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Onboarding new clients is a great feeling, knowing that somebody is ready to work with you and hand over their hard-earned money for your expertise and your guidance. But if you lead a busy lifestyle, or you’re a complete technophobe then you’ll know that the admin tasks involved with onboarding can be tedious and repetitive.
Sending out contracts, invoices and multiple emails can take up an excessive amount of your time. Time you could use to perfect your program and services. Time you should spend with your clients or creating your online courses.
Well, I’m about to make your life that little bit easier by telling you that there is a MUCH simpler way to do things.
I’m a HUGE advocate for Dubsado. Dubsado is an online tool that is so much more than just your standard CRM. There are tons of exciting features and it’s absolutely perfect for service-based entrepreneurs, that’s why I would absolutely recommend it for your coaching business.
In this guide, I’ll give you a complete walkthrough of how to set up an automated onboarding process using Dubsado. This is a rough guide of what your workflow could look like, however the possibilities with Dubsado are limitless and everyone has their own style.
Before we jump into Dubsado, you’ll need a rough idea of how your onboarding process is going to work. Grab a pen and paper or open a google doc and start designing your process. Things to think about:
Do you have a contract your client needs to sign?
What do you want to say in the emails that go out?
Do you have a welcome pack or a questionnaire that needs completing?
Are there any systems you need to get your client set up on?
These are all questions you need to ask yourself. The onboarding process should be efficient and convenient for your new client and should also be informative and give them a good first impression for the type of service they will receive going forward.
Here’s an example onboarding process.
This is just an example of how your onboarding process could look. Everyone works differently, so it depends on you and your preferences.
I would recommend writing it all out and think about how the journey would look from your clients’ point of view. They could already be extremely busy, so you don’t want to make it too longwinded. Try and keep the process short and professional.
Before we set up the workflows on Dubsado, we need to take a look at the onboarding process we designed and ensure we have all of the resources we need within the platform. Using the example above we’ll need to set up a few different templates which you can find in the left hand menu within Dubsado:
Similar to Calendly, this allows your clients to book in discovery calls, client catch-ups, coaching calls and so on. You can customise each meeting as it suits you and you can link your Gmail calendar which prevents any clashes in your schedule.
A really useful feature that Dubsado has integrated is electronic document signing. You can set up your contract from within Dubsado (under form templates) and then when you send out the contract to your client, they can sign it electronically.
The lead capture form is linked to Dubsado so that when a potential client fills this out, all of their details are stored under ‘leads’, allowing you to clearly keep track of leads and convert them into projects once they’ve agreed to work with you. You can embed the lead capture form on your website or simply send a link to your potential clients.
There’s a high chance that you’ll need some additional information about your client so that you can provide the best possible service to them. Dubsado allows you to create questionnaires (under form templates) and then capture as much information as you need. This will be very useful in your onboarding process so think about what you want to know about your client beforehand.
These are emails that you are likely to send on a regular basis. For the onboarding process, you will probably need 4 different emails. One for when you send the contract out, another for when you send the invoice, another for when you’re sending your scheduler link and then the Welcome email which will contain a questionnaire. You can customise these however you like, but it’s important to make them your own and add in a little personality.
These would usually be your 1-1 or group coaching packages. When you click on packages in the left-hand side menu (under templates), you’ll have the option to add in your packages and enter the price. This step is important so that we can automate the creation of your invoices.
Setting all this up sounds extremely time-consuming, but thinking about the long term, once we’ve automated the process you’ll notice a big difference in your day-to-day tasks.
Ok so now that we have all the necessary templates set up, it’s time to create the workflows from within Dubsado.
Here’s a breakdown of what the actions and triggers should look like:
Note: After the 2nd action when the scheduler is sent out for the discovery call, I’ve ticked the box in the options that says ‘ask for approval’ which means the workflow will pause and Dubsado will prompt you to ‘approve’ the continuation of the workflow. This allows you and your client to make the decision on whether or not you want to work together. If you do, you can authorise the workflow to continue from your dashboard or from the project ‘workflow’ tab.
The ‘change project status’ action will convert your new client from ‘Lead’ into ‘Project’.
Now that you have everything set up, it’s really important that you test out your workflow to make sure all the moving parts are working successfully. Create a test project (or use the one dubsado already has set up on there) and play around with it.
Things to check:
Did you receive everything you were supposed to and in the right order?
Does the contract and any other forms look as they should?
Are the emails worded correctly? Did the smart fields autofill the correct information?
Did the invoice populate the right amount?
Does everything work properly?
If there’s anything missing or something doesn’t look right, go back and troubleshoot it. Have a look at all of the actions and triggers and make sure they all make sense, and see if there’s a way you can simplify things.
One of the best things about this CRM, and another reason why I constantly recommend it to my clients, is their fantastic support system. If you get stuck, you have tons of options.
Looking for assistance with Dubsado set-ups and automation?
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