The Sanadas -California Wedding Photographers » Malibu California Husband and Wife Wedding Photographers

Hey all!

Life is busy and we know that it has been awhile since we have posted informational blog posts for our couples and for the amazing photographers who follow along with us. Although we have a ton of awesome sessions and weddings we are preparing to share with you all, we think it is time to start posting information and helpful posts again for our amazing brides, grooms and the rad photographers we mentor and who follow us!

So! Today we are going to chat a little bit about the back-end of running our business, one of our favorite tools, and how we manage to provide awesome customer service without sacrificing our work-life balance!

Ultimately if you are running a busy studio (whether you are a photographer or really any small business) we highly recommend getting organized and spending some time getting your systems running like delicious melted butter (Yup. When we think of running, the first thing that comes to mind is melted butter. That’s a perfectly normal and healthy thing… right??).

There are a TON of programs, apps, and systems for keeping your business running smoothly and staying organized. The main big ol’ system we use is our Client Relations Manager (CRM) Dubsado. This is where all of our invoices, contracts, forms, questionnaires, and client information lives. We used another system for many, many years and with the release of many new options in the CRM space we decided to move everything over to Dubsado. We feel like Dubsado serves our couples best, they are constantly putting out new features, and they have awesome customer service themselves.

Here are 5 ways we use Dubsado:

1. Our contact form: We can quickly and easily respond when we get inquiries from couples or other businesses. Clients love fast response times and what is even more awesome is that we can reference the initial contact submission as well as our past correspondence with our couples to make sure we are personalizing each response and giving them the individual attention they deserve and the best customer service we can!
2. Questionnaires: If you have contacted us for photography services or mentoring you are probably familiar with our questionnaires. We love them because we love to know as much as we can about our couples and mentoring clients so we can provide the best service possible! Dubsado allows us to create easy to fill-out, beautiful questionnaires to send to our clients to learn more about them and what they need. We also send out a detailed pre-wedding questionnaire ahead of time so our couples don’t have to think about what they might want or need on their wedding day. From family formals lists to special details, we can help our couples create the ideal timeline to make their day as stress free as possible so they don’t have to think about anything other than being in love, celebrating, and having a great time on their wedding day. Again, this allows us to keep organized and connect more with the amazing humans we get to work with.
3. Scheduler: Dubsado has an amazing scheduler built right in their system. Although we personally schedule calls and in-person meetings with our wedding couples (again, we love giving personal attention to our clients), we love using the scheduler for our twice yearly mini session sign ups  and any workshops we are organizing. There are a TON of uses for this, depending on how you run your business.
4. Proposals: When a couple lets us know they would like to save their date and book with us, we first do a little happy dance (TMI?). But! Right after we finish geeking-out, we can send a beautifully designed online proposal where our clients can build out their package and then easily review/sign their contract and invoice. The system is streamlined but customized for our couples to be as easy as possible.
5. Client Portals: Probably one of our favorite features is our client portals. This is a personalized space where each couple/client can view all their information from contracts to questionnaires. We also fill this space with helpful PDFs and articles and it allows everyone to have a space where they can easily access or reference a lot of information from us without having to dig through e-mails.

Those are only a few of our most-used features in Dubsado. They also have amazing workflow systems to help with automation in your business to give you more time to spend on creating amazing work for your couples. Not only has this helped us get even better at customer service (which we can all agree is paramount when planning a wedding) but Dubsado’s own customer service is out of this world, which just helps us be better on our end!

Want to try Dubsado? Want 20% off? Use the code “FREEMONEY” or This link to sign up and get a discount.

*Please note this post contains affiliate links. They save you money and we get a free month of service if you sign up as well.