“You need a CRM” they said.
“You can’t manage your relationships with Customers by just talking to them” they said.
“You need software to talk to people”.
Gah.
So for those of you who aren’t salespeople, CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Manager”. It’s a special type of cloud-based Software As A Service that features (normally) systems for tracking products, inventory, schedules, client contact info, client history, service offerings, contracts and signatures, mailing lists and workflows, and invoicing and payment plans, all in one website app. It’s an “essential” part of any digital business, and yet, for some reason, I still cannot for the life of me find one CRM that doesn’t completely suck.
They inevitably seem to introduce unnecessary constraints, waste more time than they save, increase your administrative overhead one-thousandfold, and ultimately fail to provide proper tracking anyway, allowing clients and customers to slip through the cracks.
I’m winding down our involvement with Dubsado, a CRM that specifically targets digital service professionals, mostly photographers. Before them, I was seeing what value I could get out of HubSpot. The forms you see on our websites, the ones which use different fonts and mismatched colors (because the Dubsado CSS loader is a glitch-addled black box which is better at changing the fonts on their own internal menus than the form you’re attempting to edit), those were Dubsado forms. They don’t work anymore, and they never will again.
They will eventually be replaced with simpler forms that work better, forms which submit your inquiries directly to my email instead of to a CRM. I will communicate with you directly from the beginning, instead of via appointment scheduler workflow, and we’ll figure out what works that way.
For now, you’re not going to be able to use the form, so just call or email me. That’s always going to be an option, and honestly, given the amount of pointless busywork and suffering that dealing with CRM forms has caused me, as of now it’ll be a bit of a relief.