Sprout Studio

I love Sprout! From the fantastic customer service to the myriad of features it's been amazing!

Pluspunten:

I love that my whole photography studio is under one roof. Leads, calendars, workflows, contracts, galleries, album proofing, money management... everything is all in one place. It makes my life so much easier! I also LOVE the customer service. The team is super prompt at answering questions and solving problems, and they're very responsive to adding newly requested features for their members. Amazing!

Minpunten:

There isn't much I have to say that's not positive about Sprout, I think at this point the only thing I would say isn't working for me is that the calendar system isn't easy to navigate. At this point I have to click through each month to get to a date in the future, and when I'm looking to see what September 2019 looks like, for instance, having to click through 18 months to get there is annoying. Also sometimes I find the lead and shoot pages are quite slow, I'm assuming it's because I have a lot of open shoots so it take awhile to populate. It would be great if these pages could somehow populate a little quicker :)

Sprout is the tool I needed

Opmerkingen: I love it. I have used many other platforms but none had everything I needed in one place. I would invoice a customer here, send a gallery from there, manage a calendar in yet another place. Now, I have all of that and sooo much more in ONE PLACE. It is such a critical part of my business and I'm grateful!

Pluspunten:

Having Sprout is like having an employee, without the cost. I'm able to set up workflow, that makes it easy to stay in touch with potential clients and customers to ensure that nothing is missed. It also provides great reporting to stay on top of the business. It's awesome.

Minpunten:

Nothing. they listen to their clients and are constantly making updates which makes the software even better.

Worst CRM with the Worst People

Pluspunten:

Sprout has some decent features, notably their booking proposals which are very pretty.

Minpunten:

Where do I begin? 1. Site speed: It takes FOREVER to load anything. I just sat for literally 2 whole minutes waiting for an email drip campaign to load. It takes about 30 seconds just for your active shoot dates to load. It takes about 20 seconds to search for a specific client. It is truly mind blowing how slow it is. This should not happen on a website in 2024. We have 1gig fiber internet and this happens on every computer at every location for all of our employees. 2. Bugs: they have bugs all the time. The #1 thing you need in a CRM is trust that there will be no bugs. What if a shoot date just disappeared? That hasn't happened yet, but we have no faith that it won't, considering how often other bugs pop up. Their latest was to send out a marketing email to every single email address that has ever contacted us. People whose weddings were years ago, weddings that haven't happened yet, freaking those couples out, people who decided not to use us, etc. 3. None of their workflow items are dynamic and update in real time across the system. So, if you have 100 shoots coming up and a questionnaire is set to go out to them 6 weeks before the wedding, and you want to add a question to that questionnaire template, that added question will not update on all 100 of those current weddings... it will only apply to any NEW bookings after the change is made. So any critical changes you want to email templates or questionnaires, etc basically are always a full year behind in implementation LOL. 4. Customer service - they often take hours to respond in the chat. When they do they rarely have answers for you that are helpful, and they clearly do NOT care about their clients at all. They don't actually relay any of the feature requests you want and instead focus on new features that are totally unnecessary. They have no system of voting on feature requests like other CRMs, so they just choose to work on whatever THEY like the most, not what their PAYING CUSTOMERS actually want. They just recently had a huge email blunder described above, and when I gave a simple solution for how they could send us the email addresses that were affected by it using ChatGPT they literally told me they weren't allowed to use ChatGPT to help us out..... I could go on and on. Do yourself a favor and avoid this company at all costs. On the surface it will look like a good option when you're shopping around, but trust me you will regret it down the road, and it is a huge hassle to switch CRMs once you're all set up with one!

Can't beat it for the price

Opmerkingen: Overall, I'm pretty happy with it, and I don't think you can beat it for the price. Customer Support is always friendly and helpful. It's a pretty complex program, so there's a definite learning curve- it's not really a figure-it-out-as-you-go kind of program. But the tutorials are very clear and thorough, as long as you actually the take time to watch them.

Pluspunten:

My favorite feature is that it includes gallery delivery- so my clients only have to manage one portal for everything from signing the contract, making payments, and

Minpunten:

I REALLY wish they would have an automatic payment option. I don't love that clients have to manually make each payment individually.

All in one for client management for Photographers

Opmerkingen: Extremely useful, however, they need to do a wayyyy better job at explaining where to start setting up all of the tools they have to offer. I think even for them is hard to explain what number one thing to do from the get go. I love all of the tools they offer but there has to be a better way of setting up. In my opinion the templates are the number one place to start, then price list, etc.

Pluspunten:

These is so much in this software, and much that I have been wanting to keep my photography business organized.

Minpunten:

It is quiet the learning curve with the immense amount of tools that the software offers. They should have step one, step two, step three. It is extremely disorganized even their training. I had to create my own 1,2,3 list of where to start setting up. Yes they offer a whole "school of training" which has the most annoying music one hears for too long when each training video starts. Now give me two weeks later between learning how to use it, I can appreciate all of the tools