company.
• Sets status and pipeline stage to Lead, so it enters your funnel rather than pretending to be an active account.
• Records the source as Public Profile, so you can tell later where the work came from.
• Saves the project details the prospect wrote into the client notes, word for word.
• Opens the new client record, so the next action is available immediately.

That last point matters more than it sounds. The original wording of an inquiry is evidence. When you write the proposal two weeks later, you are reading what the client said, not what a teammate remembered.

Declining is deliberately a two-step action with a confirmation, and accepting a lead when you are already at your plan's client limit tells you so up front rather than half-completing the work.

Working the pipeline after intake

Once a lead is a client record, it takes a place on the lead pipeline board. The stages are the ones agencies actually use: Lead, Contacted, Meeting, Proposal, Closed Won, and Closed Lost. You drag a card between columns to move it, and the board shows totals for how many are in pipeline, won, lost, and your conversion rate.

Marking a deal Closed Won opens a short onboarding step instead of just changing a label. You set the client's currency and hourly rate, choose whether invoices should apply tax by default, and optionally create the first project with a budget and target deadline right there. It is the moment where sales context becomes delivery setup, so Arpixa uses it.

For more on qualifying before you commit time, see how to qualify leads for your agency.

How it connects to the rest of Arpixa

Intake is only useful if the thing you captured keeps travelling. Because the Lead Inbox lives in the workspace, it does:

• An accepted lead becomes a record in your CRM, with contacts, notes, activity, and history from day one.
• The inquiry text is available when you build the proposal, so scope reflects what was asked for.
• Accepted proposals can carry straight into invoices and projects.
• Approved clients can be given access to the branded client portal, where visibility is controlled per client.
• Day-to-day updates on live work stay in the shared Inbox, separate from new business.

That is the point of Arpixa as one agency workspace: a lead should not have to be re-created at every stage of its own lifecycle.

Arpixa has a real Free plan (not a trial), with Starter at $12/month, Pro at $29/month, and Advanced at $89/month. Because accepting a lead creates a client, client limits apply: 1 on Free, 12 on Starter, and unlimited on Pro and Advanced. Annual billing lowers the effective monthly cost, and the pricing page is the source of truth for current plan limits.

How to use the Lead Inbox

A simple intake rhythm that works whether you get two inquiries a month or twenty a week.

1. Publish your public agency profile so prospects can send a work request or book a call.
2. Open the Lead Inbox to see public leads and workspace access requests in one queue.
3. Read the submitted project details on the card to judge fit before replying.
4. Accept a promising lead so Arpixa creates the client record with the inquiry attached, or decline it.
5. Work the new client through the pipeline stages: Lead, Contacted, Meeting, Proposal, Closed Won or Closed Lost.
6. Use the Invites Sent tab to invite clients directly and track pending, accepted, and revoked invites.

Once a lead becomes a client, the next step is usually a clean kickoff. See how to onboard a new client smoothly and building a lead to client pipeline.

Frequently asked questions