First of all, congratulations!! HoneyBook is one of my top 2 recommended CRMs for creative service providers, so you truly made a great choice.

Whether you are new to CRMs entirely or just want to see where you could be upgrading your life, business-wise, lock in, because I’m gonna tell you all the things you need to know.

The first thing we’re gonna do in HoneyBook is click on our profile icon and update company settings and upload our brand colors/fonts/photos. Whatever you set as the “Default Photo” will show at the top of your clients’ Client Portal. Once you have your key personal and company information and brand kit completed, we are ready to unlock the true magic of HoneyBook.

Creating Your Services

Next up: creating your services.

In the left sidebar, open up Services, and for each of your offerings, create a new “Service,” including description, price, and tax if applicable.

Once you have all your services added, it’s time to move to the big leagues.

Now lets talk about the five life changing functions of HoneyBook 🥵

1. Forms
2. Schedulers
3. Document Templates
4. Email Templates
5. Workflows

Obviously your CRM also gets you paid, but all of these things are integral in helping you get there.

Inquiry & Project Forms

If your website has an inquiry form on it that’s through your website host, it’s time for a major upgrade 💅🏼

Let me introduce you to the magical world of embedded forms. This may sound complicated, but all it really means is that a form you created in HoneyBook shows up on your website — this is PERFECT for lead forms, because then all your inquiries go straight into HoneyBook instead of into your inbox and otherwise into the ether.

In HoneyBook, you’ll see a section called “Lead Forms,” and ironically, that’s not what you want. You want to go to the regular schmegular “Forms” section to create your cutesy branded Inquiry Form. You can start from scratch or from one of their templates, and create new questions with the information you want to collect from a new lead. It will include Name and Email by default, but you may have other questions you need for screening. You can select the question type in the right-side menu and adjust the question name and options.

Once you hit Publish, you’ll have the option to “Copy Code” (do this).

Then, in your website host (Showit, Squarespace, etc.), you’re going to go to where you want that form (i.e. a contact page), insert a new HTML block, and CTRL+V paste that code from HoneyBook form into that box. Adjust the size of your block as needed so the whole thing shows up right on your website and BOOM. Branded form that goes straight to HoneyBook, baby!!!

Let’s get clients scheduled

Once your inquires or books, one of your next steps is likely to hop on a call.

If you use a Google, Apple, or Outlook calendar to keep track of your life, you’ll want to connect that here so you don’t get double booked over all the other life things!!

To create a scheduler that lets clients find a time to book with you, open “Schedulers” and Create New for each type of meeting you will have for each type of service. Click through each section to set duration, your availability, booking rules, and booking confirmation settings.

Once you have your schedulers set up, you will be able to include these Smart Fields in your email templates and files.

File Templates

Up next, file templates. Proposals. Invoices. Contracts. The cool part about HoneyBook is that these can literally be sent in ONE smart file. Did someone say streamlined???

In the sidebar, open Templates and Create new. The simplest way to get started is to take a scroll through HoneyBook’s templates, find a general layout you like, and start building from that template. Once you open the template, you can click the palette icon in the top right corner and click “Apply Company Theme.”

Just like that, your colors and fonts are applied, and it’s ready for you to pop in your Services and proposal copy.

Ideally you make one for each service, or one where clients can select the package they want. This prevents you from recreating the wheel every time!

Email Templates

Email templates are the secret sauce of a CRM. Why? Because they allow you to be in multiple places at once.

In HoneyBook, you create these in the same Templates page, but instead of a file, you’ll select Email Template.

If your services are well established and you already follow a repeatable workflow, odds are, you have some past emails you can mooch from to create email templates for your services. I recommend walking through one of your services at a time, mapping out each email touchpoint, and creating a template for each.

If you’re still figuring it all out and aren’t ready to take that leap yet, here are a few key emails to start with:

1. Inquiry Response — a little “hey I got your inquiry & I can’t wait to chat! here’s some more info while I review your responses” goes a long way
2. Any of those big details emails — before a shoot or a wedding, where you have to include event details/addresses/color paletes/etc. Give yourself a template to make your life easier, okay?
3. Review Email — ooh I know how much you hate sending the dreaded review request email, but by creating a template that you like, you can literally never have to think about (and feel awkward about) this again!!

Now, I mentioned Smart Fields before: to further personalize your emails, you can click on the Smart Fields icon, and add client or your company information, so your email can say things like, Hi {{First Name}}!!

“But I don’t want to sound like a robot”

You know what sounds like a robot? An email written by ChatGPT.

You know what sounds like YOU? An email template, written by you, exactly the way you would’ve said it if you were typing it straight off the dome. And it can be sent or drafted whether you’re there to do it or not.

And to tie it all together, let’s talk workflows.

While it may sound scary, a “workflow” is just the sequence of steps you go through in a client project, and “automation” is usually just saying “if this thing happens, this other thing should happen.”

So you have your inquiry form & your inquiry response email — let’s walk through how we can tie these together with automation.

In the Workflows section, you can create new. Bonus because for this example, HoneyBook has a default template for this 💅🏼 you can start there.

1. The first step of your workflow is the “Trigger”: a form response is submitted, into your Inquiry Form.
2. The second step is the “Action”: you want HoneyBook to send an email (specifically, your Inquiry Response email template).

BOOM. They have some new information in their hands, they know their inquiry landed in your inbox, and you just gave yourself a buffer to review and respond.

And you can apply this same principle to other parts of your workflow! A discovery call is booked? Automate an email draft with a proposal, contract, and invoice. Project marked complete? Automate that review email, baby!!

Okay I’m overwhelmed now. Can I just have someone else do this?

Literally so glad you asked. This resource is always here if you need it, but so am I! I offer full HoneyBook Setups (your offer, start to finish, with all the email and doc templates/automations/etc.) and Sprints (a quick build of one part of your process—onboarding, offboarding, etc.), and I would LOVE to work with you.