Chapter 12 of 16 · 7 min
Leads and campaigns
A pipeline that tells the truth about where members come from, trials that hold real courts, and campaigns to audiences that are always current.
Leads
A lead is someone who might join: a name, a phone, how they heard of you, the sport they asked about, and a stage. Stages move forward in a fixed order, and two stages are final — converted and lost. Losing a lead requires a reason, because it is the only part of a funnel that teaches anything.
A converted lead is kept with a link to the customer they became, so “which source produces members” has an answer months later. Conversion rate is measured against closed leads, converted and lost, not against every lead ever entered, so a busy week of new enquiries does not make last month look worse.
A walk-in who books is a customer, not a lead. The desk does not have to invent a prospect to record a person.
Trials
A trial session for a lead is a real booking on a real court. It holds the slot and competes with every other booking, so two prospects can never turn up for the same court because a trial was written on a notepad.
Campaigns
Campaigns sends a message to an audience. An audience is a set of rules — members of this sport, anyone who booked in the last 90 days, under-16s — and the rules are evaluated when you send, never saved as a list, so a campaign never reaches someone who renewed yesterday. Someone with no email is not in an email audience; someone with no date of birth fails an age rule rather than being guessed at.
The audience is frozen at the moment of sending, and delivery counts are read from the actual sends, so what a past campaign reached stays true even after the rules change.