It’s important to have a good system in place to source, capture, nurture, and convert leads to strong clients. Luckily, HoneyBook offers all of the tools needed to keep those processes running smoothly and in one place.

For most businesses, a lead is an early-stage, potential client: someone interested in your products or services, but who has not yet booked (signed a contract or made payment). A lead might even be someone who hasn’t explicitly expressed interest in your business, but who could be a good fit based off of a lead qualifying tool or some other information.

In comparison, a client is someone who has booked a project with you (contract signed and/or payment made).

Depending on your business, you can source leads using a variety of different tools and channels:

HoneyBook tools: If you’re using HoneyBook lead forms, the HoneyBook contact form or the HoneyBook Facebook and Instagram lead ads tool, each lead submission will create:

Manual entry: If you’re manually entering a lead into HoneyBook, you can do so in whatever way works best for you. At the very least, be sure to add them to your contact list so that you can save their details, add private contact notes, and send batch emails.

When you create a new project and add someone to it, that person will automatically go on your contact list. You can use this project to keep everything organized until you're ready to send emails and files. Also, if you're using a mix of HoneyBook tools to collect leads and entering some leads manually, this will help keep everything consistent in the system.

If you’re using HoneyBook lead capturing tools or manually creating a new project to capture a lead, the project will be added to the inquiry stage in your project pipeline.

You can then use your project pipeline as a tool to track the status of your leads. If a project is in the inquiry stage for some time, it means it might be time to follow-up, or archive the project if the lead has grown too cold.

You might even consider creating custom pipeline stages for different qualities of leads, where you can move and further categorize your projects/leads.

Contact form and lead form: Before a lead even comes in, you can use the HoneyBook contact form and/or lead form to ask qualifying questions.

Priority lead notifications: If you use the HoneyBook contact form or lead form, you'll automatically receive special notifications for leads that are more likely to book and/or book high-value projects, so you can follow-up right away. These notifications are powered by a powerful, machine learning (ML) model that predicts booking likeliness and high revenue potential.

Questionnaires: After a lead is entered into HoneyBook, you can send questionnaires to gather more information. Send one manually, or use automations to automatically send at your desired trigger.

Once leads are in HoneyBook as contacts and projects, you can follow-up in any way you’d like: manually send files and messages, use the batch and bulk email tools, schedule and hold meetings, create and apply automations, whatever works best for your business!

Automations: To save yourself the time of manually creating and sending each and every email follow-up, use automations. Automations allow you to automatically send emails and files (and set internal tasks) at your preferred cadence. You can even automate smart files with invoices and contracts when the time comes to convert, for a totally hands-off experience.

Batch and bulk emails: If you prefer to take a more hands-on approach to when your messages are going out, but still want to simplify your process, consider using the batch and bulk email tools. These tools allow you to send one email to multiple recipients, all at once—making them the perfect tools to quickly share things like email marketing content with a wide audience.

Still have questions? Feel free to send us a message by clicking the Question Mark icon on any HoneyBook page. Our team is always happy to help!