Systems for Creatives with Amy Gould

EP 8: The Beginner's Guide to Dubsado

• Amy Gould

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In today's episode of Systems for Creatives, I'm thrilled to introduce you to my favorite client management system. I can’t wait for you to hear about how this system has transformed the way I, and many other creative entrepreneurs, run our businesses–in this Beginner’s Guide to Dubsado! 


As someone who regularly sets up Dubsado for creative business owners, I break down all the key features that make this platform so powerful - from lead capture forms and automated workflows to proposals and scheduling capabilities. I'm passionate about creating incredible client experiences, and I show you exactly how Dubsado can help you manage your one-on-one clients more efficiently while saving precious time in your business.


Using a website designer's journey as an example, I walk you through a practical demonstration of how Dubsado can revolutionize your workflow, handling everything from that initial consultation booking to post-project follow-ups. I share my favorite features, including the game-changing scheduler that eliminates the back-and-forth email dance of booking appointments, and the workflow automation that takes repetitive tasks off your plate. 


Try Dubsado for free with your first three projects, plus grab my special code for 20% off your first year. 


❗️Save 20% on Your Dubsado Subscription with this link ❗️

dubsado.com/?c=amysgouldco


Whether you're ready to dive in yourself or interested in my Mastering Dubsado course or done-for-you setup services, I'm here to help you work less, make more, and wow your clients.


💠 Create Your Leads Management Plan by signing up for my Leads Magic Course:

https://amysgould.com/lead-magic/


💠 Master Your Dubsado Course - Let me guide you through setting up your Dubsado account so you can work less and create a client experience that WOWs in 4 weeks or less. https://amygouldcompany.vipmembervault.com/products/courses/view/1155155




Stay in touch!



Book a Free 15-minute Discovery Call to Learn How I Can Help You Work Less, Make More & WOW Clients: www.amysgould.com/book-a-call


Website: www.amysgould.com


Watch me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SystemsforCreatives


Share your takeaways by email: amy@amysgould.com


Connect with me on Instagram: amysgould_

Stay in Touch with Us

Book a Free 15 Minute Discovery Call to Learn How I Can Help You Work Less, Make More & WOW Clients: www.amysgould.com/book-a-call

Website: www.amysgould.com

Watch me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SystemsforCreatives

Share your take-aways by email: amy@amysgould.com

Connect with us on Instagram: amysgould_


Speaker 1:

Hi everyone, welcome to the Beginner's Guide to Dubsado, designed especially for creative entrepreneurs like you. I'm Amy Gould, and today I'm going to introduce you to a powerful tool that will help you streamline your processes, manage clients and save you tons of time. I'm excited to share this with you because I absolutely love Dubsado and I'm hoping, after you watch this video, you will, too, love Dubsado, and I'm hoping, after you watch this video, you will too. So Dubsado is my CRM of choice and I set it up for a lot of creative entrepreneurs. I'm excited to share exactly how it can help you in your business. It is a client management system and it's designed to help you manage one-on-one client more efficiently, so it can do a lot to keep everything organized in your business, save you time and help you work less, make more and wow clients. I'm all about creating an incredible client experience, and I know that once you finish watching this video, you're going to be so excited about how Dubsado can help you do that. For creative entrepreneurs, dubsado offers unparalleled benefits. It allows you to manage clients and projects in a seamless manner, helps you stay organized and frees up time for you to focus on your creative work, whether you're a photographer, designer or any creative. Dubsado can be tailored to meet your business's unique needs. Dubsado can be tailored to meet your business's unique needs.

Speaker 1:

Let's dive into some of Dubsado's key features. So the very first thing that I love to talk about when it comes to Dubsado is how it helps you manage your clients, and that can be started from the very first moment they interact with you on your website through your lead capture form. Any information that you put into your lead capture form will be put directly into Dubsado for you no more entering people into spreadsheets or anything like that and it can kick off a workflow to start working with that client and moving them further through your process. So I love that about Dubsado. It has a wonderful client project area, so you can see all the details of a project in one area, including your emails, any forms that you've sent, the contract, the workflow that they're in and, if you're not familiar with Dubsado, workflows are the automation piece of Dubsado. Also, inside of the project area, you can see any forms that you've sent the client or will be sending them in the future, as well as any appointments that have been booked or any schedulers that have been sent. Now, when you get into Dubsado, you'll also see all of your projects in one area, as well as what status they're in. One thing I absolutely love about Dubsado is that you can create custom project statuses so you can see exactly where people are at in your process of delivering your service, which I think is really helpful.

Speaker 1:

Now let's get into probably my other favorite piece of Dubsado, and that is proposals. I absolutely love proposals. They are a template in Dubsado that can be used a couple of different ways. You can use them in both cases to send a proposal to a client or maybe a brochure about your services, and they allow the client to pick the services that they'd like, select any add-ons and then they can go right to approving the form, signing the contract and paying the invoice. So literally, you can get paid in minutes after sending a proposal. If someone's pretty quick on filling out forms and signing contracts and things, I love that about Dubsado. You can create beautifully branded forms from your proposal to the contract, and even the invoice is customizable. So you've got a lot of options there, and if you don't really want to send the invoice or the contract with the proposal, you don't have to. You can turn that feature off and then have it send as part of your workflow later.

Speaker 1:

Dubsado also has a few other form options. They have what are called questionnaires, and these are great for collecting client information. Are called questionnaires and these are great for collecting client information. They also can be used for just sharing information with clients. You don't have to have a single question on your questionnaire. You can use it to share just general information with clients, and that is a way that I have used them frequently. It's great and it really helps to create an incredible client experience. You also have something I've mentioned before, which are lead capture forms, and these can be used to add brand new clients into your Dubsado, assign a project status to them and kick off a workflow.

Speaker 1:

On a side note, proposals can also be used to kick off a workflow and add new clients to your system by using the public proposal feature inside of your proposals. So there are actually two ways you can start projects, and I love that. Along with questionnaires, you also have contracts and sub-agreements. These are both that allow you to digitally sign contracts or your clients to digitally sign, rather, contracts inside of Dubsado, and then you can use sub-agreements for things like video releases or photography releases or anything like that, leases or anything like that. So, because you can only assign one contract inside of Dubsado, the sub-agreements allow you to have additional signed documents, and these are very much like DocuSign and other online signing things. So this feature lets you get rid of a signing software if you've been using something like that in your business up till now. Then we have the invoicing and contracts, which we've already kind of talked about, but I do want to let you know that Dubsado has now a payment option through Stripe that allows you to pass along credit card fees to your clients if you so choose, and it has another couple of awesome features as well. I've got a whole other YouTube video on it. If you want to take a look at that right up here.

Speaker 1:

Then let's get into the scheduler, which is you know. I've already said it's my favorite feature twice now, so it's a great feature. I love the scheduler. You can put it on your website. You can add a link in your social media account and people can go right from your website and book an appointment with you for, like, a discovery call or anything like that. So I love the scheduler. You can link it to your Google Calendar and it can check and see if you're available for appointments and then book them. You also have the ability to set your availability, so you can say I only want to take discovery calls on Mondays and Fridays from nine to noon or whatever you choose, and Dubsod will not book anyone outside of that.

Speaker 1:

It also looks at their time zone. So if you're working with clients across the United States or overseas, it's going to look at where they are and show them availability with the correct time zone applied. And I don't know about you, but I'm terrible at figuring out time zones and doing the math, and nine times out of 10, I'm going to screw it up. So I love that feature because it saves me a lot of brain power and I don't have to figure out if I've done the math right between Eastern time zone and Pacific time zone, for instance. So it also sends a confirmation to the client and sends reminders so they can add it to their calendar and there are buttons you can add to the client and sends reminders so they can add it to their calendar, and there are buttons you can add to the emails so they can reschedule and cancel as well. I love this feature. It saves me so much time. I hate trying to play that back and forth game with emails to book an appointment Probably the most time-saving feature aside from all of the form templates in Dubsado as far as I'm concerned. So definitely a great feature and a huge time saver in your business.

Speaker 1:

Now we're going to get into the piece that you've probably been waiting for. I know I love it. It is the Dubsado workflows. I absolutely love workflows in Dubsado and here's why they save you so much time because they automate all those little repetitive tasks that you have to do on a daily basis and take them off your to-do list. So you can create workflows inside of Dubsado that are triggered, for instance, when a lead capture form is filled out, that automatically sends an email to someone to let them know that you received their form when you're going to be back in touch with them, and then gives them another really awesome thing to consume while they're waiting for you to get back to them. This way, they're still excited about working with you and it buys you a little time if you're not just sitting on your phone waiting for people to fill out your lead capture form. That is a great tool to use.

Speaker 1:

There are so many ways that you can use Dubsado workflows to automate your business, but I think the best way to explain it is just to maybe give you an example. Well, let's say you're a website designer and you've already embedded your lead capture form on your website in the form of a Dubsado scheduler so someone can book a consultation with you to talk about having you design their website. Your prospective client goes to your website, loves what they see, gets so excited about working with you, sees they can book a free call with you, and so they go and they pick a time and they fill out all the information on your lead capture form. So you get a notification from Dubsado that says hey, so-and-so filled out your lead capture form and booked an appointment. You check your calendar. You see the appointment in there. You go, look at the form and see what they've got to say. They look like the perfect client. By the way, you took a little time to do some research ahead of time to see what their current website looks like and understand more about them.

Speaker 1:

You get on the discovery call. You have a great time, you feel really prepared for your discovery call and you're able to put together a proposal for them in just a few minutes, using your pre-made proposal template that you've already created in Dubsado and by just adding and tweaking your packages that you've already created in Dubsado. So they're still excited about working with you. They get the proposal in just a few minutes after the call. They get the proposal in just a few minutes after the call, they review it and they pick their options, sign the contract and pay the invoice and within maybe even a half an hour, you've got a paid project and they get a thank you message from Dubsado along with an onboarding questionnaire telling them how excited you are to work with them and asking them to fill out the onboarding questionnaire and book their onboarding session with you so you can get started right away on their project. They're blown away by your client experience and they schedule the appointment, fill out their onboarding form so you have everything you need to have to get started.

Speaker 1:

You do the onboarding session, you get busy building their website. They get some automated emails from you as you're designing their website, updating them on where you're at in the process. By the way, those only take you a button click to send, so that's a huge time saver. And then you automatically send them the scheduler to book their off-boarding call with you to review everything you did for them in their business. You have the off-boarding call, you make a few tweaks to the website and then you send them the feedback form so you can hear all about their experience of working with you. And, by the way, you've got a few emails that go out after the off-boarding form happens, so that you can check in with them and see if they need any additional help with their website. Maybe you even send them an upsell for recurring services using another proposal that, by the way, will create another project for you. How does that sound in your business? Can you imagine using something like that in your own business?

Speaker 1:

I know I talked about web designers, but there are so many ways that any creative service provider can use Dubsado. If you're excited to get started with Dubsado and do a deeper dive into it, be sure to check out my Mastering Dubsado course, where we'll cover advanced features and strategies to make the most out of this tool. Additionally, my Getting Started with Dubsado course is perfect for beginners and will walk you through the basics step by step. You'll get templates that you can add right to your Dubsado account, step-by-step tutorials and even tech support from me through our online community. And if you'd rather have me do your full Dubsado setup for you, I have that option as well. You can check out both of these options in the show notes and book a discovery call using my Dubsado scheduler to see if we're a good fit to work together.

Speaker 1:

Now, before I sign off, I do want to let you know that Dubsado is great for a lot of things beyond customer management. You can onboard contractors, seamlessly, pitch your podcast to potential guests and follow up. You can also send podcast pitches to be on other podcasts and send over your file with all of the information that they can take a look at to decide if they want to have you on their show. You can also manage guest speakers for your events, and so much more. It really is a very helpful tool in your business. The flexibility makes it so essential for any creative entrepreneur.

Speaker 1:

Now, before you just go ahead and dive into paying for a subscription in Dubsado, I do recommend trying it out, and Dubsado has a free trial for the first three projects in there, so you can hop right in there and try it out. Give it a test drive, see if it's the system for you and your business. And in the show notes for this episode I do have a code for 20% off your first year with Dubsado. You can grab that and get started with taking a test drive. If you decide it's a good fit for your business, you can go ahead and subscribe and get started using it to work less, make more and wow clients. If you loved what you saw today, I'd invite you to check out my other videos here on YouTube. I have several videos walking through lots of tutorials on Dubsado features to help you get busy designing your Dubsado setup.