Welcome to another special blog edition at We Make Systems Sexy. So let’s talk about one of my favorite sexy platforms, Dubsado.
We know there is no such thing as a perfect tool, and I completely believe in laying it all out there… Hence our topic this week:
The Pros And Cons Of Dubsado.
Yes, it’s true that I’m a Certified Dubsado Specialist so I may have a hint of favoritism, but I promise to be fair in this evaluation. After all, Dubsado is one of my favorite topics. But even the platforms that I love and use daily have their good and their bad. So in the spirit of transparency, I want to always be very real with you about the pros and cons of our favorite business tools.
Perhaps another day, we’ll even talk about the pros and cons of ClickUp and some of the other things that we use in our tech stack.
So I will say just to start that the pros of Dubsado outweigh the cons. Let’s just open up with that statement.
In considering the PROS, here are my main highlights:
- Your client onboarding experience becomes more about your brand and not the system that you’re using (aka Dubsado). So if you’re anything like me, you love your branding, (We just rebranded and I’m super excited about it!!) Likely, you want to put your branding out to the world and show it off at every chance. Branding shouldn’t stop when someone completes your contact form or your proposal or a questionnaire. The elements of your brand can be incorporated into all of these key touch points within a project when using Dubsado. When using this CRM, you’re not confined to a template for proposals or other forms. You can create your own custom forms that you use for your branding, that have your flair and your taste to them. And they’re unique to you. They are beautifully made forms and it’s worth repeating once again: completely custom to you. And it’s all part of that client experience that screams your brand, from lead capture to offboarding (or from A to Z).
- Speaking of off-boarding clients…When wrapping that project up, you can also white label within Dubsado, so the forms that you send to somebody can actually be routed through your business website and can use your website name instead of Dubsado branding. How cool is that?! It’s a really nice feature that they have and yes, that’s included with the account, no extra fees.
- Another piece is, again talking more about Dubsado forms, is that they are highly customizable. I already noted the importance of adding your branding to your forms in #1, but what if you could actually embed images and videos into your forms?! Pretty amazing, right? Our team even likes to throw in some GIFs for fun, and we love that you can do all of that with Dubsado. Features like this make Dubsado forms highly customizable, and super valuable for your clients, plus it makes you stand out as unique. And think of the possibilities… You can include a welcome video in your onboarding questionnaire, or a video that explains to them how to fill out a certain form, and so on. You can style your forms to match your visual brand elements that are on your website. The possibilities are endless! And with Dubsado’s newly released Form Builder, the images you embed can actually go the full width (it truly looks like a website). So you have even more capabilities with that as well.
- Another pro to using Dubsado forms? Clients can upload their own files to your forms directly. And what’s beautiful about this? It eliminates the need for so many back-and-forth emails and trying to figure out where those files are for your project. Ugh – frustrating! And really, having 10,500 emails when you’re trying to actually onboard a new client can really create a less-than-stellar client experience. Instead, using Dubsado reduces so much back and forth, because it’s all just happening within the client portal right within Dubsado.
- The thing that really sets Dubsado apart (as opposed to some of the other CRMs that are popular out there) is the workflows. Within Dubsado there are flexible and robust workflows, which is a fancy way to say automation. My clients (and even my coaching students) are always so surprised by how much of their client processes that they can automate. We automate these processes by building strategic, unique workflows for each type of project or specific service that you offer. Workflows will pick up the slack for you when you’re cooking dinner for your family. Read that again. Workflows will pick up the slack for you when you’re cooking dinner for your family. And if you’re out at your kid’s baseball game or if you’re just busy adulting, when workflows are working in the background you can do other things that are more important.
- Should I use a new number for this one? Let’s do it. So another cool workflow feature is that you can see an overview of where each client is in the process of onboarding or working with you. This bird’s eye view comes in handy if you’re the type of business that juggles multiple projects at once. At We Make Systems Sexy, we do a lot of project-based work so it’s super helpful for us to know exactly where a person is a part of the process at any given time. Since you’re seeing it from a bird’s eye view and not having to dig through Facebook messenger DMs and emails and all of the other ways that people try to communicate with us, it can all be in ONE centralized location. Hallelujah!
- Dubsado also offers payment processor options. It’s really a one-stop shop. This means that you’re not just sending an invoice, but you can also collect your payment right there from within Dubsado. Plus that payment processor accepts that money through Stripe, Square or PayPal. YOU can choose whichever payment processor you prefer. And you can have PayPal connected with Stripe or PayPal connected with Square to give two different options, right? There is the added benefit of being able to apply payments to invoices manually if clients actually choose to make a payment by a different means. For example, I had a client from Canada that actually chose to pay me through TransferWise (which is not integrated with Dubsado). I would just send her the invoice for her records and then I would just mark it as completed manually after she paid me. There are other options if it doesn’t always work out for accepting payments from different countries as well.
- Another feature of Dubsado is email integration. With Dubsado, you can use your own domain or branded email address, even if you aren’t with Gmail. Yes, they do have other options, for instance, there is an Outlook Integration and so on. This means that if you reply to client emails from within your Dubsado inbox you can keep track of emails immediately within the client project, you can also use read receipts (which are super nice to be able to know if somebody has received and actually opened the email), the email they received from you is going to match your email address exactly. It’s not going to say it’s coming from Dubsado, it’s actually connected directly through your email domain.
We’ve discussed quite a few features of the pros of Dubsado… all the things that you can get done, shows off your branding, highly customizable forms, the workflows allow you to live your life with your family when you’re off the clock, the multiple payment processor options for receiving payment directly there, and email integration.
Are you convinced? And these 8 pros are just a TINY portion of why I love Dubsado. But I promised to be fair and transparent. So here goes…
Here are some CONS you may consider before using Dubsado:
(Just remember I said there are way more pros to Dubsado than there are cons, there might be a couple of small ones)
- A big con for many people is they may not have the time to invest in learning this platform. Because it offers so much, yes, it is a robust platform. However, if you have the time to invest, Dubsado 101 is a really great program that Dubsado offers to go through all of their videos and training to figure out how to set it up on your own. Now if you don’t have that kind of time, and you would rather invest money, having a Certified Dubsado Specialist (like yours truly) or somebody who is really experienced with Dubsado come in and set it up for you has a huge return on investment, especially if you’re really busy and that Client Onboarding is a piece that takes a lot of your personal time. Recap: That’s the initial setup and getting through that learning curve.
- The schedulers. Dubsado’s schedulers are currently in beta so they are more limited than some of the other schedulers that have are available out there. However, if only one person with one calendar needs to use the scheduler within Dubsado, you’re all set. Now if you have coaches on your team that would need appointments to be assigned to them, then it can be a little bit more difficult with that scheduler. Because of that, people will with the current scheduler will link out to a different scheduler, like maybe Acuity or something like that.
- Some other missing details are that Dubsado doesn’t have the same kind of conditional formatting some other platforms may have. For instance, if somebody answers a certain question in a specific way, it would be nice to then give this option and that option because of the way they answered.
So even with these cons, those are things that we hope are coming in the future to Dubsado. But because the system is so comprehensive and customizable, it can be more difficult to get started as I mentioned earlier.
As you can clearly see from this blog, you have so many options and settings to choose from which is what makes Dubsado so awesome. Yes, the learning curve can be steep so if you have questions, please always feel free to email me. Or maybe you are ready to outsource setting up your Dubsado account because you know about all the amazing features but you lack the time to customize it? Get in contact with us for a free consultation. During the call, we can see the best way to work together. We also do coaching and specialize in VIP days for Dubsado set-ups (they’re my fave!)
Here is my affiliate link if you are looking to sign up for Dubsado and you want to do it on your own: sign up here. My link will get you 30% off your purchase of a Dubsado plan, woo hoo! If there are things that I didn’t cover within this blog post that you have questions about, be sure to reach out to me. I really enjoy engaging with all of you and I can talk about Dubsado all day!
