I’m sure you’ve heard it before, and if you haven’t, this is me telling you, you need a CRM system when you offer one-to-one services.
And if you don’t believe me, read more here.
HoneyBook is our go-to recommendation for sleep consultants. I’ve been in the backend (and even tried) other CRMs, but HoneyBook is my favorite.
Why did I choose HoneyBook over another CRM?
HoneyBook is perfect and exactly what I needed for my sleep consulting business, without being too complicated or overwhelming, as some other CRMs are. For my business’s needs specifically, it does what I need it to - sends booking confirmations automatically, drafts proposals for my review with an auto-response, sends payment and file reminders after a certain amount of time, and still allows me to customize things specific to each client experience.
For example, for every personal touchpoint I have with a client, I make sure to add a little something “extra” in the email, or, attach the personal sleep plan.
It also has an app, which was 100% amazing when I was starting out those first few years as a sleep consultant...while I was still working my full-time job as a teacher. The app allowed me to work on the go and continues to be super convenient when I’m busy chasing my two little boys around.
The scheduling is easy to use. All you have to do is set up the sessions based on when you want to be available for certain calls. You can tweak your availability week to week if you have other commitments or appointments come up and it’ll automatically block off your calendar during those times.
There is going to be a learning curve with any CRM system, but I’ve found HoneyBook to be a bit easier to use and understand...so if you don’t consider yourself very “techy” it might be a good fit!
I’ve also started building a team of consultants, and the process for assigning clients to my team has so far been flawless. My team has access to everything they need to work with clients without access to the full business account.
All right, I’ve either sold you on it and you’re going to go sign up right now, OR you already know all of that and are just here for the good stuff - either way, keep reading!
Getting Started: Familiarize yourself with your account.
The dashboard is where it’s at - quick access to everything you need on a daily basis! See a preview of recent projects, your calendar, bookkeeping, tasks, and reports.
If I’m not clicking into my calendar right away to directly hop on a call with a client, I’m navigating toward the top menu and clicking the “Tools” dropdown menu. Anything and everything you need is housed there. This is where you’ll find company templates for emails, invoices, proposals, brochures, and questionnaires; a library for all of your uploads; access to automations; scheduling; task management; a time tracker; lead capture forms; access to all the reports; batch emails; gift cards; and MORE!
Phew!
Okay, you’ll also want to spend a little time in the upper right menu where you can access your company settings. This is where you will add your company branding, general information, set up a client portal, integrations, team settings, company preferences, and banking details.
Getting Started: Update your Company Settings and branding.
Once you have your company settings all in place, you won’t have to spend too much time in there, but it is important to start here!
Fill in and connect everything you might want to integrate with your account. Upload your logo and brand colors. Connect your domain so everything coming to your clients from HoneyBook is fully branded. Link your bank account. That’s all pretty self-explanatory.
Then, logistically, you’ll want to go into your company settings and click on preferences. You’re going to set up your project types. This is where it can vary from consultant to consultant, so you need to consider how you want your client experience to flow.
I have mine set up by service type because this then triggers an automation based on the service the lead is interested in - they can choose between “Discovery Call,” “Gift Certificate,” “Independent Sleeper Call,” or, “Sleep Coaching”.
Other clients oof ours have set it up by age - newborn, baby, toddler/preschooler. Others yet have set it up by service offerings - newborn care, in-home sleep coaching, and virtual sleep consulting.
These project types tie in directly to the lead contact form that you might have embedded on your website or linked on your social media.
Then, you head to that “Tools” drop-down menu I mentioned earlier and start building your lead contact form! This is essentially what triggers a project to be started in HoneyBook and where you want to direct people to work with you.
Getting Started: Setting up templates.
Head on over to the templates area. This is where you will be working to set up
Packages (the building blocks of the other form types) - correlate your offerings and set them up as a package on HoneyBook.
Invoices, Contracts, Proposals (basically an invoice and contract all wrapped together in one document), and Brochures - use the packages to build these other file types - more on these below.
Questionnaires
Emails and Email Signature
Contact Forms (you can access these in both the tools → templates menu OR directly from that tools dropdown)
Gift cards (don’t worry about this yet...I’d get everything else set up first!)
After you have your packages set up, you can start with the invoices, contracts, proposals, and brochures, and as you start typing the name of your package into these file types, you’ll notice the option to populate that package within the file. This will save you lots of time as you build these documents!
The same goes for your email signature...create this first, then come back to the email templates. You can create canned responses and insert your email signature into each one (or not if you have a team member!).
Once these files are all set, you can add them to projects and start using them. Essentially, a copy of the template is applied to the project. You can then edit anything specific for that project within the project without changing the actual templates.
Getting Started: Setting up your calendar and scheduling.
Setting up appointment sessions is pretty easy. Click into your calendar and toggle to “scheduling,” OR from the tools drop-down click on “scheduling”.
Click “+NEW SESSION TYPE” and set up your discovery call! Do the same for consultation calls and follow-up support calls. If you’ve previously integrated Zoom into your company settings, this will be an option for a call type. Then, adjust your availability per week as needed.
You can copy and paste call links directly into emails or as needed on social media. It’s super handy!
I highly recommend building all of the above before you even *think* about automation. Once you have all of this built and have been using it for a few weeks, take notes about your client workflow. This will help you map out your workflow to ensure that nothing is missing. Once you know that - YEP, this can happen automatically - then it’s time to build your automations!
We will save that conversation for another day!
Bookmark this blog post to come back to, especially if you’re getting started or planning to get started with HoneyBook.