Create a Busy Invoice Format for Marketing Effortlessly

Busy invoice format for Marketing

hey there my name is Christy I'm the CEO and founder of the solo life and a honeybook pro as a honeybook pro I've been able to see how so many different business owners are currently using honeybook and then what we're able to do to really streamline and optimize their accounts that being said there are so many common mistakes that we see as people are just getting started and so I want to make this video to share those with you so maybe you can avoid those if you're just diving in or maybe you're not just diving in and you maybe have been using a honeybook for six months a year or two and this video can just be enlightening to you and some simple tweaks that you can make to really enhance your setup so with that let's dive into the biggest honeybook mistakes that we see and what I wish I knew when getting started [Music] I'm so excited to go through this tutorial with you to show you the biggest honeybook mistakes that we we see and for you to realize that they are actually super simple and if you've made these in the past or you're just discovering these things know that you are not alone because not only do we see this all the time but I even did some of these same mistakes in the beginning so let's go through them the first thing is not integrating your email account so if you come into your settings and then you go into company settings click into Integrations and then make sure your email is actually integrated here if it is not it's going to say mailman honeybook.com all you have to do is connect it here and go through your email provider it takes less than 60 seconds to set up and then your emails your brochures everything are not going to be going to your clients as mailman honeybook.com it will actually be coming from you the second mistake we see is in your preferences often we get messages from clients from students from people being like I don't have automations turned on and my clients are getting these emails saying hey I sent a file did you get it or maybe it's sending questionnaires or files to them that you are not sure where it's coming from well this is actually coming from the preferences the actions section I would recommend turning all of these off to start unless you absolutely know you want to use these so for example send a questionnaire to my client three weeks before this is a big one send a reminder to my client if they've not viewed my sent smart file or file within three days that one is the one that people are like it's sending reminders I don't know where it's coming from I didn't want that to go out send a smart file three weeks before or expire Legacy proposals so make sure you take a look at this action section and turn these off if you don't want them going out automatically Okay the third mistake we see is having multiple projects for one client now I want to go through this a little bit talking about adding a new project or new client what the difference is and when you should add multiple projects per client so the mistake portion right is say you have a client who is a monthly recurring client who you send an invoice to each month that should be one project right every client you have is automatically going to be one client you could add multiple projects click add new project right and I say okay this is just silver life honeybook setup or let's say honeybook monthly support I'm gonna put the uh other and then create project now I could add my client to this okay so I added John Smith and now this is our project portal now once you have a project portal you can send multiple files in here so you'd click in files you'd see everything that's here whether it's multiple invoices you can always create new and just have this all in one place if you're sending a new invoice to an ongoing client you do not want to start a new project you want to go ahead and search for that portal that you already have and just create a new file in there now when would you create a new project for an existing client if you are doing a whole new service a whole new project for example if we had a click up roadmap that then moved into a custom click up build those would be two separate portals if you're a photographer and you had a mini session with a fan family and then they book another mini session the following year that would be a new project portal so there are some simple rules that you should follow in terms of you know creating new projects but typically if it's an ongoing client you just want to have one portal so that it all the information stays in one place another quick tip for you here is that you saw that when I created this project I renamed it well when something comes in for from your contact form it's just going to be that person's first and last name project so Christy da Silva's project I always recommend coming in here and renaming that project like putting the client name or company name Dash and whatever the service is not only so that's how it shows in my Pipeline and in my calendar but also because the client can see what the project is named so it just makes it a little bit more clean not only for you but also for them okay moving on the next mistake we see is cluttering up your pipeline so here let's take a look at our pipeline right you can see we do have a good amount of stages so inquiry follow-up three months six month book call on hold blah blah blah um but what we see is you can actually customize your pipeline right and add these custom stages and you can see what we've added as custom stages but what we see often is sometimes people are trying to use these stages as like task reminders so edit Gallery send gift send onboarding questionnaire where for those things you really want to utilize instead project tasks that way you have those reminders in your task section but they're not cluttering up your pipeline and typically people forget to move people in their project pipeline stage quite often so let me pop back into John Smith's project and here you can see if I want to add a task that says order client gift as a reminder I can just add tasks click order client gift and then put a due date on it and it's as easy as that all right we have three more common mistakes I want to go through so the next one is editing templates in the template Center for a client so what I mean by this is if I come into tools my templates people will come into here and be like okay cool I'm gonna come into this proposal or actually let me go into one of my templates I'm going to come into this invoice template that I have and in here I'm gonna put a custom package for someone that maybe is like okay 45 minute strategy session boom boom boom boom and then click update template use template and then attach it to a project but what your templates really are for are for you to have this base Blank Slate to work off of and what you want to do instead is go into the project portal first and then you want to click create new invoice then go ahead and open that invoice and then edit it from there that way now you can see this invoice template is attached to John Smith's project anything that I edit in here will not affect the original template so you're keeping the templates super clean and then anything that you need to customize for the client you could do so now that it's attached to their project while we're in here the next things that we see often are there are so many buttons to click so many settings so people don't usually realize that you can change the button for your files and the thumbnails for your smart files so if you go ahead and come into configure settings this right here this thumbnail is going to be defaulted to whatever that template from the template Center was or a default template that was already in your account so all you want to do is click on this pencil and you can upload a new photo or choose from your library that way it's customized to you and your brand the next thing is that button this is actually in the three dots here these settings and hold on let me go back to the template Center because I actually can't do this in John Smith's project again changing the thumbnail you want to make sure you do that in the template Center so it's a lasting change so if I come in to a template now let's go into say this style guide then if I come into the three dots and click edit email settings I can choose an email template that I always want to bring up if I'm sending this manually and then this button here if this was a style guide instead of it saying get started in the email I want it to say style guide and then you can click save and it will change that button text okay and my last tip for you but certainly not least is uh one of the most common mistakes we see is people not embedding their contact form on their website so when you create a honeybook contact form in the template section you could have multiple contact forms or just one generic one then you can see when I click in here and I click publish it's going to give me this embed code so you can click on these embedding instructions here or if you have your um web hosting platform logo here you can check on that exact guide but you're going to copy this code and then embed it on your website so you can see for disable lace this is our honeybook contact form it super branded and looks like it's a part of our website but this means we are not losing one single lead that inquires through our website we don't have to be sifting through our email because maybe we have like a Squarespace or a webflow form but instead they're going to go right into honeybook and then this can also trigger the amazing automations that are possible through honeybook so that is it for our biggest honeybook mistakes I hope that was helpful for you and you learned something new let me know in the comments if you did learn something new and what was the most eye-opening for you so I hope that video was helpful for you and just learning the different mistakes that we see and how you could really avoid those when getting started with honey look or even fix them now to streamline your account moving forward if you like this video make sure to give it a thumbs up and go ahead and subscribe to our channels if you want to stay in the loop about all the honeybook tutorials coming down the pipeline and if you are ready to Dive Right In to everything you need to set up your honeybook from the beginning we also have a honeybook course I'll make sure to drop the link in the description below if you're interested in checking it out and do me a favor and drop in the comments below what your biggest takeaway was from this video with that thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time [Music] thank you foreign