How to Optimize 17hats

Intro

Happy Monday, and welcome back to another Momentum 360 weekly blog! We’ve been pumping out content like our job depends on it, 1) because it does and 2) because we have a lot of value to provide in the marketplace! Like we always say, if this is your first time with Momentum 360, welcome!

If you haven’t heard about us yet, we’re Momentum 360! The highest rated virtual tour company in the United States. We have over 1,000 vetted partners who do great work with us, as our core services are: 1) virtual tours 2) photography 3) videography 4) 3d rendering 5) virtual staging

These 5 core services have created tremendous value in the marketplace, as our goal is to be the largest, fastest, on-demand content company in the world. We’re damn near the fastest in the United States right now, but we have a lot of room for improvement! It’s a really exciting time for us, so if you’re a photographer looking to join the team, do yourself a favor and fill out this partnership form.

Back to the topic at hand, the purpose of this blog today is to teach you how to optimize 17hats for more leads, conversions, and money. 17hats is one of the best softwares on the market to use if you’re a photographer, but many photographers aren’t using it correctly to grow their business. They’re spending way too much time on manual tasks, while they could be saying it by using these 3 strategies I’ll discuss in this blog.

Why This is Important

If you’re a photographer, you’re in the service industry, which means people have to call you, fill out a form, etc to get in contact with you to do a job. Primarily, these jobs are one-off jobs, so it’s difficult to earn recurring business due to this nature. You get a lot of volume, but it’s important to try your best to earn more recurring business so you can have some cushion between monthly expenses.

It doesn’t matter what software you use (we prefer 17hats) but, you certainly need a CRM software that keeps track of leads, current gigs, invoicing, etc. If you don’t have this, and are still going off Google Sheets, then you’re putting your business at a deficit, due to the manual hours it takes to do data entry. This is why reading this blog is so important, so you can earn more of your time back from manual, time-consuming tasks.

It’s hard enough to run your business as it is, right? So why not take 10 minutes out of your day to read this, implement it in your own business, and save more time? It’s a foolproof way to getting your time back to start living and stop being a slave to your business.

If you prefer learning from a visual perspective, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here, where you can watch our video “How to Optimize 17hats.” It’s literally the same exact piece of content, just in video format, so you can follow along with both pieces of context to get the most out of the topic.

Lead Forms

Starting off on the first big strategy to follow in order to optimize 17hats, you need to incorporate lead forms into your CRM! Take Momentum for example, we have two sides of the business. On one hand, you have Momentum Digital, which has core services such as search engine optimization, website design, pay-per-click advertising, social media and a bunch of other goodies!

On the other hand, you have Momentum 360, which has core services such as virtual tours, photography, videography, 3d rendering, and virtual staging. With this being said, it would save us so much time to simply create two separate lead forms for each side of the company.

Instead of just having one generic form that doesn’t separate between both sides of the company, it’ll be incredibly hard to manually sort through all of those lead forms, creating confusion and added manual time in the long run, which is what we’re trying to avoid!

What we’d recommend doing is actually creating forms for different core services, this way you’re able to gather more data for each service to see which one has a higher LTV (life-time value) than the other, so you can determine if it’s even necessary to keep providing that service! On top of that, you’ll also save so much time from sorting all these different services for each company, so your partner who runs each side of that company can easily identify which leads are there.

Once you have multiple lead forms filled out, you’ll start to notice that you’re getting more of your time back. Once you have more time back, we’d recommend doing more of what creates revenue for your business, whether that’d be cold calls, emails, whatever, you know how time back to do this for your company!

Templates

This is another super easy thing to implement in your business’s 17hats. So let’s say you have many lead forms filled out, and you have one service, let’s take virtual tours for instance, that are selling out like crazy!

You’re tired of manually creating new quotes for the same service, what should you do? You should start creating quote templates for your most popular services!

Templates will automatically save with general information for the service, along with the price, logistics, etc..the thing that’s cool is since you already have a lead form with all the contact and company info, you don’t need to change anything at all! Just create the templated quote, and hit send! You’re again saving crucial time on not doing manual stuff, so you’re then saving all of that time so you can continue doing the stuff that matters.

Workflows

Last but certainly not least, we have workflows, which is the holy grail of 17hats optimization, especially for photographers! Ever have a lead who hasn’t closed yet? Ever have a really great client that you want to ask them for a Google review? Want to ask for a referral from a client you’ve had for a longtime? Want to invite a new client for your private community on Facebook?

Yes, the answer is yes. You can do all of this within workflows! Workflows are very simple to understand, they essentially execute automatic tasks inside of 17hats to make you more efficient. For example, we have a follow up workflow for our leads that have been sent a quote, but haven’t accepted it yet. Here’s a condensed example of that workflow:

Day 1: Client gets sent email

Subject Line: Hey {First Name}, Just Following Up Here!

Body: Hey {First Name}, just wanted to follow up with you on our quote! We’re booking up fast, so we’d love it if you could accept your quote today, so we can process you in our order queue!

Day 3: Client gets sent email

Subject Line: {First Name}, What Questions Do You Have for Us?

Body: {First Name}, it’s been a while since we spoke, is everything ok? What questions do you have for us to get your quote accepted? Remember, you don’t owe any money when you accept the quote, this is just to get you queued in the order flow. Does that make sense?

Day 5: Client gets sent final email

Subject Line: {First Name}, Last Chance Before We Move On

Body: {First Name}, we haven’t heard from you in a week, if we don’t hear from you soon, your order will be passed over, and you’ll have to wait longer to get your shoot scheduled.

As you can see from these 3 workflow sequences, it gets a lot more FOMO and urgent as the emails get on. For Momentum 360, we have quite literally so many leads coming in, if you don’t accept your quote in an orderly period of time, then we will unfortunately have to pass you up on your dedicated shoot date for another client who actually did accept the quote, harsh, but it’s what needs to be done.

This is the most important thing for you to implement in your business’s 17hats. If you want to know how to truly optimize 17hats to get more of your time back to be more efficient, then use workflows, you won’t be let down!

Long Term Approach

We’re big fans of Alex Hormozi…maybe you’ve heard of him recently, maybe not. Either way, what we love about Alex and his wife Leila, is their perception of time. They aren’t looking at weeks and months in terms of success, they’re looking at years and decades. Case and point, if you’re in the content business, more than likely you actually enjoy this stuff, and you’re not in it for the money. If you’re in it for the money, then you’re looking at success in a very short time horizon, rather than the players who look at success as years and decades, because they’ll still be providing their services then, while the people who’s just looking to make money will have most likely moved on to try to find the next shiny object they can find.

So think about your business like that! Had a bad month? Had to fire a few people? It’s all good, if you look at this as just a bad time that will pass, rather than something that will make or break your business. This is important, because you will have moments in business that suck, and others that are incredible, more than you know. Trust the process, but also learn how to delegate and use these 3 strategies to optimize 17hats to your advantage. If you learn how to optimize 17hats to allow you to get hours back during a work week, you’ll notice how easy it is grow your business!

Conclusion

So, there you have it! These three helpful automatic adjustments while using 17hats will make an incredible difference in your business. We’ve been using these three strategies since 2020, and it’s making an incredible difference in our business’s success! We highly encourage you to check out our official FB community, where we have current vetted photographers on our time who use these strategies, and it’s helped them grow their business too!

As the saying goes, don’t just take it from us, but take it from the hardworking people who’ve seen this piece of content before, and have it work for them!

If you’re a photographer looking for more gigs, do yourself a favor and fill out our partnership form here, where we hop on a brief call with you to learn more about you, your business, see some example work, and then if you check the allotted boxes, we’ll add you to our roster in that certain area!

If you’re a marketing director or someone who’s looking at doing a virtual tour, photography or any of our other 5 core services, do us a favor and hit us up on our website too! You can email us at info@momentumvirtualtours.com or call us at 215-607-6482 for more information on how to transform your business with our content.

It’s an absolute pleasure to write these blogs and provide tremendous value to the marketplace. If you enjoyed this piece of content, like and comment below! If you didn’t enjoy it, still comment below some feedback for us, so we can make our blog even better than before! With that being said, from everyone here at Momentum 360, enjoy your day, and we’ll see you soon. Keep grinding!