118. My Process for Onboarding Clients in 10 Minutes (& How You Can Do It Too)

Phylicia Pough: 00:00:55

Hey, friend. You're listening to Harmonious Mompreneur, where faith, family, and business come together.

I'm your host, Phylicia Pough, a Christian wife, mom of two, and life and business system strategist for moms.

If you've ever felt like there just aren't enough hours in the day or find yourself craving more time for yourself but feel guilty about it, you're in the right place. While many strive for balance, I believe it's harmony, an integrated flow that works for you, that truly sustains.

Each week, I'll share insights from my personal journey and practical strategies to help you design systems that bring peace to your business and home life. So give your kids another snack, take a deep breath, and let's dive into today's episode where we'll start creating your harmonious Mompreneur life.

Hey, friends. So how long does it take you to onboard a new client? Is it minutes? Is it days?

And listen, if it's taking you too long, I just want you to understand that you might be losing money and frustrating your clients in the process. So today, I want to share with you my process for onboarding clients in 10 minutes and how you can do it, too.

But first, what is the problem with a slow onboarding process?

Okay, so when your onboarding takes too long, and let me just back up, onboarding is the time from once the client has paid you until you start doing the work. So what does it look like? So maybe it looks like they accept a quote, sign a contract, make a payment, get some onboarding materials.

That's what onboarding is. It's like, how do you welcome them into your world?

So when this takes a long time to happen, when it's too long, clients begin to feel uncertain and they can actually start to lose excitement after they have already said yes to working with you.

So if I've said yes to working with you, and then it takes like a week for me to go through the whole process of signing a contract, making a payment, and understanding what our working relationship is going to look like. Of course, this is dependent on the industry. And, you know, in corporate, a week could be standard, but we're talking about the online space, right?

So that could be a long time. And so you want to shorten your onboarding process or make it as quick and seamless as possible.

Now, when I say quick, I don't want it to feel like it's rushed, and I don't want the quality to diminish because it was quick. But you just want to make sure that it is not overly drawn out or that it's not taking too long when it could be shorter.

A slow response time can also just reduce trust. Before you even begin working with the person for them, it might be like, well, it's taking them this long to onboard me.

How is it going to be when it's time for them to deliver my service?

And of course, when there's delays in sending, you know, invoices and contracts and there's just miscommunication, you could be missing out on money, payments might be missed, clients might be backing out because, you know, things are just too disjointed and not clear. So again, you just want to make sure that your onboarding is not taking too long.

So what are some signs that your onboarding process might need a little bit of help?

Number one, if you are manually sending contracts, invoices and welcome emails, if you're manually doing all of these things all of the time, this can change. And this can speed up your onboarding. If it's taking you hours or days to get a new client fully onboarded, again, there's room for improvement.

And if you are constantly repeating the same steps, if you're doing this over and over again, more room for improvement. Okay, so what did I do to get my onboarding process down to 10 minutes?

So the first thing I did is I got really clear on what my offers and my packages, my offer suite, I guess you will, I got really clear on what that was and I standardized it.

So it was not a lot of custom, custom things because it's really hard to standardize, it's hard to streamline, it's hard to automate when things are not standardized and happening on a repetitive basis. So I got really clear on my offers, packages, and I standardized it.

And that really helped put me in a position to be able to add lots of automation to my onboarding process. And the automation is taking care of some of those things that I was doing manually in my process and saving me lots of time.

All right, so after I got clear on my offers and I streamlined my offers, I standardized my offers, the next thing that I did is I wrote out the process. I wrote out step by step what the client journey was going to look like.

I thought through what needs to happen first, what I wanted to happen next, and I literally just wrote it down.

I used my phone, or you can use pen and paper, and I wrote out what the process was going to be before I went into any tool and tried to create some type of workflow or set up some type of automation.

I thought through what the actual journey and experience was going to be like from the time of inquiry to the time that they are, you know, signing the contract, making a payment and getting their welcome information. All right? And so that's what you want to do. You want to make sure that you know exactly what this process is going to look like step by step.

What is your onboarding workflow going to look like? This is going to, again, position you to be able to, number one, find gaps in your process.

It's going to also allow you to be able to see where you can simplify and then also where you can automate. Okay.

And then finally, once I standardized my packages, once I documented the client journey, I then went into my tools and my tool of choice for this particular area is Dubsado. And I went into Dubsado and I set up my workflow.

Okay, What I did, I went in, I created my canned emails or basically email templates, I created my packages, it created my proposals, I created my contracts, and then once I did all of that, I set up my workflows and the workflow basically does the work for me. I say all the time, let the workflow work for you. And that's literally what my client onboarding workflow is doing. It is doing the work for me.

So what this looks like, I'll kind of walk you through my main offer, which is the Harmony System Sprint.

So if somebody is interested in working with me through the Harmony System Sprint, which is the VIP week, then they will start out with an application. So the link to the application is on my website.

So they'll just go, they fill that out and they will automatically get an email that says, you know, thank you for submitting your application. On reviewing your application and I will be responding to you within 24 hours.

On the back end, I get a notification that somebody has filled out this particular form and I'm reviewing it, I'm doing what I told the client or the prospect that I was going to do. And so now once I decide, okay, this person is going to be a good fit, I have a workflow set up that will send the proposal to them.

And the proposal has the flat fee for the service and then there's also some upsells on that, so they can choose some additional services as well.

So I send them the proposal and they can decide, you know, they basically customize their package and then kind of in the same document, if you will, once they accept the proposal, then it transitions into the contract, they sign the contract, and then it transitions into the payment. And depending on if they selected that they wanted to do full payment or 50, 50 payment. You know, that was the specific workflow that I applied.

Let's just say they're doing pay in full, then they will pay their entire invoice. Once that invoice is paid, then they are getting a welcome email immediately, which is inviting them to schedule their kickoff session. Okay.

Once I set up this workflow, the only work that I am doing is reviewing the application, and then I'm going into Dubsado. I'm opening up their project, and I'm applying a workflow.

It's literally a few clicks of a button, and after that, I'm not doing anything else until they submit their questionnaire, which is attached to the scheduler. I'm reviewing their questionnaire in preparation for their kickoff call.

Once they schedule their kickoff call, they, of course, they get the confirmation email that the call has been scheduled, and then they also get the reminder email. So I'm not having to go back and forth. I'm not having to remember when their call is.

It's on their calendar, and it's on my calendar, and the availability was based on my schedule and what works best for me. Right. And so I literally just a few clicks and all of this work is done.

They're able to get their proposal, they're able to get their contract, they're able to pay their invoice, they're able to schedule their appointment and fill out their questionnaire. All of this without me having spent a bunch of time doing it, without me having to manually do all of these things.

And I say it takes 10 minutes, but it really was less than that. Okay.

And so what you want to do, if you want to get to the point where you are onboarding your clients in 10 minutes or, you know, whatever makes sense for you and your business.

But if you feel like you want to shorten the time for your onboarding process, um, I want to encourage you to kind of go through those steps that I went through. You want to find ways to standardize your.

Your offers, you want to document your client journey from start to finish, and then you want to find the tool that works best for you. Okay. I'm not telling you to use Dubsado, right, Because it might not be the best fit for you.

I have a previous episode where I talked about how to choose the right CRM.

I will link it in the show notes, but find the right tool that works for you that's going to help you to automate some of the steps in your onboarding workflow. Okay?

Now if Dubsado is something that you already use or you want to use and you want support with setting up your workflow and setting up your client onboarding or your entire client experience to where you are saving and maximizing your time, then definitely feel free to DM me or fill out an application for the Harmony System Sprint, because that is what I literally do. I set up your entire client experience for you. So that is what I want to leave you with today.

You can onboard your clients in 10 minutes or less with the right packages, with the right process and with the right tools.

And if you want to dig deeper into maybe what your process should look like, how you can set up your process, or set up your offer so that it's standardized, then I invite you to join the Lead to Loyalty challenge.

And we're going to go through mapping out your client experience from start to finish so that it is efficient and so that you can be positioned to onboard your clients in 10 minutes. Okay? So I hope that this was helpful. Thank you so much for tuning in. With grace and gratitude, I will see you in the next episode. Hey friend.

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