How do I onboard new clients in less than 5 minutes?

Are you losing your clients' interest before you can even get started on their projects? 

When it comes to a successful client engagement, speed can play a huge role in client satisfaction. Clients are typically the most excited right after signing on to the project and with each passing day, their excitement wanes, leading to frustration before work even begins. 

Why continue on with a laborious client onboarding process when it could be completed at the click of a button? 

In this episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson discuss the painfully slow onboarding processes that plague most businesses and how they've been able to compress their entire client onboarding process into less than 5 minutes!

Why Listen:

• Learn how money is "running out the door" with manual onboarding
• How to balance automation with necessary human oversight
• Get a step-by-step walkthrough of an effective automated onboarding process

Whether you're drowning in onboarding tasks or looking to enhance your client's first impression, this episode provides actionable strategies to transform your efficiency and client satisfaction from day one.

If you're interested in automating your client onboarding process, check out our free 25 automation generator to see how you can automate your process!

Also, be sure to check out our video on how you can leverage ChatGPT to create diagram of your current onboarding process. 

If you found this episode valuable and want to help other businesses reap the rewards, would you mind leaving us a 5-star review? It will help with show rankings and give more listeners the opportunity to find our show. 

Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode! Thank you and see you next time!

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to automate your agency. Every week, we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.

0:00:18 - (Micah): If you've listened to the last couple episodes that we've released, then this episode is the grand finale. So, two episodes ago, we talked about how to generate leads with tools like Limblest and Apollo. The previous episode to this one, we talked about how to convert those with AI and automation powered tools that provide instant gratification and instant value to your prospects. And in this episode, we're going to talk a little bit about what happens after you get those clients in.

0:00:48 - (Alane): Yeah. Cause now you got to do all the work you gotta do. Client fulfillment. What'd they buy? And I remember Micah when we were doing this, and, you know, we were selling a lot in our previous company, and I was looking at it, and it was taken, on average, 2 hours of someone manually taking the information from the CRM and the sales team or the sales person and then getting that to client fulfillment and getting the right people that need to, you know, okay, county needs to set them up in Quickbooks.

0:01:18 - (Alane): We need the account manager to be introduced and all these things like, we had somebody dedicated to new client onboarding, and that was her job, taking information from the CRM and kicking it off for everybody with the tasks that they need. And I was just losing my mind. I just saw money running out the door.

0:01:37 - (Micah): Money was running out the door. And we, you know, we see this. Yeah, we see this quite a bit with clients as well. They'll come in and we'll have, well, we're copying and pasting all of this data. Okay. Then there's errors. Oh, then we forgot a step. Then we didn't do this because we ran out of time, because we were onboarding and we had to focus on other stuff and more client fulfillment. All these things put together just mean that there's a lot of risk, there's a lot of money running out the door.

0:02:11 - (Micah): There's a lot of time and human error possibilities when in reality, if, especially if you were to follow these last few podcast episodes that we had, you can build leads, you can have your prospects fill out a form which gives you a huge amount of information already. You can have that automatically put into your CRM, and then as you work the deal, you can have your CRM trigger another automation, say, once it becomes a one deal that all of a sudden you're now disseminating that information across your platforms, you could be creating Google Drive folders, you could be creating client briefs and summaries, you could be creating projects and tasks.

0:02:58 - (Micah): All of these things can be automated from just simply moving a deal to one.

0:03:04 - (Alane): Yeah, when you think about like, the client is most excited at the time they sign the contract, they're ready to go because they're spending money to work with you. So they're at the point where they make the decision to let's go, it's go time and they're up here and then they wait to be onboarded and their excitement wanes every single day that it takes for you to completely onboard them, get them introduced to the right team, and without automation, this on average takes two weeks.

0:03:31 - (Alane): At the point that you are finally ready to kick off something with that client, two weeks is a long time to get disengaged with somebody. And now they're from the highest of the high to being frustrated and ready to get moving with you. And so how do we eliminate that timeframe to a few minutes versus two weeks with minimal input from your team? It can all be automated, all the things that you just mentioned, from creating a Google Drive folder or whatever asset folder to a client brief to the client project in your project management system, or even creating the customer in QuickBooks with a drafted invoice ready to go.

0:04:09 - (Alane): Because so many times, and this is from doing calls with potential clients to doing speaking engagements, the biggest thing that I find that clients forget to do is invoice their clients. And so that's just money not being collected until they remember or catch the error.

0:04:28 - (Micah): Yeah, and I mean, that doesn't even count. Thinking about, hey, somebody just agreed to do a project with you. Why not send a welcome email automatically templated, personalized with all the information that that client now needs to know about. Well, how long is it going to take? What are the next steps? Where are we going with all of this? What to expect? How do we communicate? What tools are we going to use?

0:04:56 - (Micah): All of those things can be easily mapped out.

0:05:00 - (Alane): I love just seeing how much can be done with such a simple click of a one deal and a CRM and some popular ones that we work with that we see is pipe drive and HubSpot. I think close is another one too. Micah. And there's some automation that can happen beforehand with proposals, but let's just talk about it from the point of a one deal. The salesperson clicks one and within three minutes all those things are kicked off.

0:05:29 - (Alane): The salesperson is happier because they're not having to spend time on tedious tasks. Burnout is less because you have less going back and forth between people, both sales. I don't know of many people that are sitting around waiting for work at a company. You know, there, it's a fast now, you know, there things are happening. There's a lot of things on people's plates. And so adding this handoff between sales and account management or support or, you know, whatever you call your services team, it can be alleviated with this automation.

0:06:02 - (Micah): Yeah. When we implemented this ourselves, we went from spending a couple hours, sometimes an hour, sometimes more. But what I would see is steps were forgotten. You know, we made an error, it was too slow, or the teams were so busy we had to wait for the onboarding to even start. And that already is putting us behind the gun. When somebody says yes, like you were saying earlier, Alane, they just want to get going. Like, let's just go, let's get started.

0:06:31 - (Micah): What's next?

0:06:32 - (Alane): And consistency is a big thing, too. The way that I would do something, the way you would do something, the way a different account manager would do something. We've got three different ways. Like what's the standard way that our company is going to onboard clients? What is the email template going to look like for welcoming them for, you know, things they need to do next, whatever it might be. We don't have to reinvent that wheel every time.

0:06:55 - (Alane): That can be automatically generated from a template.

0:06:58 - (Micah): Yeah, and I love what you're bringing up, Alane, because this is the way to start thinking about things from a business challenger, from a systems perspective. So I was going to say, you know, a little bit ago, well, how would you implement this inside of your business? And it's starting with this. It's starting by sitting down and thinking about what is the consistent steps that we want to have happen every time we have a one deal.

0:07:25 - (Micah): The easiest way to do this is once you have those steps is diagram it out or feed it to chat GPT and ask it to create a process doc for you, help you visualize what this might be little bit more. I even just released a video on YouTube last week showing how chat GPT can model and create diagrams with code, all from all of this. So check that if you're interested in that, we can link to it in the program notes. But being able to visually see what your onboarding steps are, I mean, I've seen an experience with multiple clients where just thinking through this set of steps for onboarding, a lot of magic happens because all of a sudden it's not just up in your head, oh, we have to onboard this client, we have to do these things.

0:08:10 - (Micah): Once you get it on paper, then you're forced to ask questions, you're forced to create logic around what if they don't have this information yet? And some companies listening may have actual two week, three week long onboarding processes, and that's okay. But you can still automate sections of those and collect data and even have multiple automations that string these areas together even while you're waiting for the client to respond back.

0:08:38 - (Micah): When they're responding back, they could fill out the secondary form where they submit the information, and that triggers the next step of the process. There's really simple ways to create a nice streamlined onboarding process all the way through.

0:08:52 - (Alane): Yeah, I think one of the biggest hesitations that I hear from customers initially is when we're talking about sending a welcome email or creating an invoice automatically in QuickBooks, whatever the scenario is, is they're instantly afraid of it just going directly to the client like, oh, can I edit it first? Can I customize it? Of course, instead of automatically sending in the automation, the draft can be created.

0:09:18 - (Alane): So nothing could go in front of your client without some type of review first. And the next thing that I would say too is the value of a project management system as a part of this automation sequence so that you have some accountability in place. So every time you mark that one deal and it kicks off everything, having it also creates from a template in your project management system like ClickUp, Asana or Monday, where it creates the rest of the tasks for your team for what needs to get done. Because some of the pieces may not individually be able to be automated, you still need somebody to manually do something in there.

0:09:58 - (Alane): But what part is automated is the task creation for what happens after the client gets marked as a one deal?

0:10:07 - (Micah): Yeah. And I would even say with the task creation, you can automate the assignment, you can automate the due date, you can automate the delivery date, you can automate the priority, you can scope all of those out and have all of that done. And it sounds like, okay, simple, but when you're mapping out complex projects and leveraging templates, you can trigger it that way and assigning all this stuff out and creating all of these attributes, even of the tasks, it saves so much time.

0:10:38 - (Micah): I think more importantly than anything else, and I hinted at this a second ago, is this is building a repeatable system. So when you're trying to scale this, you're not training an individual person to do every single onboarding step. The system is doing the steps. You are training the people in your team to use the system, which is a lot easier to train and a lot more scalable. And when you want to improve your onboarding process, you improve the system.

0:11:09 - (Micah): You don't have to retrain 1234, however many people you have on your team doing this.

0:11:16 - (Alane): I'm going to tell you my, like, it's such a subtle thing that we added to our new client onboarding template and in ClickUp, and it's my favorite, is that whenever we get a new client, one of the tasks in there is to connect with that new, that contact on LinkedIn or those contacts, if there's multiple contacts, like something that gets so easily missed, but we have it as a part of our onboarding process, and the team member gets automatically assigned with a task to connect with them on LinkedIn.

0:11:50 - (Alane): Something that people don't even think about but that it's consistent. Every single new client has that happen because we have it as a part of our process.

0:11:58 - (Micah): Yeah. And I can. I can say for sure when we didn't have that as part of our process, it was a wishful thinking situation where we would get in and maybe one of us would remember to remind the other person, oh, did you find them on LinkedIn? Did you reach out? Did you connect with them? And most of the time the answer is no. But like you're saying, Alane, now it's immediately a task and we don't even have to remind or think about it.

0:12:26 - (Alane): Yeah, and it's automatically assigned, like you mentioned. And this is so helpful, too. When you're looking at a team across multiple departments that have to do their designated tasks, you know if something got done or not, you're able to see, okay, well, we just onboarded this new client for the things that needed to happen manually. Did they get done? And until you have that in the project management system, you might be missing out on it because you don't have the visibility.

0:12:50 - (Alane): All right, Micah, so we've been kind of talking about what an automation sequence could look like from CRM. One deal to an automated sequence. But let's just paint it. Paint the picture all the way through. So we have a one deal in the CRM. It just got marked as one. Tell me what happens.

0:13:09 - (Micah): Yep. So from a one deal in our scenario, we have it going in, we have it creating the Google Drives. We have a shared drive already set up. It goes and creates a client related folder. Within that, it actually goes to ClickUp creates a brand new client folder inside of ClickUp. It grabs the information from ClickUp. This is getting a little technical, but it's the ids of the objects that it's creating in ClickUp and associates that with the folders created inside of Google Drive.

0:13:41 - (Micah): So that way we have a direct correlation between, we know this aspect in ClickUp or this folder in ClickUp means this folder in Google Drive. So we can send data back and forth and assets back and forth all through additional automated pieces. Anyway, it's creating that, it's creating an automatic client brief from a template, it's pulling data out of our CRM and populating all of these things across the board. It automatically creates the tasks we were just talking about. It creates the initial project it goes through and goes into our time tracking system. It creates a new client record and time tracking we use. Toggle would highly recommend. It creates a brand new project based on the deal that was just marked as one inside of our CRM.

0:14:26 - (Micah): So all the terminology and everything is correct and used the same way all the way through. Because automation is doing it and not a human we create a Dropbox folder. So that makes it really easy to share stuff. We actually go in and we create a couple more elements like we create a Trello board. We're branching into creating slack stations and channels we create. Let's see, what else do we create? Oh, announcements for our team telling that a new client is being onboarded drafts a welcome message and I think there's probably a couple more things, but that's the bulk.

0:15:07 - (Alane): That's a general overview. Yeah. And if anybody's interested in seeing based on the software that you're using, see what's capable of being automated for your new client onboarding process. We will link to our 25 idea generator tool in the show notes and you'll be able to input, you know, if you use HubSpot, ClickUp, mailchimp or whatever, it'll output example automations that could be used for your new onboarding process.

0:15:36 - (Micah): Great. Well, thanks everybody for listening. We're really excited about these last three episodes, really drilling in on how do you generate leads through automation and AI, how do you convert those leads and then how do you actually kick off projects and removing just a ton of those pain points in these whole kind of beginning stages of client engagement and finding the prospects and the right leads. So reach out with questions.

0:16:03 - (Micah): Definitely check out some of our prior episodes. Thanks for listening.

0:16:07 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.

0:16:19 - (Micah): And join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:16:23 - (Alane): Bye for now.