If you’ve considered starting your own agency or already gone down the path, you have or will encounter the question of how to manage operations. It can be a daunting process to identify the right invoicing system, CRM, email marketing tool, process automation, time tracking, scheduling, and project management tools (all that fit within your budget). Rather than puzzle together multiple tools or continue the hunt for the swiss army knife, look no further than Dubsado.
Dubsado has been a game-changer for our businesses. Dubsado is traditionally considered a tool for creatives and have made it an integral part of our business. After hundreds of free trials, coordinating integrations and trying to get multiple software to work together, we landed on Dubsado, to do it all tool for our little agency.
Dubsado has helped our company create a seamless workflow for our agency, which was proving difficult to do given the variety of services we offer and the nature of customizations provided to each client. If you’re running or plan to run an agency that caters to each individual client’s needs, here is a sample of how to streamline some of the processes for your business within Dubsado.
Lead Gen
In the early sales cycle, moving inbound leads from your website to CRM can be tricky or even require multiple integrations between website and softwares. The “lead capture” form with Dubsado helps streamline this process when working with new potential clients. A lead capture form is a form, that you can customize within your Dubsado and embed on your website. Lead capture forms will automatically pull the info entered on your website into a new contact card in the Dubsado CRM. This eliminates any manual customer entries while simultaneously allowing you to build out your contact list for future marketing opportunities (Don’t forget to include an opt-in checkbox!).
We include the Lead Capture form on our contact page instead of a generic contact form. This allows us to record all people interested in our services, build out our email contact list and correctly funnel clients down the right path based on their projects.
Canned emails
The canned emails come in handy when nurturing leads and allow you various ways to engage and turn them from a lead into a client. We used canned emails for many different purposes, from invoicing to contract delivery, but most important are the autoresponders we send immediately after our lead captures have been filled out. These emails contain information specific to the type of project they have identified, offer useful tips, and encourage them to schedule an appointment, which is also managed through the Dubsado scheduler. (Bye 3rd party subscriptions to Acuity or Calendly!)
Appointment scheduler
As mentioned previously, we take advantage of the included scheduler in Dubsado; we can integrate all employee’s calendars for easy scheduling, and include advanced settings for each appointment. We only allow XX amount of new client calls per week and only so much time. With the advanced settings, you can set limits and get an incredible granular call schedule set up for your business. Plus, the scheduler allows you to easily attached pre-call forms and questionnaires so you don’t have to manually send the form yourself.
Contracts, proposals, and forms
To help keep our team out of endless paperwork, we have created a set of contracts, forms, and proposals based on a potential client’s project needs. The form builder in Dubsado is perfect for getting a template into place, quickly updating, easily attach any of the forms to the potential client in Dubsado, and keep their paperwork organized on their client dashboard. This keeps the digital onboarding process quick and easy, which could otherwise be long and tedious. Having digital signatures on contracts is also quite handy for you (no 3rd party signing software) and for clients, especially those not so tech-savvy customers.
Client portal
Once those leads turn into actual clients, setting up a client dashboard for them is as easy as one click. With a quick canned email you can provide login credentials to the client portal, allowing your customers quick and easy access to all of the paperwork, and forms you have for them.
These features barely scratch the surface of the actual power that Dubsado.
Once you’ve had a chance to create a process for lead capturing you can get into the nitty-gritty and take advantage of the workflow automation, time tracking, invoicing, payment processing, bookkeeping, and more.
As the business owner, what I like and appreciate the most about Dubsado is the hustle of the team behind the sotware. As a customer for the last 3 years, I signed up in the early stages of their company (when they were in year two). Since then they have evolved SO MUCH, and I appreciate the effort they have put into creating this amazing tool for creatives. Dubsado has staying power and is only going to keep getting better. Get in now to take advantage of this powerful tool and grow your business as Dubsado helps power your backend.
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, which means if you are interested in Dubsado, using my link gives you 20% off and I get a little something in return. Win Win!
