Optimize your sales advisory process in Onboarding forms

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okay so today I want to talk to you about how to onboard clients if you're a service provider consultant or a freelancer so here's the first thing you need to know you should not start working until you get paid by your client the whole process of selling your services that is a whole separate process and I don't consider a client a actual client until they have paid that first invoice and this is the reason why onboarding is so important that you understand how to properly onboard people and all of the steps involved and in this video I'm going to show you my simple five-step onboarding process that you can use in your service based business when you have a good client onboarding process you're going to have happy clients who keep referring you year after year month after month and they keep coming back to work with you a good onboarding process is going to allow your client to feel seen and heard and feel like they made the right decision by paying you money and this is why you need to see your client onboarding process as the client experience because when they have a good experience they will not not have things like buyer's remorse and being like Oh my gosh I just paid them I put a deposit down what if they don't do a good job and then they start changing their mind maybe they don't feel comfortable you want them to feel comfortable and you also want to show that you are a professional and they made that right decision so some of the main benefits of implementing a client onboarding process is that number one it helps you set expectations with the client okay so there's no like Oh I thought that you were gonna do this and we were supposed to do that when you are clear in your onboarding process and I'm going to break down how to communicate that when you're clear people know exactly what to expect and when things are going to be due the other thing is that it really helps to create a very clear path to follow so typically when you onboard a client if you're doing consulting or if you're doing coaching if you're doing marketing or any type of done for you service right you're gonna need a few things from the client to get started like you can't start unless they give you their logo or their brand information or whatever it is that you're going to be working on with them or maybe if you're doing coaching you need to know certain things about their business or their lifestyle whatever it is because that's how you will formulate your strategy as a consultant so when you're clear as soon as they pay the invoice they automatically will get an email they're going to do the welcome email and I'm going to show you how you would structure a welcome email they know that they have to submit to you the documents by a certain date in order to meet the deadlines for the project and this is so important because if you don't include this I'm telling you it's going to cause headaches so in this video I'm going to show you how to do that all right so let's get into step one of the client onboarding process number one the first step is they have to pay the invoice and sign the contract okay you should never ever ever ever ever ever begin working on a client project and you haven't gotten paid yet or if they haven't even signed the contract okay now some people actually have a client sign the contract and then they charge them and build them out I believe that you should at least get a deposit maybe you get 50 up front especially if you've never worked with them before like you don't have a history you don't know what they're about what if they don't pay you okay and you just started working already My Philosophy is at least get a 50 deposit or some form of a deposit could be less really up to you and typically I tell people to charge for the first month up front so let's say you're doing a six-month Consulting contract and every month you're going to meet together to help it with a strategy on the first of the month they have to pay for that entire the next 30 days okay then after that you'll build them again for the next 30 days so really you should just charge if you're gonna do monthly work up front now when you have a contract that is a legally binding contract and if something were to go wrong if there was a disagreement you could take that to a court and actually like fight for that okay so contracts can be legal documents now I want to tell you right now I am not a legal professional I'm not an attorney okay so I'm gonna give you a few tips but I actually have some resources for you in the description of this video of where you can learn about legal contracts from actual attorneys and I'm going to include the link in the video so make sure you go check that out but overall when you have a service agreement with your client you want to include things like the scope of work okay what's going to be included and at what price point whatever package they decide to choose you want to be clear about that because you don't want the client to start working with you and then start telling you to do extra things that you never agreed to right you don't want that that's called scope creep so in your contract it should be clear they signed up for this package that comes with these five things and this is how much it costs you also want to include in your service agreement how you're going to accept payment digitally how often you're going to be billed when one of the invoices do like typically in my contract when I was doing more content marketing social media management I would say if we don't receive payment within seven days we're not going to be moving forward with working with you I would tell them really clearly so they had to make sure that they paid Voice by a specific date you also want to be clear about how you're going to communicate are you going to have a monthly strategy call monthly meeting or you're going to have weekly meetings and then how often they're going to receive status reports if you're going to include status reports or not and also what is the method of communication are you going to communicate through just email can they call you I would recommend you do not give clients your personal cell phone because some of these clients will overstep their boundaries and they won't have any boundaries with you and they'll be like you know three o'clock in the morning you know oh is this going to be done by the you know tomorrow and you don't want that okay so I don't recommend you give them your personal cell phone so be really clear about how they're going to communicate and what you also want to be clear about are you going to offer refunds okay what is your refund policy for work you could decide that you can say we don't have a refund policy or you know we do we'll give you 50 whatever it is it's totally up to you very personalized but you want to include that as well in the service agreement and then you also want to have a confidentiality agreement as far as like if you're going to be working with a client in their business and you're going to be exposed to their trade Secrets or their information like data you want to put that in the contract so that you're protecting them and you're also protecting yourself like I said before I have some links in the description of this video for you to purchase templates from attorneys that have actually written them so if that's something you're interested in feel free to go and check that out okay now step two which is the welcome email as soon as they pay and they sign the invoice you want to have a welcome email like what I like to do is I typically will automate the welcome email so that as soon as they click on a pay button and it gets received I have a system in place where they get automatically emailed okay to onboard with me I used to do this manually and like I would forget and then they were like all right so what's the next step and I didn't have a next step already communicated so it's really stressful so when I went and automated this it actually saved me so much stress and like it actually helped me grow my business because I was able to onboard a lot of clients in within one month and I didn't feel so stressed out so your welcome email is going to just really let them know you know you appreciate them working with you you're excited to get started on the project or on this Consulting engagement and you want to let them know what the next steps are so in that welcome email you want to list what are the next steps what are some of the due dates what are some of the things that you need from them to actually get started on the work and so here you're going to send I typically is what I do I put a questionnaire link I'll have like a form they can fill out to give me the preliminary information I need to begin the work maybe if I'm doing social media for a client I need to have their logo I need to have their brand colors I need to know their website there's some market research I have to do to research the content that I'm going to create for them on a monthly basis so this welcome email I'm telling them hey by the way make sure you submit this form because we need this information so that we can get started also in that email you want to have a link to a kickoff call so I like to have a kickoff call with my clients because I want to make sure that we're on the same page that you know they have the things they need I have the things I need to get started and so I'll give them a link in the welcome email and say hey also once you fill out the questionnaire here is the link to schedule your first of course we can start the project and this may be a call where if you have an agency especially you may have a team member maybe you have an assistant who helps you you can invite your team to the call or maybe they have a team they have a staff it could be a bigger business or a non-profit that has different employees there and so they may need to bring their team members on the kickoff cost so everyone is on the same page as far as deliverables due dates what's expected and next steps another thing you can include is you can also have a welcome packet and the welcome pack is like a little cute little I usually design these like in canva it could be like a PDF form they can download that talks about your business your team it explains how they can contact you your email who are the contacts the welcome packet could also have the timeline talk about your company different pieces of information that you want them to know about working with you and like I said you could put this into canva in a PDF or some graphic design software you can even use like a Google doc and convert that into a PDF another really important thing you want to include in the welcome email is what is your process so when you're doing especially if you're doing like business Consulting done for you Services you should have a process that you follow step by step and if you want to know more about creating a process and how to communicate that to people make sure you comment below let me know you're interested I will put together a video if that's something that people want to learn about let me know in the comments of this video so for social media management my process is that I first do a kickoff call with the client I have their questionnaire I do market research on their ITIL client their target market and I start coming up with a Content calendar of ideas that we're going to talk about for the rest of the couple of months so we're going to be working together and then once the client approves the initial content calendar then I go and I give that information to my team and then we start creating content for them every single month that's typically what you would do for ongoing digital marketing services so what I have done in the past is I will put that process the five steps or the six steps that I do to work with a client in that welcome email so they know how I work you can also put a timeline so when you do website design there's a lot of Depends things that have to get met that affect the dates that you will be able to deliver and publish that website for instance you're going to need to have the company logo to put on the website you're gonna need to know their brand colors there's a lot of preliminary stuff that has to happen and if you don't receive information ahead of time it will affect your ability to actually even start so you could be waiting weeks and weeks if you don't have this stuff you can't even work and so this is why you want to explain to the client in that welcome email that they have to give you certain things by a certain day in order to receive the outcome and the outcome is the finished product that you are creating for them all right so let's talk more about that kickoff call I really like to have a kickoff call because I like to put a human element in my relationship with my clients you know there are some people who are service providers that I feel like they do a disservice to clients when they don't have a phone call with them they don't have a zoom call or a video call or a video conference because they want some some people just want to do everything through email and a lot you're going to find different clients who don't want that they want to talk to a human being okay they want to feel like they're cared for so this kickoff call is a great way to really personalize that relationship and build that trust and let the client know that you really care about them and you really want to help them so in the kickoff call I will go over everything I just explained in that welcome email as far as deliverables timelines my process next steps and then a lot of times what happens is clients are sometimes busy and they don't give you the information they don't fill out that questionnaire form and so I'll use a kickoff call to make sure that they we go over the questionnaire and I have all of the answers I have their logo I have their brand colors I have the market research information I need to help them if I'm creating a strategy for the client I have that information and I do that through the kickoff call the kickoff call also allows you to get a lot of clarity on what the client truly needs sometimes an email is not enough to really grasp that information but having a conversation with them will allow you to uncover what they may be struggling with and what they really need help with so once you finish that kickoff call now you're going to start doing the work and so it depends on the type of service you're offering if you're doing done for you Services let's say you're doing marketing a website website design maybe you're doing bookkeeping or accounting or maybe you're an attorney whatever it is now if you're doing more business consulting or coaching or strategy you're not doing done for you Services because you're doing more advisory Services where you're meeting with the client to help them with a system or help them with mindset coaching whatever it is then it's going to be a little bit different so and so what I want to talk to you about is this is why having a policy as far as how you're going to communicate with the client is so important so this is where you're going to have your weekly meetings or your monthly calls to stay in contact with the client if you're doing advisory or coaching you're going to be meeting with them every week or if you're doing that twice a month or once a month that's how you're going to deliver the work if you're doing done for you Services you have to decide if you're going to be sending them a weekly report or a monthly report for their marketing or if you're doing their accounting you know giving them their financial reports every single month what are they going to receive them all right so the next step is simple it's the off-boarding process and this is where where you finish working with the client and now you want to have a great kickoff meeting to just kind of go over everything you worked on together finalize that project make sure the client is happy with the work and then say bye bye and give them a handoff now here's where it's really really crucial this is where you can upsell the client into working with you more for a longer time or doing other projects or giving them other services or you can also ask them for a referral if they have a referral to their friends and family and you could get additional business you can also ask them for a testimonial or ask them to be part of a case study so that you can put the testimonial on your website and on your proposal on your marketing collateral the off-boarding process is also really important to just establish that trust with them so they can refer you to people over and over again so as you're growing your business you're going to want to eventually automate this whole onboarding process and there are a few tools I use in my business to make sure I'm on top of what's going on with the client and that they're receiving a lot of these things on autopilot so the first two I love and use in my business is a tool called dubsado I really like dubsado because they have forms that you can send out they have invoicing system they also have digital contracts that you can send to the client to sign digitally disado allows you to create proposals and questionnaires and emails so once the client actually pays the invoice you can set up dubsado so they automatically receive a welcome email and a welcome packet so I actually have a link to dubsado in the description of this video so make sure you check that out another tool I use to automate my business is I use convertkit I use this for my email newsletter I use this in the pre-sale process so before someone becomes a client and the way that I actually get them to buy my services is I send out a weekly email I may even send out two or more emails a week to get them to want to book a call with me or sign up and I use convertkit because it's a powerful sales funnel that you can actually automate that entire process with there's a link to that as well in the description of this video alright so I put together a client onboarding checklist and guide to help walk you through this entire process you can actually download it for free by going to the description in this video grabbing that free checklist and that's going to help you be really organized in your business all right so thank you so much make sure you subscribe and like this video I will see you next time take care [Music] thank you