Your website form works and enquiries come in, yet some customers never receive a reply - because the form email looks like a hundred others and gets lost between an invoice and a newsletter. We show you two Task Manager rules that identify a lead in your inbox, prepare a customer report and create a task due tomorrow.
Where form leads get lost
Take Instalacje Mazur in Poznań - a seven-person heat pump installation company with a “Request a quote” form on its website. Enquiries go to biuro@, an inbox monitored by the owner, Tomek, and a salesperson, Michał. A dozen or so arrive each week, alongside invoices from wholesalers, courier confirmations and manufacturers’ newsletters.
A form lead faces three problems at once in this inbox:
- It has no owner. Tomek thinks Michał will reply. Michał sees that Tomek has already opened the email, so assumes it has been dealt with.
- It has no due date. An invoice has a payment date and a courier delivery has a time slot. An enquiry saying “I’d like a quote” has neither - so it waits.
- It lacks context. Before replying, someone needs to read up on the house in question and make an initial calculation of the required output. Everyone puts it off until “things are quieter”.
The result: an enquiry received on Monday gets a reply on Wednesday, by which time the customer already has two other quotes.
The cost of replying after two days
This is not a problem limited to one company. A 2011 study described in Harvard Business Review examined how quickly 2 241 US companies responded to enquiries submitted through their websites. Only 37% replied within an hour, while 23% did not reply at all. Among companies that responded within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours. A separate study cited in the same article analysed 1,25 million leads: companies that tried to contact a customer within an hour were about seven times more likely to have a qualifying conversation than those that waited another hour.
The lesson for a small service business: you need to see the lead immediately and set a due date for it before it is buried under the rest of your mail. You cannot keep up with this manually - someone is out on a job, someone else is on leave.
“Form lead → note (AI)” template
In Task Manager, rules follow a single recipe: WHEN something happens, IF the conditions are met, DO the actions. You do not have to build one from scratch - in the Automations window, click + and you will find the “Form lead → note (AI)” template under Sales and leads. The template appears in the menu when an administrator has configured AI and you have access to Mail (Pro plan). It opens as an unsaved, disabled draft. Click the Enabled toggle - the rule will be saved and activated in one step (clicking Save alone leaves it disabled).
Here is what this rule does, step by step:
| Block | What happens |
|---|---|
| WHEN New email in inbox | The rule is triggered by every email received in your inbox (emails you send do not trigger it). |
| IF AI evaluates | AI receives the sender, subject and an excerpt of the content, then answers “yes” or “no”: is this a form enquiry or a new lead - contact details for a person or company and a request for contact, a quote or an offer? Newsletters, invoices and automated confirmations are explicitly excluded by the condition. |
| DO 1: Write a message using AI | For emails, this block does not send anything - it works as an analysis. AI writes a short report: who is writing (person, company and contact details from the signature), what they need, when they need it and a suggested first step. |
| DO 2: Create a note | The report is saved as a note called “Lead: Jan Kowalski (jan@firma.pl)” in the Leads folder in your Notes. The folder is created automatically if you do not already have it. |
| DO 3: Show notification | A notification appears in the Notification Centre: “New lead: jan@firma.pl - the report is available in Notes, in the Leads folder”. |
The order of the actions matters: the AI analysis comes before the note because its output is added to the note’s content.
The “AI evaluates” condition is always processed last. If you add standard conditions before it - “Email subject contains: form, quot” or “Inbox: biuro@” - AI will only evaluate emails that pass those conditions. Enter the root of the word - “quot” will match every variation. Fewer queries, fewer mistakes and lower costs on your API key.
What a lead report looks like in the Leads folder
Open Notes, expand Documents and go to the Leads folder. Each enquiry is stored as a separate note. The screenshot from the demo instance shows a lead from Solarion Energia - a renewable energy company asking about a new website and an advertising campaign:
At Instalacje Mazur, Tuesday’s note about Anna’s enquiry would look the same, just with different details:
- Who is writing - Anna Wiśniewska, owner of a detached house in Swarzędz, with the phone number and email address extracted from the form footer.
- What she needs - a quote for a heat pump for a 160 m² house that currently has a gas boiler.
- When she needs it - “I’d like it done before the season starts”.
- Suggested first step - call her, ask about the insulation and heating system, and send the audit form.
The note created from the email is private - it is visible to the person whose mailbox runs the rule. If Michał needs to see it, Tomek can share the note with him, or Michał can connect biuro@ to his account and enable his own copy of the rule.
If you have the AI Assistant with internet access permission, add this to the instruction: “visit the website on the sender’s email domain and include what the company does” - the report for a lead using a company email address will immediately tell you who the client is.
“New lead → contact task (AI)” template
The note organises what you know about the client, but it does not make sure someone calls them. That is what the second template in the same category is for - it identifies the lead in the same way, but performs different actions:
- Create a task in the Workspace you select before saving - this is the only field you need to complete. The Task is called “Contact: a.wisniewska@…”, has high priority and a due date of tomorrow, while its description contains the subject and content of the enquiry.
- Show a notification: “New lead - task created: a.wisniewska@… is waiting to be contacted. Task due tomorrow”.
The Task is immediately linked to the Mail thread: its header contains a blue badge with the email subject, and clicking it opens the correspondence. Linking it does not share the email content - anyone who does not have this mailbox connected will only see the Task. Find out more on the Mail creates a Task page.
At Instalacje Mazur, both rules work together. Tuesday, 9:41: Anna submits the form. 9:43: Tomek has a notification, a note in Leads and a Task due on Wednesday. He assigns it to Michał when editing the Task. The lead no longer needs to be “noticed” - it is on the list with a date.
Instead of clicking through settings, describe the rule to the Assistant
If you want the note to go into a different folder or the notification to use different wording, you do not need to search through the fields. Open the AI Assistant and write as if you were talking to a colleague:
When an email arrives from the website form, create a note about the company and contact in the Leads folder, create a “Call” Task in the Sales Workspace due tomorrow and let me know.
The Assistant creates a draft (name, trigger, conditions and actions) and explains what the rule will do in its response. Below the response is a “Go to Automations” card. The draft is disabled and unsaved: click Save, then Enable. You can make changes using natural language: “change the due date to two days from now”, “add a condition that the subject contains quote”. For a step-by-step scenario, see Automation described in plain language.
What happens next with the lead
The rule finishes its work once the lead has a note and a Task. From there, it is business as usual in Task Manager:
- Assign someone and enter the date promised to the client. The default is “tomorrow”; if Anna asks for the quote by Friday, change it to Thursday.
- Ask the Assistant to set a Reminder for the Due date: “remind me in the morning on the Due date” or “two hours before the Due date”. If you move the Task’s Due date, the Reminder will move with it.
- Use the Task Thread, not email. Notes from phone calls, photos of the boiler room and the initial estimate - keep everything with the Task. A month later, anyone on the team can open it and see what happened.
- Only close the Task after sending the proposal, not after the first phone call. The “overdue” tile above the list shows leads that have stalled.
The full cycle from enquiry to closure is described on the Task Manager for sales page.
AI makes mistakes - how to spot them
The “AI evaluates” condition is a model assessment, not a fixed rule. It can get things wrong in either direction: it may treat a spammer offering SEO services as a lead, or miss a three-word enquiry with no signature. A few safeguards keep this under control:
- When uncertain, AI answers “no”. The automation would rather do nothing than do the wrong thing. Missed leads are therefore more common than false positives - you still review the mailbox, but no longer need to copy anything from it.
- Test before enabling. The Test button checks the last 20 emails and shows which ones would meet the conditions and which actions would run (with variables filled in; the AI report itself is not yet generated during the test) - it does not save or send anything. Tomek tested the rule on 20 messages: it correctly identified 6 leads but also treated one advertising directory offer as a lead. He added this to the condition: “sales offers sent to us are NOT leads” - and the next test produced the correct results.
- Run history. Every email that matches the trigger has an entry: completed, skipped (including the condition that stopped it) or error. Review the “skipped” entries once a week to check that no genuine enquiries are among them.
- Low-cost conditions before AI. If the website form always uses the subject “New website enquiry”, add the condition “Email subject contains: website enquiry”. AI will only evaluate those emails, leaving the rest of your mail untouched.
- The daily limit for AI requests from Automations (200 by default, set by the administrator) protects against a sudden surge, such as during the initial synchronisation of a large mailbox. Once the limit is reached, rules using AI are skipped for the rest of the day and recorded in the history; the counter resets at midnight.
- Three consecutive errors pause the rule and you receive a notification and an email. No safeguard operates silently.
An important note about data: the lead email summary is sent for evaluation to your selected model provider (OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude or xAI Grok) using your API key. Your application data remains on your server, but the request itself is sent externally.
What this automation will not do
- It will not extract a date from the email - the Task always uses “+N days” from the time the enquiry arrives. You enter the date promised to the client yourself.
- It will not choose a salesperson based on the content. If leads should go to different people, create separate rules with conditions based on the subject or sender.
- It will not look inside attachments - AI can see the sender, subject, content and file names, but not the contents of the files.
- It will not reply to the client for you unless you add the “Send an email from your mailbox” action with a confirmation such as “Thank you, we will get back to you by tomorrow”.
Automations and Mail are modules included in the Pro plan - see the Pricing for details.
Two rules, ten minutes to set up - and every form enquiry has a report, an owner and a Due date. If you would like to see it working with your own mailbox, request access in the Demo.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to use AI to identify leads from a form?
No. If your form sends emails with a fixed subject or from a single address, build a rule using the “Email subject contains” or “Sender contains” conditions without AI. You will lose the client report, but a follow-up task with a due date will still be created.
Who can see the note and task created from my inbox?
Your inbox is private, so a note created from an email belongs to you by default - you can share it with selected people. Members of the specified Workspace can see the task, but not the email content unless they have connected the same inbox themselves.
Can I connect a Gmail or Outlook inbox?
Yes. Task Manager connects via IMAP and SMTP, so it works with Polish hosting providers, Gmail and Microsoft 365. With Gmail, you need an app password, which requires two-step verification to be enabled on your Google account.
What happens if AI misses a genuine enquiry?
The email stays in the inbox - the rule does not delete or hide anything. In Run History, you will see it marked as “skipped”, along with the condition that stopped it. You can then add a description of what your enquiries look like to the AI prompt and click Test.
Sources
- Harvard Business Review, James B. Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran, David Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” (March 2011): audit of 2 241 companies, 37% responded within an hour, 23% did not respond at all, average response time of 42 hours, seven times more likely to have a qualifying conversation when contacted within an hour
- Google, Google Account Help, “Sign in with app passwords” - two-step verification requirement for app passwords
- Task Manager, user guide, “Automations” - ready-made “Sales and leads” recipes, “AI evaluates” condition, Test, History, safeguards
- Task Manager, user guide, “Mail” - mailbox privacy, linking a thread to a task
The Task Manager Team - we write about teamwork, AI in business and keeping tasks organised, using examples from Task Manager, software installed on your own server. Task Manager has been developed by Blue Creation Group (Piotr Łącz) since 2013 and is used by organisations including Neonet, the Military University of Technology and Polpharma - read customer reviews. We check our articles against the user guide and the latest version of the software.
