Let's take a look at how to manage our conversations inside Pitchbox. So to start you'll notice that every project you have set up gets its own dedicated inbox and that's to keep that project's conversations in one centralized space. But if you want to see those responses you can select this section here or click on the project card and then select inbox from the left. Now your project inbox is designed to hold all of the conversations from all of the campaigns within that project meaning that if you and your colleagues are working on separate campaigns all of those conversations will be brought into this one centralized space.

But if you'd prefer to change up your view to see only the replies that matter to you you can do so by setting the filters on the left hand side. Simply select if you want to view the responses from a particular outreach email, from a particular campaign or from a particular tag. You can also control how you interact with the inbox through some settings on the right hand side. So the first is reply in the opportunity details page. If I select this option it means that when I select on a row I'm actually taken straight to opportunity details and I can handle the conversation from this section.

That said if you'd prefer to keep everything in the inbox you can also go for the reply mode vertical split which opens up a drawer that allows you to reply straight from this dashboard. As you can see you still get a quick preview at the bottom but the reply window is right in the main section allowing me to draft up my response. Alternatively you can also go for view mode vertical split which just opens up a quick preview on the right of the full message. So it looks something like this. Once we have our settings in place we want to start managing our conversations.

Now for a bit of background when you launch your automation sequence the system is picking a contact from every website and it's running through your full set of templates and it will keep doing this automatically until such times as we get a response. When we get a response that automation comes to a stop and we hand that chat over to you to take over and the system will automatically update the milestone to got a reply. Now milestones are a feature in Pitchbox that allows you to categorize conversations based on where they're at and there are a range to choose from.

You can see our full selection by selecting the opportunity and selecting set milestone. So because of this process it means that any time we see a conversation or inbox our goal is to get things moving. So you'll notice on the left as well that we have 43 communications in this section. So again our goal is to try and get this down to zero each day where possible just so we have no conversations that are waiting on us to take an action. But let's look at actually how to handle some of our conversations. So we want to first start by looking at the message and understanding what's happening with that conversation.

You can manually draft your response or you can use AI Assistant to help come up with one based on the context of the previous message. You can also add special parameters for the AI to follow when it does draft your response. Your team can also leverage things like canned responses which can be set up under the Pitchbox settings and it's a way for your team to set up templates for very specific scenarios. So if you have say you're handling a payment for a link you may have a standard way to approach that conversation. If so we recommend setting it up as a canned response so you can quickly pull that template directly into this panel saving you a lot of time.

But once you have your response drafted we can actually leverage some additional features. The first being that we can change the milestone based on where we got to with that conversation and that means that it becomes quick and easy to identify the conversation that are going to be prioritized. Once you set your milestone you can also leverage our chase up feature which is designed to help you get a personal notification if that person doesn't respond in a set amount of time. Simply select chase up and the duration that you want to wait so we're going to go for two days and use whether you want this to be triggered if we didn't get a response or a milestone wasn't changed or both.

Once you've made your selection just select send and the communication will disappear from the inbox but you can still find this conversation within all emails which has a record of all of your conversations. Now let's say that you have a conversation that's hit a dead end and you want to update that in your CRM. Again you can still do it after drafting a response if you want to send a thank you message but if you want to quickly update that milestone from the dashboard just select the opportunity and then set the milestone. If this is a loss meaning that it's the end of that relationship and it will mark it as loss and select OK.

Then depending on your settings your team or me have set up a custom field so it asks for additional information when the milestone has been updated. In this case I set one up to ask for a reason for a loss. If you'd like to set up something similar to this check out our tutorial on how to work with custom fields or visit our knowledge base for more information. Now if I'm done with this conversation and no more action needs to be taken I can simply select the opportunity and then select archive which takes it out of my main inbox. Now if you have a chat that doesn't necessarily need a response but you would like to kick the automation back into action again you can do so by selecting the opportunity that you would like to focus on and click on the three dots from here we just want to archive the communication from our main inbox and we want the system to resume outreach meaning it will look at sending out the next email attempt within the sequence to that contact.

Now if you have a conversation that's progressed to getting a backlink we want to still update that in our CRM and we can still do it in the same way. We want to select our opportunity and select set milestone to a win. Alternatively you can also do this by entering the opportunity detail section so in this section we just head on over to the milestone and change this to won. This is going to trigger a quick pop-up which is asking for some set information. The first is link URL which is designed to help you track the link placements that you have so if you have a link on a specific blog post of theirs you will put the URL for that page here and you can track multiple pages per opportunity.

We also have a space for extra info for your CRM such as cost what kind of placement type it is and this section can be fully customized. Now in the inbox you can also access some additional controls by hovering over the opportunity. So for example you can view the site in a new tab, a quickly apply tag, add a task, you can archive the communication, open up the reply, snooze the communication, put up a preview or again view an opportunity details. So one quick tip to help you stay organized with your conversations is to lean on those milestones that we've been updating as we use our inbox.

If you want to see a quick view of your conversations by milestone we can actually see it by heading over to the opportunity section on the left hand side. In this section you can see a quick graph that shows you all of the opportunities that you have under a particular milestone. So this can help me prioritize my time more effectively. So let's say at the beginning of the week I come into the section and I see that my Got a reply is getting quite high. Again that means there's a lot of conversations where the automation has stopped and it's waiting for me to take an action.

So ideally I want to get that number as low as possible. But equally if I see that my negotiations and almost there section is getting quite high, those are the types of chats that are more likely to convert so I might want to prioritize my time over there. And if you want to quickly see how many have converted to a win or how many have been lost, just simply select on the bar and all the opportunities will be listed below. And finally one last tip for the inbox is you can also use the advanced searches in this section. So that's the search bar on the right hand side.

There is a quick help key to show you the different kinds of searches that you can run, use of this. Simply go to the column that you're wanting to search through and see the key above. So in this case if we wanted to look for a very specific term that's in the subject we can use the key subject followed by the term and it will allow us to pull forward very specific results.

Intro to Pitchbox Project Inbox