What the hell is Dubsado and how will it help my service business?

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If you’ve been wondering what the hell Dubsado actually is, you’re not alone.

On the Dubsado website, they call it a business management solution, and maybe you’ve heard of a CRM? (if not, it stands for Client Relationship Management) But it’s so much more than a CRM! What it should really be called is a magic shit-hot business management system.

Dubsado is my thing, but I appreciate this kind of thing is not the easiest thing to get your head around at first. So in this article, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about this awesome tech that can transform you from a stressed, frazzled and worried business owner into a shit-hot boss who wows their clients with the experience they give them.

Who is Dubsado for?

Dubsado is perfect for coaches and consultants or anyone who sells 1:1 services or group programmes.

These are service providers who typically have lots of different steps in their processes for each client they work with. We’re talking monthly or weekly appointment bookings, invoicing, feedback forms, questionnaires, and other tasks like buying your client a gift or checking in with them at certain points in the programme.

It’s not the best platform for course creators though. If you’re a course creator looking to automate your admin, there are way better platforms for that.

What can Dubsado do for my business?

• Once you’ve got it set up right, it’s like a reliable VA who works for you 24 hours a day. It takes care of so much, including!

• Appointment bookings

• Appointment reminders

• Email templates

• Questionnaires

• Contracts + online signing

• Feedback forms

• Task reminders

• Invoices

• Payment instalment reminders before/overdue

• Task boards (a very basic version of Trello)

• Clients notes

• Contact form on your website

• Payment schedules

• Package templates

But the real power is in the automation. I have clients who might have 30-40 steps for a six month programme that they no longer have to remember for each person because they’ve set up a series of actions (workflow) in Dubsado that does it all automatically.

It’s important to know that the software won’t come with your workflows ready prepared - these need to be set up. Here’s a more in-depth look at how that could work once it’s ready to go:

Booking a discovery call

Dubsado allows you to capture all the client’s details from the very first moment they get in contact with you. Say you’re DM-ing on social media, if they wanted to go further you could send them to your website which has a Dubsado contact form which is embedded on your website.

You can have the form set up to ask questions so you can vet people beforehand. All this potential client info will go straight into your Dubsado system as soon as they fill it in so you’re not having to go backwards and forwards populating spreadsheets/word documents etc.

Once they’ve answered these initial questions, you send the new lead your online calendar for them to choose a time slot so they can chat with you. This will be linked to your calendar so that it only offers time slots when you’re available.

It’s also possible to do embed the calendar and contact form directly onto your website if you don’t need to vet them first. You choose how it works best for you!

Proposals, Contracts, and Invoices

You have the discovery call and of course they’d want to go ahead - because you’re awesome!

At that point you’ll want to send a proposal, contracts, and invoice. Usually this might mean hours of faffing for each client, checking you hadn’t left a field blank or worse - with a different client’s name on.

But in Dubsado, this is all done for you using smart fields that pull in the correct client details. I’ve sent out beautiful proposal/contract/invoice combinations that have been viewed and signed within 4 minutes, and 2 minutes after that they’ve paid the invoice too. So it’s really easy for the client and it’s easy for you as well.

After the contract is signed, it can be added to a client portal that holds all the documents. Instead of asking you to send them copies of their contract or invoices, your clients will have a link to their portal that they can access anytime to view the documents. It houses all the emails you’ve sent to each other and anything else you do within Dubsado during your time working together.

Dubsado also links out to QuickBooks and Xero to keep your accounting up to date too. You can add all of the details of your packages so that invoices can be generated quickly and easily. Then, every time an invoice is created in Dubsado, these are automatically raised in the accounting software too.

Emails and Reminders

Dubsado allows you to create a template for every email you would ever need to send a client. These could be triggered automatically (for example, if you’re running a group programme and you want to send a summary email of everything you’ve covered so far after Week 3 of the programme) or you can just pick the email you need anytime and send it straight away.

Whenever someone books a call with you, like a discovery call or a coaching call, you can set up reminders of the appointment to go out that allow the client to add the appointment to their calendar. I always do 48 hours before, then 2 hours before the appointment and they all happen automatically - my brain is free from this kind of admin crap!

You can also set up payment reminders. You can have an upcoming payment reminder, same day reminder, and an overdue reminder (x3 if your clients are bad at paying - you decide!). You can set all of these up so you don’t need to remember to send them yourself. Once the client has paid, it will stop sending the reminders - just link up your platform to Stripe, Square or Paypal so that your clients can pay online. 

Task Management

As well as automating your client admin, Dubsado can keep you on track with tasks you need to do for your client. Either by using the workflow to send ‘To Do’s’ to your inbox or via the client task boards, which are like a very basic Trello.

You can also set up reminders for tasks you want to do later on in your workflow, for example buying a gift for your client at the end of the programme. These reminders could be triggered by your client paying an invoice, or completing a call with you. They could come through to you as an email or as a notification on your dashboard. Again, you create it for how you want it to work best for your business!

This is where Dubsado becomes more than just a CRM and starts to behave like a task management system as well.

Branding and Design

Dubsado allows you to add your branding to absolutely everything. This means you can create some amazing looking proposals, questionnaires, feedback forms, that kind of thing, all as templates that you can send to your clients.

You can also white label your domain name so that when you send your client a form to fill in, it looks like it’s on your website rather than an external platform. The URL of the form will include your domain name, so everything is consistent and professional looking.

Tracking and Analytics

There’s even more to Dubsado though, because you can also use it to gather analytics on other cool things in your business.

I always suggest asking people how they heard about you on the Discovery Call booking form. This gives you great analytics about where your leads come from. If you’re on Instagram a lot but all your leads are saying they heard about you from Facebook, you might not want to spend so much time on Instagram!

You can also tag the income relating to each of your packages to get analytics on what’s selling well. Maybe you’ve got an offer that you’re marketing lots and it shows you’re not really selling it, and another offer that you don’t market so much and you’re selling loads of it. This is all super helpful information to have visibility on, and Dubsado can do this as part of a workflow automatically, so you don’t even need to lift a finger!

Sounds awesome! But what if I get stuck?

It’s true that Dubsado is a beast and isn’t the most intuitive system on the planet. Even though it might seem scary at first, Dubsado’s customer service is awesome! They have an online chat function and they get back to you within a few hours. They even let you go through the course they train their staff on.

What’s the cost?

At time of writing, it’s US$40/month or US$400/year to use the platform. As a Certified Dubsado Specialist, if you use my discount code 9999 (link here), you’ll get 30% off your first month or year.

I would love to give you the code without it being an affiliate link, but it’s the way it works!

Ready to create your five star client experience?

If you’re ready to create a five star client experience so that your coaching clients buy from you again and again, I’ve got just the thing to help you get started. Because before you even start with something like Dubsado, you HAVE to figure out your processes. So I’ve done the hard work for you!

My mini-course takes you through step by step how to map out your processes and gives you extra bonuses of a new client checklist, what to include in a feedback form to create awesome case studies and a process map for a three month 1:1 programme.