Anyone with a service-based business can benefit from HoneyBook. It’s one of our favorite clientflow management platforms and project management tools. And for agency owners, business coaches, or business consultants in particular, HoneyBook can help you manage new leads, client communication, and your own team.
Wondering how to use HoneyBook for your coaching or consulting business? Follow these tips below!
As a business service provider, having a streamlined, organized system for inquiries and booking is crucial! Can you imagine manually responding to every message that lands in your inbox? (If you’re doing that now, take this as a sign that you don’t have to anymore!)
You can use HoneyBook to automate common tasks and processes that your business uses. In fact, that’s what we did for Grafted, a lifecycle marketing agency that recently hired us to help with HoneyBook.
The Grafted team realized that managing leads and communicating with prospective clients manually was eating up too much time — something that any business owner, not just coaches and consultants, can relate to! So we helped Grafted discover what workflows they needed help with and what we could automate for them.
You can do the same for your business. Start by workflow mapping so you can fully understand the steps in a process from start to finish. That’ll make it easier to set up an automation for it.
For example, you might map out a workflow that breaks down your new employee onboarding process so that you can set up HoneyBook automations for steps like training, filling out important forms, and scheduling their first check-in meeting.
One objection we hear from clients that we support with HoneyBook? They’re afraid to use automations because they don’t think they can be customized to their services, offers, or business needs. And that’s just not true! HoneyBook’s customization options are one of the best reasons to use it for CRM and project management.
You are in control of what to automate and how you want to do it. Take scheduling and responding to inquiries, for example. You might want to send a brochure to potential leads early on in the conversation, while another coach or consultant might prefer to wait until they’ve had their first meeting. That’s totally fine. You can customize your email sequences either way.
We love that you can automate multiple follow-up messages to prospective clients, too. If someone doesn’t reply to your request for a call, or if someone takes too long to sign your proposal, you decide when to follow up and how often. Customizable templates make it easy to write out your messages ahead of time, too.
Here are some reasons you might need a specific workflow (and a unique automation to support it):
There are so many different ways for your inquiry and booking process to go! When you automate these workflows, you save time and money — and you provide a better client experience for new leads.
HoneyBook isn’t just for client-facing tasks. Did you know that you can use it to collaborate with your employees and team members, too?
HoneyBook makes collaboration and team organization easy from the get-go. For example, you can assign new members of your team a role based on what level of access they need to an account.
All basic team members can manage templates and automations, but if you want someone to view other members’ workspaces, you could assign them the role of Moderator. Want someone with even more permissions and controls? Make them an Admin so that they can add team members, create and send files, or issue refunds.
On that same note, you can assign specific projects to your team members. Once a project is assigned, they’ll have full control, and they’ll be able to access it in their own pipeline. By letting team members focus on specific projects, you prevent overwhelm and boost your team’s productivity.
Here’s a bonus tip for you before we go.
When working with new clients, be crystal clear on why you’re using HoneyBook. Typically, HoneyBook’s CRM tools are used for the initial booking and sales processes. If you switch over to ClickUp as a project management tool after you’ve onboarded your client, make sure they know that and why! It helps set client expectations and builds trust between the two of you.
Wondering how our experience with Grafted ended? Here’s what they had to say on their new HoneyBook build:
“I have time back on my calendar to work on the most important areas of our business.
With the ability to automate much of what we do in HoneyBook, my prospective clients are now receiving responses much quicker, they’re moving through the sales funnel more efficiently (and with less drop-off), and they’re getting contract proposals that look cleaner than anything we have put out previously.”
See how HoneyBook has transformed other agencies and businesses here!
And if you’re ready to make that happen for your coaching or consulting business, give us a shout!
