Raise your hand if you ever felt like you need a CRM to grow your photography business, although you got totally overwhelmed by the setup process. Well, today I'm here to tell you that you don't need one. So stay tuned.

Welcome back to the Freedom Focus Photography podcast everybody. I am your host Nicole Begley and I love to help pet photographers master the craft and all portrait photographers make more money in their business by dialing in their pricing and sales processes. Well today I want to talk about the dreaded CRM. You know you guys love to hate them. I know I do. You want to love them.

but you find it really frustrating. You feel like you need to have one. You set aside all this time. You start getting in there. You start building it. And all of a sudden, like weeks have gone by and you still don't have a final CRM. And then you have the time sunk of how much time you've put in the CRM and you want to make it work. And then you start to put it in work, but then you change your process. And then you have to change the CRM. I speak from experience. I've been there. I've been there. It can be a really frustrating process.

And quite frankly, I've been running my business for most of the time without one. And I want to share with you kind of what you actually need and some other options, you know, and not to throw any shade. If you have a CRM that you love, great. I'm not saying you need to get rid of it. If you have something that's working for you, that is fantastic. But if you are struggling to find something that works, I want to give you some different options today. And we're going to talk about that a little bit. But first.

What is a CRM? A CRM is a Client Relationship Management software. CRM, Client Relationship Management. And it is designed for businesses to track, manage client interactions, sales pipelines and workflows. These are softwares like HoneyBook, Dubsado, 17 Hats. There's lots of different CRMs on the market. And they sound great in theory, but

They can really become time sucking projects that don't add as much value as you think if you are a smaller studio in a boutique situation where you're only having a handful of clients a month. Now, if you're running like a high volume studio, then okay, a CRM is going to be a non-negotiable for that. But for most of us that maybe have 50 to 70 clients a year, there's other ways that we can create that process too. Now, like I said,

I'm not here to say no one should have a CRM. There are definitely people that find CRMs that they love that work really well for their business. And, you know, if you're getting to the point where these other options that we're talking about don't work for you, certainly spend the time to go and get a CRM and get it set up. You'll likely want to invest in either some assistance from a person that set it up.

or set aside a bit of time to go through all the education pieces to learn how to actually set up the CRM. Because it isn't something that you just like open the software and it's ready to go. You have to build it out for your workflow, how it's going to work best for your business. And that takes time. And with all things in business, things will cost time or money. So if you're short on time, but you have some extra cash, yeah, you can hire a consultant to help you get that set up.

If you don't have the money, but you have some extra time, then you can dive into those tutorials and start to set it up yourself. but today, what I wanted to do is talk about some other solutions for you because, let's be honest, how many of you guys out there have started setting up a CRM only to give up halfway because it's too confusing, right? and then there's also all these different features that maybe we don't need.

Like they can have these crazy complex automations, but do we really need that? you know, what's, what's going on here? no, one thing I do want to mention because a lot of people tend to get confused of is a CRM the same as my email marketing and no, they are not, they are different. I actually don't know. It's possible. There's one out there that includes both, but I don't know of any that includes your email marketing and your CRM.

So having your CRM is like your database of your clients. And then the email marketing is how you contact those clients, how you email them, how you reach out to them, how you communicate with them and stay in touch. So we're not going to talk about email marketing in this particular episode. Those would be things like kit used to be called convert kit. That's what I use. I love it. They do have an option. No, the

I lied, sorry. They have a free option, but I looked into that for the conservation fund and it's required basically having like little ads that were not for your products on your email newsletter. And I was like, that's a deal breaker for me. But it is a fantastic software, but it does cost about $29 a month for the basic plan. Some easy ones to start with are like a Weber, Mailer Lite, MailChimp, things like that.

usually will let you have one to 2000 people on your list before you have to start paying. So there is no reason to not build your email list, but that's not what we're talking about today. Today we're going to go back to that CRM, which is that client database that really tracks all the clients you have, where they are in the process, anything that they need to do as part of the process. So that is generally what it is.

Okay, sorry Venus.

All right, so let's talk about what we actually need. What jobs is a CRM doing for most boutique photography businesses? Well, number one, it is acting as a database for our clients. So it's a place that we can store all of the contact information for our clients. It is also going to be a way to track where our clients are through our process, like how many people have signed our session agreement, who has set up their pre-session consult, who...

has their stuff ordered, who's been completely delivered, who needs their testimonials. Like we can write down our whole process and then we know where everybody is inside that process. It's a way to send and manage session agreements and a way to collect payments and invoices. So that's really it. That's the heavy lifting that a CRM does. But it doesn't have to be in this one and done software solution. I wanna go over just some...

couple of different options that if you're just starting out that you can utilize some of these free services or they're either free or a little bit less expensive. But again, like I said, if you're getting to the point and it feels overwhelming and you're like, I really want to streamline and my business is growing and I need that CRM now, that's totally cool. I'm not here again to say that no one should have a CRM. I just wanted to give you guys options. So let's talk about these different options.

for building our client database. Well, you can use something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet. If you want to get fancy and create automations, because that is one of the benefits of CRM, is it will natively kind of connect these different things. So like somebody fills out their session agreement and they automatically get tagged or added to your client database. If you want to get fancy automations,

There is a software called Zapier, Z-A-P-I-E-R, zapier.com, and it will connect lots of different software together. So that's one way, again, not to talk about email lists, but when somebody fills out a contact form on my website, I have a Zap that says, hey, this person filled out a contact form on my website, add them to my email list, and it can automatically happen in the background. So...

depending who you use to fill out your session agreements, like you could create a zap that says, Hey, when somebody fills out my session agreement, add their name, email address, you know, contact information, mailing address to my client, Google spreadsheet.

We'll see how that goes.

So for creating.

So to summarize different things that you can do for just building that client database, Google spreadsheet or Google sheet and Excel spreadsheet, or if you have something like air table or Monday, I use Monday, then I can build out something there. Okay. So for the next piece for tracking clients, this is for like keeping track of your process, where they are in the process and what still needs to be done. So

Number one, do you have a process? Can you sit down and just kind of write out everything that needs to happen for a client to go through their process? I would actually recommend doing this in two different ways, writing out everything from your end that needs to happen. And then from their perspective, what needs to happen just to make sure you're not missing anything. And once you have that, then you can do something. What I did for years is I actually just had a checklist. it was a word document that I printed out copies on my printer.

And I stapled it to the front of a vanilla envelope, you know, just those folding envelopes. And I had on my wall, like a magazine rack that had five or six little, Pockets, you know, like if you were at a doctor's office and they had a magazine rack on the wall, I had that on the wall of my office. And I would have one clients booked, they would be at the very top. And then once they had signed their agreement, paid their session fee, then moved to the second one. And then once we like held their.

sale session or their pre-consultation and they are totally ready for their session, they move to the third one. And then after they had their session, they needed to edit, they moved to the fourth one. And then once the sale session was done and I needed to order their items, it went to the fifth one or while their items were on order. And then like the sixth one was for delivery or testimonials or something. So you can just kind of create something as simple as that.

like straight up old school analog, no digital stuff needed at all. It worked really well for several years. I was running a six figure business managing my clients in that way. if you want to make that a little bit more digital, you can create a Trello board. Trello is free. you know, if you want some of the bells and whistles, you might need to upgrade. Although I don't think, I was actually mine's still free and I have a lot of boards.

but you can create a Trello board where you have each column as a different part of your process and then each card is your client. You can have all the information in it and you just move them along the board on Trello. You can create deadlines, checklists, stuff like that in there. So that would be a great way to manage that. Again, totally free.

I manage my client process on Monday. I just kind of, have different statuses. can change and move them into different groups, kind of like that trailer board, moving them across Monday is different groups. just moved them down, the process there. So lots of different ways to, utilize that. if you didn't want to have a CRM. Now, I will say some CRMs are better at managing the checklist and workflow than others. so.

Just keep an eye on that if that's something important to you. but there's definitely some great free options, digital or analog like Trello or those checklists. Okay. let's move on to signing agreements. This is an important piece of, of everything. And you do really need a way for people to sign agreements. you can use something like hello sign docuSign. Some of those can be really expensive.

I think because they're marketed towards the B2B space, but man, like we don't, we don't need that extra expense. so there might be, looking into like Google forms. I personally use jot form for signing my session agreement, that they are legally binding. So, some things I make sure to have on my form is the client has to put in their name and address and there is a date and time on it, or at least a date.

and then they sign it. JotForm does track their IP address that it's signed from so that it is legally binding documents still. So you don't have to worry about that. And I did check with a lawyer about that. Again, I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice, but I just wanted to share what I learned. So yeah, so you need some way to sign an agreement. And then of course you need a way to get paid. So how do you want to get paid?

Well, first my question for you would be how are you keeping track of your books? Because no matter where you are in your business, you definitely should be having some accounting software available. is that, are you using Wave accounting? It's free, it's great, highly recommend. That's what I use for the conservation fund. For my main business, I do use QuickBooks. So QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks learning curve is a bit steep.

It has a lot of functions and features that most of us don't need and it can be a little bit confusing. However, most accountants are familiar with it, but wave, wave works really well too. So check out wave accounting. If you just Google that, you should be able to find that they have a free version. It's a really great way to get started. So no matter what you're using, any online accounting software is likely going to have an ability for you to send an invoice. So you can just manually create an invoice and email it to your client.

Yeah, maybe it takes an extra few minutes than it does if you had a CRM that automatically creates and sends an invoice. But like I said, how much time are you saving from not setting up that CRM? And also money, CRMs do cost money. that's just kind of a, giving you some different options here just to go over them again. We need a way in our business to create a database of our clients. We need a way to track

where our clients are through the workflow of the process. We need a way to send and manage session agreements and we need a way to collect payments.

We talked about these different ways that you could put those together yourself, but I have another solution for you guys too. If you're someone who wants like maybe a little bit more structure than trying to put all these other tools together, but maybe not the complexity of a full CRM, there's a middle ground I think you would love. And that is my favorite online gallery software, CloudSpot, which started out as an online gallery. It has a very robust online gallery service, you know, from

carts and people doing favorites and creating different versions of galleries with downloads, without downloads, with a store, with custom items in your store, with the store linking to different labs. So when they order, they can automatically get sent to your client. Just so many different things going on there. But it also started to offer a studio management aspect to it as well. So that would do things like sending those invoices.

sending agreements to be signed. Like all those onboarding pieces, I generally have found that most CRMs do the onboarding pieces really, really well. And then the workflow piece, not as well. So I have always ended up finding a workflow solution outside of a CRM, but the onboarding piece of most video management software is really helpful.

So if you want something that does not cost an arm and a leg, that is easy to set up, definitely check out Cloudspot. I am an ambassador for them and I love them. I use them myself. If you go to www.hairofthedogacademy.com/cloudspot, C-L-O-U-D-S-P-O-T, it will take you to a little special offer. It's half off the first year.

Whether you do monthly or yearly, you can also sign up without any payments. Just sign up for the free trial, which, gosh. I think you can create like, I don't quote me. I forget what exactly is entitled in the free trial. And I don't want to tell you the wrong thing here. but you can sign up for a free trial and then you'll get that discount when you decide it does work for you and you want to upgrade to it. so there is one caveat.

One caveat about CloudSpot that I know some people were not happy with. And if you are in our Elevate program, you know that Heather and I have gone.

can't even talk.

Lay down. Sorry. My mom and her boyfriend are here and the dog barks at him constantly because he has to be here in a while. Okay. What was I saying? All right.

If you're in our elevate program, you know that Heather and I had an ongoing issue about tipping and whether we should ask our clients for tips, leave the tips line on, on our invoices. And I am firmly in the camp of no, if your client wants to tip you, they will still tip you. And I don't want to have that tip line on an invoice and them to feel like, I know you guys have all felt it when there's a tip somewhere and you're like, how much?

Am I supposed to tip here? How much am I supposed to tip? my gosh. 10 or 20 % is a lot of money on a $5,000 order. so anyway, I don't have that on. and another thing that like one of the things because of that, sorry, let me be, let me re say that. one of the things that is most important to me for my clients is I never want them to feel nickel or dimed. I want them to have.

and experience that is yes, expensive, but like I'm taking care of them and I'm not going to be, you know, adding little fees here and there. So CloudSpot, when you sign up for their gallery system, the studio management service is included. The way though that they are able to make a little bit of money because it costs a lot of money to develop software and also maintain the software is by having just a little bit of a higher invoice fee.

which they had split with the photographer pain, I think like two and a half, and then the, client pain 2%. if they use a credit card or yeah, if they use a credit card on the invoice. so that kind of splits up the merchant services fee, which is usually about 4%, three and a half percent. So cloud spot is making 1 % on that invoice sale because like I said, businesses need money to run.

So I don't fault them for that. But as someone who doesn't want my client to have extra fees, I wouldn't want my client to see that they have to pay 2 % to use a credit card. So when I was talking to them, they said, if you want to turn that off, you can totally reach out to their support and they can turn that off on the back end of the system. But that would mean then you're paying that that full amount. But where this...

this service really shines is creating your onboarding process through their studio management software where they, you know, your client comes in, they sign their session agreement, they pay their initial session fee invoice, and you get them all onboarded so they're ready for their session. And then after the session, once they have their final sale, you can always send them an invoice direct from whatever accounting software you're using because

we all should be using something like Wave or, Xero or, QuickBooks to make sure that we are tracking our finances of our business appropriately. so then you would end up paying just whatever the normal merchant service fees are for any card to card use. So that's one way. And then I would just absorb that, that little bit of extra payment for my session fee. you know, the session fees usually aren't much, so it really wouldn't equate to be a couple of dollars.

so that's one way you can do that to keep it really streamlined. And yeah, like I said, generally CRMs are best done to manage the onboarding process. And then once you actually photograph the session, the workflow piece of it I find is usually best managed in some other way, like a Trello or a Monday board or a checklist. and then you can send those invoices directly through your, accounting software.

So at the end of the day, what you really want is to spend less time on the admin of your business and more time creating beautiful images for your clients and marketing your business to have more clients to create beautiful images for.

I want to help you keep it simple, stay focused and remember that you don't need all the fancy tools to run a thriving photography business. If you do want to check out CloudSpot, there's a link down below in the show notes and you can also jump over to www.hairofthedogacademy.com/CloudSpot and it will redirect you. And when you use that link, you do get the best possible deal that is not available publicly. So definitely go check that out.

I absolutely love them even before they had the studio management aspect added to it. And even though I do live sales, so I'm not selling out of a gallery, I have found it to be so helpful to deliver my digital files to my clients through that gallery because I let them know, hey, it's attached to a store that you can order prints. Really, I just have prints and cards in there. I don't have big wall art in my store.

because they're ordering that through me. When they add on the digital files, I let them know, hey, this gallery is gonna be up for a certain amount of time. I usually have that for about two months. And then I let them know you can order, if you wanna order any prints for around your house or family, you can order them through there. They're just, I told them they're basically a professional lab prices, just a, well, I don't wanna say it that way. I say they're just a...

Sorry, Venus.

I say they are pretty close to align with consumer prices, but they're coming from a professional lab and they are.

my god. Go out. Stop barking. Get out. Get out! Stop barking.

Let me try that again.

I let my clients know that I don't want them to.

I let my clients know that when things come from a professional lab, okay, hold on. Sorry. Venus cut all of that out from the beginning where I've fumbled over that of what I say to my clients. I'm sorry. So I'll start here again.

I let my clients know that when they print their images from a professional lab, the color and the contrast are going to be better. The quality is going to be better. I also let them know that the images that they can print from, in their gallery, they can have floppy prints, but they can also print the, the archival prints that have the styrene on the back, so that they last longer and they won't bend. and I have those prices set.

really just a dollar or two above what the lab cost is. I'm not looking to make money from the sales in the gallery to my clients after my main sale. They have paid me very well for their artwork, for adding on the digital files. I've been paid. So this is more of a me wanting to provide the best possible experience for my client and give them the opportunity to add more prints that are at a reasonable cost that are beautiful.

I just want everything to be beautiful for them. So that's how I utilize that, even though I don't really do online gallery sales. And that's why CloudSpot's been so helpful for me in my business. Now, on a rare occasion, if I do like a micro session, like those 10 15 minute sessions back to back, usually with a charitable component, I'll use that for sales or maybe a mini session. Or occasionally I do offer some like all inclusive

you know, maybe some people at our barn that I ride with where it's like a little mini session and it includes 10 digital prints as well as a little album block. And they can, can send the images there in the gallery and they can go choose them and we can go from there. So I definitely use it for that or I'll use it for if somebody's already ordering artwork but they weren't sure on a couple extra things, I'll use it for that as well.

Let me cut that last part. That last one I just said, or I'll also use it to help with the sales process. Maybe they've decided on most of their items and they just needed to add on a couple prints or maybe they wanted to just think about which image to use for the art piece. I'll throw a gallery together, send it to them, or maybe they need to check with their husband of like which image they want best for the different areas. One best practice though, if you're doing live sales,

and your client is not able to come to a decision at your appointment and they're like, can you just put it up in a gallery? No, no, no, no, that's not what I'm doing. What I'm doing is my clients and I have decided that they want this art piece at this size. They want this package, these albums, whatever it is. And maybe it's just which image goes in which one that they're unsure of. So they selected what they wanted. They've paid for what they wanted. And then I'll release a gallery.

If I'm in a sales session where a client can't decide exactly what it is that they want to purchase and they're like, Hey, can you just send me a gallery? No, that's, that's a no. That is a yeah. Okay. Backup, backup. Yes. I want to, or I never want to say no to my client. So I will answer yes. But in my head, it's a no, it's a, it's a yes, but so I will say yes, of course I can do that. However,

for me to release the gallery, do require a 500, a $500 or a thousand dollar, down payment on your order that will be applied to whatever you decide to order. So I'm not just releasing this gallery for them to go home and screenshot and look at and not order anything from, that it does have a cost. So they need to basically pre-purchase whatever that amount is that you feel good about.

have them pre-purchase that, and that just becomes a product credit. So once they decide what they want to do, they can put that towards it. So anyway, that's kind of my best practices when using online galleries for sales, but I kind of went down a little rabbit hole here, but I tend to do that sometimes. So sorry about that. Anyway, long story short, I hope this, episode you found it helpful. I hope it gave you some ideas of.

other ways to manage your business that don't require going like head first into a huge, giant CRM software solution. And I hope you will check out CloudSpot and give it a try because I feel like it's a great, happy medium to help you onboard easily. and, and also manage a little bit of the backend of your process too, with delivering and sharing images with your clients. If you have any questions, go ahead and reach out to me and Instagram at Nicolebegleyofficial, and I will see you on the podcast next week.