Getting Started with Dubsado CRM | Part 1 ~ Essential Brand Settings
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Getting Started with Dubsado CRM | Part 1 ~ Essential Brand Settings
Last time I reviewed how I came to looking for a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application. You may want to read this post first Dubsado CRM—the right choice for my creative small business—maybe yours too! then come back to this one.
Today I’m walking you through how to customize all the essential brand settings, creating and customizing proposals, and giving you a sneak peek at the sample and my custom lead capture form.
Essential Dubsado Settings
Dubsado is a very powerful CRM and will take quite a bit of time to learn all the ins and outs. Our focus today is what to do when you open the application for the first time. We’ll get all the essential branding item details set and off your to-do list.
STEP 1 | CUSTOMIZING BRAND SETTINGS
I started customizing my brand settings in Dubsado first. Click on the gear icon on the upper right corner of your screen. Next look at the column of the left and select—Branding—under Brand Settings Heading. I uploaded my logo and entered my business information and added my brand color for form/link buttons.
The next tab down—Dashboard—allows you to select from 6 color schemes for your dashboard and toggle financial indicators on or off.
Continuing down the tabs—Portal—is where you can customize the elements in your client portal by selecting portal colors and uploading a banner and mobile banner as well as the welcome message. I’m not sure how I overlooked this tab for several months.
I will do another post walking you through all of these settings. For now, just modify the welcome message if desired and note that you can find your portal link here.
Under—Multi-user—you can select the number of users for your organization. It just the two of us, so I don’t need to upgrade. I’ll be doing all the work in Dubsado for now so I will wait to invite Ben as a new user until a later time.
You are also able to set your time zone and language in the—International settings—tab.
Next, very important for your pocketbook and mine, the—Recieve money—tab. I set up payment processing with Square and Paypal. You’ll have a choice between Stripe and Square here.
At the center top of this section, be sure to notice there are two tabs—Recieve—and—Invoices. Take a moment to go to the right tab and toggle the tax column setting on or off to your preference and review the company name setting.
Under—Email—I easily connected my business email account and chose to toggle the tracking pixel setting on.
I don’t have anything to connect in the—Integrations—tab and this falls under essential settings so take a quick peek at the options here and move on. Similarly, the remaining three tabs are not essential, so click on them and familiarize yourself briefly with the options and get ready to move on to step 2.
STEP 2 | CREATING YOUR PACKAGES
Once you have customized all the details of your account you can move on to setting up your packages. You will find this under the Templates Heading—Packages. For a service-based business like my brand and web design business, the packages are the services I provide.
Right now, I offer 2 options for both brand identity and website design, Essential and Elite levels. The major difference between them is the size of the project and the number of deliverables. Additionally, I have several add-on options.
For each package, you create a name and a price. I also added bullet points of what is included. You can do this by clicking on the—small gear icon—on the upper next to the Package Name. In the above photo, it’s to the right of the Essential Brand Identity Package Title.
Make a note-to-self, you can copy a package by clicking on the—copy icon—just to the right of the small gear icon I just mentioned. Just remember to customize the details of your copied package and rename it. This is such a time saver!
In this section, you will also create any discounts you may choose to offer like a”friends-and-family” discount or a special sale. You’ll find this again at the top center, right tab—Discounts.
With Dubsado, there is a pretty steep learning curve, especially if your are totally new to CRMS and all the lingo. Thankfully, they have a decent amount of training videos and now a free Dubsado 101 course dedicated to assisting in really understanding the system.
They also have so many webinars to teach you exaclty what you need to know. You may even find one specifically for your niche! I'm also looking forward to the additional training content coming soon to become a certified Dubsado Pro.
STEP 3 | CUSTOMIZING YOUR FORMS
After detailing out all your packages, you’ll want to customize your forms. You’ll find them by locating the—Forms—tab just two tabs above—Packages—where we just finished up. You’ll notice are 5 types of forms listed across the top center of this page: Contracts, Sub-Agreements, Questionnaires, Proposals, and Lead Capture.
This is one of the areas I found somewhat confusing, in that you want to work from right to left rather than from left to right and start with the Lead Capture Form.
They do have this sample form below to get you started.
You’ll find the settings for the form at the top center, right tab. There are some additional settings below the fold including default fonts, size, color, button options, and privacy settings. So be sure to always scroll down when working on your forms.
Also unlike many applications today the forms do not autosave—so be conscientious to save your work, often. When you are all finished click the down arrow next to the save button and select—save and close—or your preferred choice.
This is the custom form I created to embed on my website’s contact page that allows someone to inquire about working with me.
With this form connected, when a prospective client/lead completes it, Dubsado will create a new project. I will talk more about projects and leads versus clients in another post. For now, just know this is how a project is created. This is how it looks on my website.
We’ve talked through the essential settings to get you set up for success in Dubsado. We looked at all the brand settings, how to set up your packages, and how to set up a lead capture form.
I’ll start with the specifics of how to embed your form next time so stay tuned!
Dubsado Series Posts:
Dubsado CRM—the right choice for my creative small business—maybe yours too!
Getting Started with Dubsado CRM | Part 1 ~ Essential Brand Settings
Getting Started with Dubsado CRM | Part 2 ~ How to Embed Your Lead Capture Forms in Squarespace 7.1
The Dubsado 6 year anniversary sale is on now! Save big $$ through the end of the week Get an additional 30% off your first month or year on top of a 30% discount by using my code: sisusiteshop
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Hej! Thanks for stopping in! Sisu Site Shop is an online business strategy + custom brand and web design studio. We sell Squarespace 7.1 templates, offer VIP Days for brand + web design + Dubsado setups for small businesses including Artists, Educators, and Hospitality Professionals. We serve clients worldwide from our current home base in Montana. We help you start, organize, and modernize your business, brand, and website so that you can sell, serve, and stand out online. If you have a project in mind we’d love to learn more about it!
When you’re ready here are three ways we can help you:
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