78 - Onboarding Clients === Well, hello friends. And welcome back to the crush, your goals with Christy podcast. The business podcast where you'll find clarity over confusion, community, over competition, and the confidence to crush your goals. I'm your host, Christy Johnson business strategist. Dedicated to helping you overcome overwhelm and get unstuck and build the business of your dreams. Today, we're talking about the client onboarding process. We're going to talk about how to onboard clients and also some ways to automate it. We want to make sure that your own board process communicates your professionalism, but also your personality. It's going to give your clients a boutique experience so that all of your clients get the same amazing experience every time. And having it written down somewhere is going to save you time and automating. It will save even more time. So let's dive in. The onboarding process is truly one of the most important parts of any service based business. Why. Because it sets the tone for the entire client relationship. Honestly, a lot of times it can be the deciding factor in whether or not a customer sticks around long term. If they had an amazing experience with you, there were no roadblocks. They understood what to do. What was expected of them? What were you were going to do then? They're going to be like, wow. Working with that person was so easy and they're going to want to come back again. And again, And again, Now as a creative entrepreneur, you have the opportunity to not only make a really great first impression, but also to give your clients an unforgettable experience that they're going to tell all their friends about. So we're going to talk about how to effectively. Onboard your new clients and how to automate the process so that you can create a boutique or high end experience. That's going to impress them. So why should you automate your onboarding process? Well, it has so many benefits. The most important one is that it saves you time and energy by automating the process, you're able to streamline everything. So it's going to reduce the amount of time spent on or onboarding. It can also help to make sure that you don't miss any important steps, which can often be the case. If you're manually onboarding your clients. Another key benefit of audit, automating your onboarding process is that it allows you to give your clients a boutique experience. You can create a custom welcome message and a personalized onboarding plan that is tailored to each client. This gives your clients a feeling that they're truly valued. And that you're looking out for their best interests. Last, but not least on boarding your clients and automating this process will allow you to give your clients the information that they need quickly and accurately. It's going to eliminate the need for multiple emails and phone calls, which can often be time consuming and frustrating. How many times have you tried to schedule a session with someone or a call with someone? And it just goes back and forth. On and on. It's really frustrating. So let's talk about how to effectively onboard your clients. So the key to success is creating a personalized onboarding plan for each of your clients. And here are a few tips on how to get you started. Number one, make sure you ask the right questions. Before you begin the onboarding process, you need to make sure that you get a better understanding of your client and what they need. So you should figure out what actually do you need, what is the scope of the project? How much money are you anticipating to spend on this project? What do you hope to accomplish with our services? What is your budget? What is your timeline for completion? These questions will help you create an onboarding plan that works for the client and for them. Next you want to create a custom welcome message. Once you have all of the questions answered, you want to introduce yourself to the client. So say I'm so excited to work with you. This is what I offer my services are going to help you out in this way and help you feel XYZ. This is going to orient them to your services, your offerings, and also help them feel more. Comfortable. You also want to let them know what communications they can expect from you and how often through the process they can hear from you. If you use any software like specialized software with your clients, you can also use this time. To tell them about it and introduce them to it. Okay. So once you have the welcome message, you need to create an onboarding plan. This should include a timeline of when you need certain tasks to be completed, as well as what tasks need to be completed in order to finish the project. The onboarding plan should also include any additional information that the client may need, like links to resources, contact information, payment terms, et cetera. Now, a lot of this will be in the contract, but it doesn't. It's not about idea to include it on as part of the onboarding process as well. All right. Once you have this process created. You can automate this. So you can set up an automatic email to send the welcome message and include little notes for yourself. If you want to personalize any aspects of it along the way. You can also set up automatic reminders for tasks that need to be completed and automated payment reminders for when payments are due. This will help ensure that everything runs smoothly and that you don't miss any important steps. You can do a lot of these in your CRM, your customer relationship management software. I love 17 hats. That's the one that I use. A lot of people really like dip Sato as well. I recommend trying out the free trial of both of them and figuring out which one works well with your blink with your brain. Finally after the onboarding process has been completed, it's really important to follow up with your clients. You can thank them or even send a handwritten note. One of the things that I do as a photographer, Stephanie and I, we send a welcome magazine. We actually send them a full planning magazine that helps them as part of their process. So when they become a client with us, we first send them a welcome message. And says, thank you so much for booking with us. We're so excited to help us get started. Here's a questionnaire. This helps us get all of that initial information that we talked about that you might need from them. Um, so it'll say things like what time is your wedding ceremony? Um, it'll also ask questions about the engagement session. Like when do you want to schedule the engagement session? Uh, what time are you typically free things like that. It's going to get everything that we need to know from them. That's going to enable us to do our jobs really, really well. So, um, then we send them that welcome package of the bridal magazine. You could, you could send a handwritten note, you can send a little gift. It doesn't really matter. Um, but whatever it is, it can even be a simple video. You can send them a video on your phone, make it really quick and say, I'm so glad that we're working together. I just wanted to reach out and say hello and let you know that if you need anything, you can contact me. This is going to give your clients an unforgettable experience and make a really great first impression. It's also going to help ensure that they stick around longterm and that you're able to create a thriving business. All right. I hope this short episode was helpful about the onboarding process. If you have any. Any questions at all, reach out to me. You can always email me at Kristy at Christy Johnson, creative.com. And I'll see you on the next episode.