5 Reasons your Business needs a CRM
First of all, what is a CRM?
As a service provider, there is a lot to do and a lot to remember when managing leads and client projects. A CRM is a customer relationship management system that helps you manage your client process, interactions, and data throughout the entire process from the initial inquiry to offboarding. An all-in-one system, like Dubsado or HoneyBook, helps you manage everything from follow-ups, scheduling appointments, contracts, questionnaires, getting paid, and also reminds you of important to-do's to help you manage everything more efficiently.
5 Benefits of Using A CRM like Dubsado or HoneyBook:
1. Helps you build confidence through a solid client process
Building an effective CRM system all starts with the solid foundation of building a good client process. Having a solid client process in place helps you build more confidence in selling and delivering your services.
This foundational piece helps you:
Define your client touchpoints from start to finish
Define everything you need from the client in order to deliver high value
Create boundaries around your time and energy
Communicate and manage expectations
Prevent scope creep
Deliver consistent, valuable results
Stay in touch and encourage repeat sales and referrals
Lay the foundation to effectively scale and grow a team
2. Lessens your mental load
As service business owners, we constantly have a high mental load and what feels like a never-ending to-do list. Between home life AND work life, having a constant stream of ideas, and wearing 20 different hats, it can be truly exhausting!
If you are a service provider, you are constantly thinking about your clients, communicating with them, and working on deliverables. Using a good CRM system to its full potential helps significantly lower your mental load around your client process. It also lessens the overwhelm of keeping so many plates spinning at once.
A CRM helps you deliver high value to your clients all while making you look super organized and on-brand at the same time. You can relax knowing that all the key touchpoints are taken care of either automatically or that you will be prompted when needing to take care of a manual step. Knowing that it's all getting done provides a huge sense of relief and gives you more time to focus on what you do best.
Lowering this mental load can help lower your stress. When you don't have to constantly remember all the nitty-gritty details of tracking what was signed or who paid or if you sent the welcome email, etc., you can enjoy your work more and serve your clients better.
3. Opens up more space for creativity
Reducing the mental load of even just one area of your business can allow more space for creativity. This is one of the reasons why I love systems so much. Systems improve the efficiency of my business so that I can have more time, energy, and white space for the things I love. This helps give room for daydreaming, imagination, experimentation, and ideation. As a creative, this is an area that I treasure and where I love spending a lot of my time, and I'm sure you do, too.
4. Keep all the things in one place
With client work, there is a lot to keep track of, and using an all-in-one CRM system helps you keep it all organized in one secure place. You'll want to keep track of all your leads, follow up with them, schedule consultations. As you onboard new clients, you'll have contracts to sign, invoices to be paid, onboarding questionnaires to send out, and lots of to-do's to keep track of. As you offboard your clients, you'll want to remember to ask for a testimonial and send them emails in the future about how they can continue working with you.
With a CRM, all of these things will be organized with every project and you'll be able to easily find whatever information you need. If you are growing a team or have a team already, you will be able to share pertinent project information with them easily as well.
5. Shortens your to-do list with integrations and automations
A big advantage of using a CRM like Dubsado or HoneyBook is being able to integrate with other systems and set up parts of your client process to be automated. It is such a big time saver.
Are you manually tracking leads that come in from your website? That can be automated, and leads can be automatically added to your CRM from your website contact form. Are you sending the exact same email word-for-word to every client at a certain part of your process? That can be automated, but you can personalize it by automatically adding their name. Are you sending out standard proposals for most projects? That can also be automated.
Another huge time saver for me has been integrating my Zoom and calendar accounts and automating my discovery call scheduling process. When I first started my business, I used to spend a lot of time going back and forth with the client trying to schedule a time. Now, when clients schedule a discovery call with me, they get a link where they can view my available call times, book a time that works for them, and then the system automatically sends them the meeting information which they can then add to their calendar. It also gets added to my calendar automatically, and they get an automated reminder before our meeting time. I now spend almost zero time on this part of my client process, and I now book calls with ease (and more frequently!).
For the steps of your client process that can't be automated, you can set up templates, reminders, and prompts for yourself. You can set certain steps to be approved first and edit templates before sending them to the client. This also helps save so much time and helps remind you of things that need to be done so that nothing falls through the cracks.
The best Leg Up for your business
Using a CRM system is the most efficient way to stay on top of your client process, especially for those of you who are booking multiple projects at a time. Once set up, Your CRM will take your clients through a seamless process to give them the information they need, schedule the calls and appointments they need, and make them feel like they are your top priority.
I consider CRM to be an integral part of a business’ branding because it shows your clients that you are professional and on top of the ball on their project.
While CRM systems do take some time to set up, you will see that it is well worth the investment as you gain so much time, energy, confidence, and peace of mind in the long run.
If you’re interested in trying out one of our recommended CRM tools, feel free to use the links below for a discount.
Get 20% off your first year with Honeybook
Get 20% off your first year with Dubsado
*These are affiliate links. We may receive a commission for your purchase of these CRM tools.*
Reiko of Sakura Rose Consulting is a Systems Strategist based in Dallas, focusing on CRM setup and workflow automation. She originally started a business in professional home organizing, but soon fell in love with the business side and developed a passion for serving Professional Organizers and other Creative Entrepreneurs. She is a happy wife, doting Maltipoo dog mom, and a multipassionate creative spirit who loves travel, family nature hikes, art, music, and always has multiple books going at a time. She loves tinkering with productivity systems and finding ways to enrich a calm, creative life.