EP 5: Effective Onboarding: Strategies That'll Save You Hours Every Week

Does your client onboarding process feel haphazard and take a ton of time? Grab a cup of coffee and let's chat about ways to streamline it and take the drudgery out of it, so you can get back to serving your clients.

In this episode, we're doing a deep dive into the significance of client onboarding for business success. I'll discuss how to streamline your onboarding process without adding extra workload.

I'll also explain how to plan and optimize your onboarding process with practical tips and tools that you can use today to improve your onboarding system simply by taking a look at your last clients. 

You'll also learn how to make your automated systems feel personal (and less like a robot), troubleshoot common bottlenecks, and continuously improve your onboarding for a seamless client experience. 

So if you're ready to take your onboarding process to the next level, join us in this episode as we explore the secrets to creating a more efficient client onboarding system that saves you hours a week and creates an amazing client experience.

00:00 Introduction to Client Onboarding

01:04 Understanding Onboarding for Different Businesses

01:41 Key Components of an Effective Onboarding Process

02:38 Streamlining with Templates and Automation

03:54 Evaluating and Improving Your Onboarding Process

05:51 The Power of CRM Tools

10:18 Planning Your Onboarding Workflow

13:07 Making Automation Feel Personal

18:03 Final Tips and Conclusion

Mentioned in Effective Onboarding: Strategies That'll Save You Hours Every Week

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Transcript

0:39

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Amy Gould, and today we're diving into one of the most important and often overlooked aspects of running a successful business, client onboarding. Whether you're a creative entrepreneur or a service provider, a smooth onboarding process is essential for setting the tone of your client relationships. and ensuring a positive experience from day one. But here's the thing. So many of us dread onboarding because it feels like just one more thing to manage. Especially if you're already stretched thin, the good news is streamlining your client onboarding doesn't have to mean adding more work to your plates. In this episode, I'll be sharing practical tips and tools to help you automate and simplify your onboarding so you can focus on what you do best. Serving your clients without sacrificing a personalized touch. Let's dive into how you can create a stress free, seamless onboarding experience that will wow your clients and save you so much time. So first of all, let's talk about onboarding and what it is and what it can look like for different businesses. Onboarding looks so very different for different businesses. I've worked with photographers and hair and makeup specialists, home stagers, you name it. and onboarding looks so different for different businesses. But there are some key components to the onboarding process that I want to make sure everyone includes in their onboarding process. usually you need to collect some kind of information. So that could be in a questionnaire, or by scheduling an onboarding call, or maybe a combination of both, depending on your business. you also need to get some information across to your clients. You need to let them know some things like your office hours, how they can get a hold of you, and when they can expect return phone calls or emails where they can find their contract invoices or other items related to their work with you. Or if you're sending them a bunch of forms, Where can they find those and fill them out? So all of those kinds of things are things that you should include in your onboarding process. The thing is, it can be a real time suck to put that all together every time for a client. The more consistent you are with your clients as you're working with them from one client to the next, the easier this is going to be. And that's why I recommend using a template because you're going to get the same information from everyone every single time. And even better, if it's a fillable online form and the fields are required, people aren't going to be able to skip. those fields and leave information off just because they don't feel like filling it out that day. So you're gonna get more consistent information back from them and they are gonna get a better product from you. So that's the first thing. Use a template. Then the second thing is automate that template to get sent at a particular point in your client experience. whether that's after they filled out the proposal or signed the contract or paid the down payment. Every business runs a little bit differently, but whenever you consider them to be a client, then they should get an onboarding template. And so that also should be by sending a scheduler link if you're booking a call so they can book that onboarding call and get started while they're still really excited about working with you and ready to move forward. If you wait too long then they've moved on to other things and it's going to take them longer to fill out their onboarding questionnaire, book their call with you, whatever that looks like. I want you to take a second and think about your client onboarding experience currently. What does it look like? Is it sort of haphazard? Are you having to go back and forth and ask a million different things in several emails? Does it depend on someone to put together a contract or a questionnaire and manually send it to the client? By the way, how much time is that taking them to do that? it blows my mind sometimes how long contracts can take to complete manually and add in client information. It can be a real time suck and it could be draining a lot of your budget and your team's time. So that's something to keep in mind. And then you also should look at what are the current bottlenecks in your process. What's slowing you down? What's holding you up? What's preventing you from getting your projects turned around as quickly as you'd like or taking more time from you or your team? What are the things that drive you crazy and Make you not like what you do. I mean, everybody's got them. We've all got those days where we just want to quit and go work at Starbucks, as I like to say. But look at that. And if those things are bothering you, then let's figure out a way to make them go away. either by adding in automation, changing what you're doing with your process, adding some questions to your onboarding form. All of those things can help you smooth out that process. So if you've got something that's rough, not working well, bothering you, Making you really annoyed at some point in your process. That's the time where we need to take a look at what it is and how we can make it go away. Because usually, if we take a look at what you're doing, we can figure it out. are you finding yourself wondering if you remembered to send on boarding materials or a scheduler, or something like that. this is where automating your process is a game changer. It makes such a difference in your life because you can just pop into your CRM, whether it's Dubsado or HoneyBook, and look and see, did it get sent? Did they fill it out? Have they even opened the email yet? You can look at all those things. you don't have to be left wondering if you did it, because unless the workflow got broken for some reason. The automation got stopped, it's going to get sent, and the automation's going to handle those things. So, and then if you find yourself asking for the same information over and over again, and holding up projects to get that information, Take a look at your process. Look at your lead capture form. Maybe it needs to go in your proposal or in your onboarding form, but add it somewhere so you don't have to keep asking for things later on in the process and holding up projects. Now I already kind of stole a little bit of my thunder with automation tools and systems. these things are the kind of team member you didn't know you needed. They are such a small investment for such a huge return on labor that you don't have to pay someone else to do. Now, granted, you're going to have to take some time and set it up. The automations or workflows, basically, you're just giving this team member a checklist. The checklist happens to be called a workflow or a automation, depending on if you're using HoneyBook or dub Sodo or another CRM. But these tools are the things that let you have the fillable online forms, let you collect information from clients that can then be put into your contracts and your emails and your forms and other things. So you don't have to always be doing it by hand. And it's going to send the onboarding questionnaire to your client so you don't have to remember to do it. And it's also going to keep everything in one place and organized for you. Again, so you don't have to organize those things. Or wonder where the contract is from this client. Or what happened with the payment plan on this client. Oh no, we forgot to remind them to pay their second invoice and today is their wedding day and now we have to ask them the uncomfortable question of paying their invoice on their wedding day. Not really something you want to do. It doesn't give you a great client experience. So a CRM is the way that you can get rid of those hiccups and bugs. It's going to take you time to learn how to do it and use it. And then you're going to change the process. As you work through things, you're going to see how things change and you can then go into your workflows and say, Oh, you know, this didn't work quite right here. Once it's all set up, it's super easy to go in there and tweak and change and make those adjustments, but you can't do that if you haven't set up. the CRM in the first place. So a CRM allows you to automatically send a scheduler so your new client can schedule their onboarding call with you. it also can send them confirmations and reminders, which will keep them showing up to their meetings with you and not standing you up. It's going to let you create those fillable forms. Automatically add client information to contracts so you don't have to spend hours copying and pasting client information into contracts. It lets you create canned email templates so you can save tons of time writing the same email over and over again and create templates for your forms and your proposals so you won't be spending two to three hours to build a proposal for someone. When you can just put a little bit of information, maybe do a little editing here or there, and hit send. It usually takes me about 15 minutes to send a proposal, if that. So that's a big time savings there too. I also love to keep emails whenever I have to write a response that's something that I might get asked again. by a client. I take that email and I pop it into my Dubsado canned email templates and I put a description of what it is that it's replying to so I can go back and use it again and not have to rewrite that email if someone asks me the same question. It's a game changer there as well. So let's talk about how to plan out your client onboarding process. I've actually recently fell in love with a mind mapping software called MindMeister. And that one is really awesome because it lets you brain dump all the things you need to do and gather during onboarding and then sort of string them together into mind maps. I love that, but you can also just grab a pad of stickies and a sharpie. One of my clients did that. It was a thing of beauty. She had so many different colors of stickies, had them all organized. It was so beautiful. I actually had her take a picture and send it to me. But basically you just take the stickies and you write a step on the sticky and stick it to the wall and then you can rearrange the stickies. in different orders or until you figure out the order that makes sense for you. And maybe you even want to add in on the sticky some questions you want to ask clients. Then once you're happy with that, you just could take pictures of the stickies and Use that to write out your workflow in maybe a Google Doc or something like that. Some things to keep in mind when you're planning your client onboarding process is, is there some way that I can combine steps? Look for ways to send the fewest emails. So if you're sending an email and then you're sending a scheduler link in another email, can you combine those two emails and make it one email with the, you know, welcome. I'm so excited you're here. Let's book your onboarding call. Click the link below to choose a time that works for you. I can't wait to talk to you and put those two things together. A question to ask yourself is how can I combine things to send the fewest emails? Look at the email. Ask yourself, is this turning into a huge overwhelming email? You don't want to write novels. Someone's going to open the email and just Run away. At least that's my feeling. When I see emails that are really long with no paragraph breaks or even if they have paragraph breaks, if they're like a blog post, I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't have time for this right now. I'm gonna come back to it later. Well, guess what? They get buried and then I forget about them. So make sure the emails are short for your onboarding. Maybe put some bullet points in there if you need a list of things from them. You can also consider adding headers, maybe add a fun GIF if that's your thing, or record a video and link to it in the email. Those are all ways that you can take the overwhelm out of emails and onboarding and make it just a little more user friendly. One question that I'm always asked is, how can I keep my automated system from sounding like a robot? And really the biggest two things that I have for this are time your automation based on the client's actions. So you don't want things just going out one way right after the other. For example, after a client signs a contract, pays an invoice, and schedules an appointment, maybe add a little time after that appointment is scheduled and then the next email goes out. So it feels a little more like a human did it and not like it's all automated. The other thing I love, and it's not my idea, I got it from someone else, but use transcription software like Descript or Otter. ai or Google Voice Typing, which is a feature in Google Documents. Maybe I'm the one that's been living under a rock, but I just figured out that Google Docs has voice typing. you could just use one of those features and then. Say what you want to say to the client in the email and let it transcribe it for you, and then you can copy that into your canned email templates. it's worded the way you would say it. You can go in there and edit it once you've done that, but it's gonna sound a lot more like you and a lot less like a robot if you say it and have it transcribed. Another thing that I want to make sure to tell you is automation is not a set it and forget it kind of thing. You need to keep an eye on it. You need to log into your CRM every day and check in on it, just like you would check in on your employees. You need to look at their to do lists and make sure things are getting done, when they're supposed to be getting done. Obviously, you need to test the process before you ever put anyone in it. every time a client goes through your process, you want to review it and look at how it went and where can I improve this process. Where did things not go as smoothly? Where was some confusion? Did something not fire correctly? How do I fix that? And if you just fix those little bitty things every time, your system is going to continuously improve and you're never going to have that big huge long laundry list of things that you need to fix. Then you want to look at how effective your onboarding process is. So are your clients filling out the form quickly? Are you getting those forms back in a timely manner? Are they asking you a lot of the same questions over and over when they get the form? If you're getting that, then maybe you need to change the way the question is worded Or add a video to explain your process or something like that so that they have fewer questions and you stop getting those same questions again and again. Are you frequently waiting for certain things from clients? Are you able to complete your projects quickly or are they delayed later on because other information isn't needed that onboarding form? Let's look at each one of these things and I'll give you a few tips on how you can improve these parts of the process. If you find new clients aren't filling out your onboarding forms, consider creating one or two automated follow up reminder emails that send until the form is filled out. If it seems like maybe they're just getting overwhelmed, you could consider breaking a long form into two forms. and sending them maybe a day or two apart. so once the form is completed, they would get, thank you for doing this. I just have a little bit more information I need to collect from you. Please complete this form and that'll be everything I need from you. And that way, it's not as overwhelming. One way I've handled this in my business is by adding in check boxes for the different segments of the form and I've got some fancy coding in there that allows you to not see the form questions until you check the box and then it lets you see the next section. That makes it feel a little less overwhelming because you're just working on that one section that you can see and then when you're done with it you can uncheck it and check the next one and you'll see those questions. It's a really cool little thing and it helps to eliminate some overwhelm too. I think I've already kind of talked about if you get the same questions over and over again look at how you're asking the question or Maybe they need some more information about the process or something like that, because they don't really understand why you're asking the question that you're asking. But if they see the process or the end result that you're delivering because of that answer to the question, it might help them give you a better answer. that's all I have to talk about today. We've talked a lot about client onboarding and why it's important, how you can create your own client onboarding process, and I shared how you can make your automated systems feel personal and the things you need to watch out for to see if your onboarding system is working for you. Are you ready to start streamlining your client onboarding process? Grab a sticky pad and start writing down each step you need to do in your onboarding process. Then put it on one sticky and rearrange them until they make sense. Maybe you layer some together in a questionnaire. When you're happy with it, create your system inside of your CRM. And if you need help figuring it all out, Book a 90 minute system strategy session with me and let's do it together. I will walk you through your entire client experience from lead to onboarding to delivery and offboarding And we will craft an incredible client experience together. I'd love to hear from you. Send me an email at amy at amysgould. com and let me know how you've changed your onboarding system with the things you learned from this podcast episode. Or connect with me on Instagram at amysgould underscore. Post a story, take a screenshot of this episode, share your biggest takeaway, and tag me. And if you'd like to work with me, head on over to aimeasgould. com and book a free 15 minute discovery call. Let's chat about how I can help you work less, make more, and wow clients. Until next week, have an amazing week.