Having the latest and greatest camera or most expensive lens won’t make you a great photographer. It takes knowledge, creativity and motivation to excel at photography. However, there are certainly equipment and tools that are available for you that can drastically help make your job a bit easier. Today I am going to share with you one tool that I absolutely love and has made my job way easier.
ShootQ – For a long time I was content with my excel spreadsheet solution for tracking my bookings and financials. I also seemed to have a decent method for tracking client inquiries. Well – just because I had a good solution, doesn’t mean there isn’t a “better” solution available.
ShootQ is basically your virtual studio management solution. Whether you are a one man operation who is handling it all or if you have a multiple person studio, ShootQ can help you. With ShootQ, now I can respond to new client inquiries in a fraction of the time. But I don’t only love ShootQ for quick email correspondence but I love it for these reasons.
- Lead Tracking – Never worry about double booking yourself anymore. As long as you add your lead inquiries into your ShootQ software, you will be warned if there is a date conflict when you are booking a date.
- Online Contracts – This was one of my primary reasons for going to ShootQ, an easy way to send and receive contracts. Don’t be like me a couple years ago and still having to scan and email clients a copy of their contract, that is such a thing of the past. I did it, I ditched it, and it’s one of my favorite things about ShootQ.
- Questionnaires – One thing that is super helpful is to be able to send your clients custom questionnaires for them to fill out. This is a great way to learn about your client, learn about their event or photoshoot requests and so much more. Simply create the questionnaire that fits your needs and within a couple clicks send out to each of your clients and get notified when they respond!
- Integrated Payment Solutions – In this digital age, you are only hurting yourself if you aren’t accepting credit card payments from your clients. Always make it as easy as possible for your clients to give you money! If you are like me, and use Authorize.net as your credit card processing solution then ShootQ makes the invoicing and payment process super simple for you by automatically keeping track of your invoices and marking them as paid automatically when your client makes their payment.
- Email Templates – It is super smart to have email templates already created so you can copy and paste into new emails (and modify slightly to personalize), but what is even better is to have all of those emails automatically loaded into ShootQ and let you choose whichever email you want from a drop down list. This has been a huge timesaver for me and I know you’d benefit from it as well.
- Workflows & Task Reminders – Lets face it, busy is good. When you are busy, you are booking more clients, making more money and building your portfolio, but the busier you get, the harder it becomes to remain organized with your routine tasks related to each client. ShootQ has a element called “workflows” in which you can define a certain number of tasks that you do for each and every client, by client type (i.e. weddings, portrait, commercial etc…) and you are able to define not only what the task is but also when you are supposed to have the task complete. This has been a super way of helping me stay organized among the craziness of working full time, running Cole Joseph Photography and of course Cole’s Classroom.
Is ShootQ for you? Well that’s only for you to decide, but I hope this article helps educate you on how it has helped me and how it might help you. The truth is ShootQ is actually capable of so much more than what I’ve indicated above but this is simply the features that have helped me the most. Of course with all good things, there comes a price. ShootQ is currently priced at $39 a month. Click right here to learn more about ShootQ.
Got a question? Let me know down below, you know that I always love to help!
Cole
