How to Find the Best CRM Platform for Your Writing Business

Whether you’re a writer by profession or as a freelancer, ensuring your clients are completely satisfied is crucial to the continuation of your business. Having a customer relationship management (CRM) platform can help ensure that. As a refresher, a CRM platform is a system that helps to automate and expedite the process between clients and providers when sending contracts, invoices, and documents. They also serve as a way for clients to easily communicate with their providers.

If you are looking to run your business efficiently and ensure its growth, you’ll want to invest in a CRM platform. However, there are a ton of platforms on the market, so it can be a bit difficult to pick one. Before you decide, you need to see which platform will best suit your needs. To help you in your search, we’ve outlined some of the top CRMs on the market.

User-friendly

Dubsado

CRMs have to be user-friendly. You don’t want to waste your time or your clients. After all, the point of these programs is to help manage your clients and improve your operations. Dubsado is a nice option in the sense that it is super customizable. However, the initial setup for this option is pretty extensive.

If you’re already a tech-savvy person, you will probably have an easy time picking up and managing Dubsado, but not everyone is. With this option, there’s the chance for a high-reward as it looks great, but it will definitely take some time to adjust to and learn how to use.

Honeybook

This platform is very easy to use and set up, making it extremely user friendly. It also has a nice look and feel to it that make it even easier to manage and put together. This is a solid option for small businesses or solo contractors. (Plus, it’s mobile-friendly).

If you’re running a larger team of writers or working on different types of writing projects, this platform may lack in the area of customization. Its simplicity that makes it user-friendly also makes it restricting.

17Hats

17Hats has much to offer small business owners and solo contractors. It’s relatively easy to use and straight forward for the most part. It doesn’t waste time with wowing you in appearance. It simply focuses on what role it is meant to serve in managing your business.

While it isn’t as simple as Honeybook, it’s added complexity also makes it more difficult to innately understand. If you choose to go with this platform, you’ll certainly be able to set it up to accomplish it’s perfect, but there may be a learning curve involved.

WriteSea

WriteSea is customizable and straightforward, which makes it ideal for writers. Unlike each of the previous platforms, this CRM option is meant to be built around the writing process of different types of writers, regardless of if they’re resume writers, scriptwriters, ghostwriters, etc.

The platform itself is also meant to be well-understood by users regardless of their experience with technology or other CRM software.

Documents, Invoices, Templates, & Questionnaires

Dubsado

Dubsado’s customizable nature strongly translates to its features including templates, questionnaires, invoices, and more. In terms of branding customization, Dubsado is a strong player. It allows users to customize each document sent to clients.

Honeybook

One of Honeybook’s focuses for creative clients is to allow their personal voice and brand to shine, which it certainly does allow. However, its simplicity once again diminishes its ability to be customized for each service, but it is extremely easy to navigate.

Each of these options, Honeybook included, allows users to add any promotions or discounts, send invoices, and provides free customer contracts. And each is made extremely easy to send to clients. If you don’t need to do a great amount of customization to these features, Honeybook is a nice and easy option.

17Hats

In terms of customization for each of these features, 17Hats could offer more here. However, it does offer the same features as each of these other platforms mentioned. If your nature of business is clear and direct, and you don’t need to really customize your documents then this is a solid option still.

WriteSea

WriteSea offers templates, questionnaires, contracts, and more that can each be customized per your needs as a writer and per your client’s needs. Again, this platform focuses on serving the needs of writers while the others are focused more generally. With this in mind, the documents provided are build to be comprehensible for clients and writers alike and customizable to best suit the needs of each project.

One key feature this platform allows that is secular to writers is it allows you the option to send your client customized follow-up questions. Follow-up questions offer a great opportunity to ask critical, clarifying questions on any of the information already provided to you by your client, which helps to increase client satisfaction in the end.

Process flows

Dubsado

Again, Dubsaod does a solid job of automating your workflow to save you a lot of time and effort. This is probably one of the stronger areas in Dubsado’s repertoire. Its strongest point comes from its ability to automate emails to clients when steps in the process need to be completed. It ensures projects are completed as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Honeybook

Honeybook has plenty of features that allow you to establish your workflow and automate your processes. However, its current system still requires a fair amount of manual work to get it moving. This defeats the purpose of automation a bit, but it will still do the job.

17Hats

When it comes to automation, 17Hats offers plenty of options that will save you a ton of time when working with clients. Once critical steps have been completing, it opens up the ability to set new automation. However, if you often have to communicate with clients and send reminders, it becomes a bit more of a manual step with this platform as you need to mark those reminders to be set once you haven’t heard from clients.

WriteSea

WriteSea is also great for bringing automation to your workflows when dealing with clients, which is certainly a plus. Automating your process is as easy as creating your workflow. Once that workflow is set up, the platform takes care of the rest, including sending reminders to your clients and other team members as well as notifying clients every time a piece of the project is uploaded to the platform.

Client Communications

Dubsado

Dubsado offers a feature that allows you to schedule appointments with your clients, which is great if the work that needs to be discussed needs to have in realtime. However, this feature is also limiting based on what it is you’re working on. If your writing projects are more of a side gig rather than your main source of income, it can be difficult to schedule communications with your clients in this way.

Honeybook

If you’re short on time, Honeybook offers easy templates for your client communications. However, that can be limiting. Writing projects also tend to be personal, which can be hard to translate while only using templates. For other projects and types of work, this can be a great option, but it’s less strong when it comes to writing projects.

17Hats

17Hats does not really offer a direct way to communicate with clients via their platform. While you can schedule appointments and sync your emails, it does not currently offer the ability for an extremely close relationship between you and your clients. In many writing projects, communication is a necessity.

WriteSea

If you’re working on writing projects that require close collaboration with your clients, this platform has the most to offer. Of each of the above options, WriteSea is the only one that offers real-time communication features with your clients. Given the collaborative nature of such projects, communication is a huge aspect of the writing business. When it comes to client communication, WriteSea takes the cake.

Overall, each of these platforms has great features to offer a variety of workers in different fields. However, the best CRM platform is WriteSea. While each of these platforms is great, they don’t necessarily cater to writers and the type of work that they do like WriteSea does. If interested in learning more about WriteSea and how it can help you grow your writing business, check out the site Writesea to learn how to schedule a platform demo.

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