“I’m so overwhelmed behind the scenes that I can’t answer my clients fast enough, and they move on to someone else.” Has this ever been you? If your answer is yes, today’s video is for you!
In this video, we’re going to be talking about the client booking process and how to make it streamlined and automated! With a streamlined and automated booking process, you’ll be able to breathe and not feel like you’re drowning in your inbox! So especially for my photographers out there, the booking process in and of itself is a really important piece to the puzzle for retention in your business and for revenue, honestly. Let’s tackle this together!
What is The Booking Process?
If you aren’t efficiently answering your prospective clients and moving them through your booking process, you are most likely losing revenue as well as some reputability.
So, what is the client booking process? When I refer to the “booking process”, I am talking about the timeframe from when your potential client fills out a contact form to the time that they sign a contract with you and become your actual client. What does that process look like in your business?
It’s so important to make sure that you have a booking process that is really streamlined and more automated behind-the-scenes, so that you don’t have to feel like you’re drowning in your inbox! Instead, you feel like you’re getting back to your clients in a timely manner and still have that personalized touch.
How to Streamline Your Booking Process
How do you actually streamline your process and keep it personal? My secret sauce to that is templating! Get all of your templates in place in your CRM, whether it’s HoneyBook or Dubsado or something else. Templates will be the key to any effective system. I say they’re the foundation to every great system. So what does that mean?
That means getting your invoices, contracts, email templates, pricing/packages, any pricing guides, and any of those important documents in place. All of these will be really crucial to then set up workflows and automations behind the scenes.
How Do I Start?
So you might be asking, “How do I get started with automations and workflows?” And the easiest way to do that is to have all your templates set up first. Then you set up your workflow and automation because it’s just a plug and play thing there. Whereas if you’re trying to build a workflow and automation without templates in place, you’re going to have to be building your templates along the way as you build your workflow out, which is much more time consuming. Templates are really the key foundational piece to any great booking process.
Start With Your Email Templates
I believe the best place to start is with your email templates. You can easily set up an automated email in HoneyBook to then respond to your clients. Usually, the thing that we drop the ball on the most, is actually responding back to our clients and then they don’t feel cared for. They feel like they got ghosted and they just move on to another person, right? Which then turns into losing reputability and you lose revenue all at the same time.
So start with your email templates and get those in place. In this video, I’m giving a brief tutorial on how you can actually connect an email template to an automated workflow and actually get inquiry responses out to your clients pretty easily by having your contact form set up and connected to your workflow.
I’m always here to help! So, of course, leave any questions below. Also be sure to take advantage of the free resources too! There’s an affiliate link below for any contracts you might need!
Leave a comment and I’d love to hear too what you have found to be really helpful in your own booking process! Also, what are some of the hiccups you’ve been running into with your own booking process and what has looked like for you behind the scenes.
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