Last Updated: February 14th, 2020
If you are struggling to convert inquiries for your service to real life bookings, you need to read this post to see how Honeybook can help you!
When we started our photography business in January 2017, we had no idea what we were doing. Seriously. In the fall leading up to officially forming an LLC, we photographed a lot of little sessions and small time weddings (usually as second shooters for other established photogs!). We knew a lot about our creative passion, but so little about the business side of things.
Most creatives are a lot like us. Great at their art form – whether it be photography, videography, DJ services, florists, caterers, and similar…but not so great at taking that art form, packaging it, selling it, and making a business out of it. That, friends, takes some extra skill!
As we have come to learn, the modern business landscape includes a lot of products and services that can help simplify running a successful business for small business owners like us. Of course, there is a lot of rubbish out there too.
Today – we utilize only a small number of essential business services.
We don’t like paying for things when we don’t need to (we are cheap!). But, we can tell you that things like Honeybook – which save time for us, create a positive customer experience, and much more – are worth the expense.
In this post, we’re going to talk to you about the 10 things that being a Honeybook user will help you to gain. The benefits have been substantial for us – so we want to share them with you to help you see what this platform actually has to offer a creative business professional like yourself!
Already feeling convinced it’s right for you? You can sign up for a free trial of Honeybook and take 50% off your annual subscription using this link.
The 10 Things You Have to Gain from Being a Honeybook User
One Platform = Many Things
First up – it’s important to understand that Honeybook is a single platform that does many key things well as we fully explain in our detailed review of Honeybook.
As a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) – Honeybook is designed to simplify the customer experience by making every interaction they have with your business an easy one. More on this in just a bit.
At it’s core, people who are looking into getting a subscription to Honeybook are going to be most interested in these key features:
- Sending out contracts
- Digital contract signing
- Sending out invoices
- Automated invoice schedules
- Diverse online payment options including credit, debit, bank payments (you can also accept cash/checks and other form of payment outside of the system and mark it accordingly in HB)
- Automate workflows (integrate contact form on website, send out questionnaires to collect info, and more)
- Communicate with clients through built in interface
It’s a long list – and there are a lot of other additional features that we find really valuable. At it’s core though, we got Honeybook to send out contracts + invoices, everything else is just icing on the cake.
The benefit of having all of these things under one roof is that you will ultimately save time and money by not needing to purchase subscriptions to multiple services that do each thing independently. You will also not need to put in extra work (ie: time) going from one platform to another and having to navigate all the nuances of each.
More Personal Time
Hands down, the best benefit we get from using Honeybook is that it simplifies so many business processes (that we just want to get over with) and frees us up to do things we actually want to do.
Early on in our business, we actually would meet with clients just to sign contracts. While face-to-face business is great, it’s not a simple solution. Get ghosted just one time while you’re at a Starbucks at 6pm – and you’ll know it’s better to just have things like this handled online.
Honeybook is a collection of key business services that, once set up and running appropriately, will save you time.
Better Customer Experience
As business owners, we want our clients to be happy with the service they are receiving.
At the end of the day, given we are photographers, our clients care most about the photos they are receiving – this is our #1 priority.
But – taking pictures and sending them to our clients in an online gallery is not the only interaction they have with us. We want them to feel their entire experience is easy and smooth.
We’ve received a lot of positive feedback over the years from past, prospective, and current clients telling us how great our booking process is. People have said things to us (sometimes literally to our faces) like:
“Booking you was so easy”
“I’m glad I could just pay my deposit online. It’s just like checking out on Amazon.”
“We talked with another photographer, and their booking process required us to meet in person, sign a contract, and we could only pay with a check! Who uses checks!”
Today – when we meet with new and prospective clients, we have Honeybook open on our laptop to show them how simple our booking process is. We get the same positive response again and again!
Thinking of it from the clients shoes (you know – using some empathy), we get why. If we were booking a creative for our wedding (or some other event), and especially if we’re paying good money for them, we don’t want to be even more stressed out during the process. We’re already accepting losing a chunk of cash from our savings account that we’ve been working weeks for. We’d want to just easily get the boring parts of this transaction over with (signing a legal document, the contract, and paying money for the service). We want to get on to the fun of working with this cool vendor!!
Quick & Easy Bookings
As we often talk with photographers and other creatives who want to break into the world of self-employment like we’ve managed to do, we will often ask them what their booking process looks like.
Like we mentioned – we started off meeting in person, signing contracts on pen-and-paper, and collecting cash or checks. This is a dated approach – but one we see newbies employing again and again.
Honeybook allows for immediate simplification of the booking process.
Instead of having to wait to meet up at a coffee shop, we can send out a contract + invoice (known as a proposal in HB) and it will arrive immediately to our clients email inbox.
Instead of needing to go to the bank to cash a check or deposit cash, we can accept credit and debit cards, and payments are deposited right into our account (within a few days).
Over the years, we’ve learned that we will book more clients when we are quick to get our contracts out to them. It removes the element of time from the equation that can sometimes lead people to 2nd guess their decisions. That means – no more lost bookings just because you were too slow to get the contract signed!
Sound good to you? Sign up for a free trial of Honeybook today!
Automated Workflows
This is where Honeybook really gets interesting…
Making use of Honeybook’s integrated workflow automation is one of the biggest ways you can begin to take time back as a creative. Honeybook has a neat little infographic on their site that says “business owning creatives normally spend 20% of their time being creative, and 80% of their time working on the business” – but through automation these numbers can be reversed.
How you can use automation workflows is very deep, but a few examples:
- Automate inquiry responses through use of a pre-fabbed email template + Honeybook contact form integrated on your website
- Automate standard follow up emails and thank you’s you’d send to all clients
- Send out questionnaires requesting information at set times
- …and more!
Related post: Our Honeybook FAQ!
Job Scheduling
Honeybook has a built in calendar system that communicates with Google Calendars allowing for all of your jobs, expected payment dates, etc. to be available both from within HB itself and through Google (a lot of people have this downloaded on their phones!).
This is a simple point of reference for knowing when certain events will be happening. It’s also incredibly useful to see when you should expect certain payments, so you can have more control over your cash flow.
Creative Community
Honeybook features a section for community members to interact with each other and post requests and gigs. As wedding photographers, we’ve taken notice of all the second shooting opportunities being posted there – it’s a really cool way to connect with others.
Really, any creative working in wedding and event spaces have an opportunity to benefit from this built in and niche community. This can be filtered by your geographic region as well – so if you want, you can just see opportunities close to you.
Valuable Data Insights
Just like when Michael Scott realized Toby returned from a trip and yelled “No!!!” in The Office, most creatives are not super driven by looking at data. Numbers in an Excel spreadsheet? No, thank you.
While data kind of stinks, it’s also very important to a business owner.
Good data will help you make more informed decisions. It goes from just being numbers on a page to something actionable.
There is a lot of data you can pull from Honeybook, but 3 ways we consistently use it:
- To pull sales figures when paying our state sales tax on a monthly basis
- To identify our sent proposals to booking ratio
- And to see where our leads are coming from (ie: social media, word of mouth, etc.)
An example of this in action: you can review quick charts right in Honeybook that showcases a distribution of leads (ie: what sources they come from) and the average booking value of the types of leads. In the below screenshot, what you are seeing is that people referred to us by our past clients and vendors tend to book us for higher package costs (over $5,000!) while traffic from other platforms like Instagram, Google, and The Knot tend to be lower paying. You can also see extreme outliers like Wedding Wire, which has translated into 0 bookings (no surprise there – though!).
Simplify Package Offerings Using Templates
Another way to simplify your booking process is by crafting template contracts, emails, proposals, and invoice schedules. This is an area that requires a little more upfront effort, but saves so much time and effort down the line.
Here’s an example of how we’ve used templates to simplify putting together a contract + invoice for new clients:
Our wedding photography business is built around 3 key packages. We put together contract + invoice proposals for each of these – so it includes all the contract verbiage, list of included things in the package, and breakdown of when payments are due (set up for “at signing” and “2 weeks before the event date”).
In our contract template, we have added fields that auto-populate based on information we’ve already inputted. This includes info regarding the overall price & retainer payment amount (we no longer have to do the math to add it to our contracts!). We also generate things like client names, phone numbers, address info, etc. as we would have had it provided to us in advance from our inquiry form.
It used to take us a lot of time to put together all of this information, now it takes about 5 minutes to get everything ready and sent out to our client-to-be.
Honeybook Referral Program for Star Users
Did you know – Honeybook can basically pay for itself!
Honeybook offers a really great referral program to its users. The great part is that it incentivizes those users who use it effectively and have success in their business.
Once you transact $2,000 through your business, you are automatically enrolled in Honeybook’s Premium Referral Program – allowing you to offer 50% off the first year subscription to others, and earning yourself a $200 commission in the progress. This is extremely valuable to us as creatives in a tough industry, and we expect it will be great for you if you find Honeybook to be worth it for your business.
Our Honeybook Offer for You
If you made it this far, you’re probably interested in checking out Honeybook for yourself. The next step is to sign up for a free 7 day trial and give it a go!
By using our link, you will also be able to save 50% off your first year subscription!
But – to sweeten the deal specifically for Formed From Light readers – if you sign up through our link, we welcome you to reach out directly to us via email for help and advice getting Honeybook setup. Please contact us from the same email address as you used to sign up!
You won’t find this kind of extra support from anyone else promoting HB – we do it because we have found Honeybook to be an excellent platform for us personally and we benefit from it every day.
We offer this because we know it can seem daunting at first with so much to take in – but trust us, it gets easier. Honeybook has been one of the best business service investments we’ve made.