Leads have a lot of potential—they’re what turn into your business. It’s important to have a good system in place to source, capture, nurture, and convert those individuals from leads to strong clients. Luckily, HoneyBook offers all of the tools needed to keep those processes running smoothly and in one place.
📚 Tip
Looking for tips and tricks to manage clients in HoneyBook? Check out this article.
What are leads?
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).
Sourcing & capturing leads
Sourcing leads
Depending on your business, you can source leads using a variety of different tools and channels:
HoneyBook lead form: share via direct link (include in your Instagram profile, share via text, or any other channel you’d like!)
HoneyBook contact form: share via direct link (include in your Instagram profile, share via text, or any other channel you’d like!)
📚 Tip
Learn more about using HoneyBook to capture and qualify quality leads here.
Adding leads to HoneyBook
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:
A new project, where you can easily track and follow-up with the lead
A new contact, which you can view in your contact list
Manual entry: If you’re manually entering a lead into HoneyBook, you can do so 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.
📚 Tip
We recommend manually creating a new project for each new manually-entered lead. When you create a new project and add a participant, the participant will be automatically added to your contact list (and they will not receive any sort of notification that they’ve been added to a project). You can use the project as an organizational tool for yourself until it’s time to start sending emails and files.
Plus, if you’re using a mixture of HoneyBook lead capturing tools and manual entry, this will ensure there’s parity between how all of your different leads are represented in the system.
Managing & nurturing leads
Organization
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. The project will automatically move to the follow-up stage once communication is sent in the project.
This means that you can 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 manually move and further categorize your projects/leads.
Qualification
Contact form: Before a lead even comes in, you can use the HoneyBook contact form to ask qualifying questions.
Hot leads tool: If you use the HoneyBook contact 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 the HoneyBook hot leads tool, which employs 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!
Nurture
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. They’re a powerful tool—you can segment automations by project type and set them to automatically apply to leads that come in via contact form. You can even automate smart files with invoices and contracts when the time comes to convert, for a totally hands-off experience.
Some automation step suggestions:
Automatically send an email X days after the automation is activated, asking the lead if they have any questions
Automatically send a questionnaire X days after the previous step is complete
Automatically queue up a follow-up email X days after the previous step is complete, that requires your approval before sending—if the lead never followed up, you can edit and send the email out; if they did, you can cancel the message
Automatically send a thank you message X hours after a questionnaire is submitted
Automatically send a file displaying success stories X weeks after the automation is activated
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!