Lessons

Lesson Info

Client Experience

So we've moved now from that sales process into on-boarding and here it is, it's time for the experience with them. So when I first learned how to create welcome packets I actually was not working at all in a communications industry. I was traveling as a leadership consultant for a women's sorority and I was going around to 29 American universities all by myself. Like 29 days on the road, two days off, nine months, it was a crazy job. Best job I'll never do again. But through that time I had to always write a welcome email and send it along to the university's chapter, because I needed to prepare them on what they needed to know. And over time I learned that if I put the right information in there I would get to do things that I missed and I loved. If I mentioned yoga one of them would usually step up and say, can I take you to a yoga class while you're here? If I mentioned that I loved Mexican food and I missed it while I was traveling on the road a lot of times, guess what, they woul...

d take me to one of those. So what I'm telling you here is that we talked about this a bit in the last module, but I teased you and I told you I was gonna break into it a little bit more. I wanna start talking to you here about that welcome information packet and how you can really on-board them and lead them through your experience by stepping up, again, to that leadership position and communicating the things that you need and would like and would serve you well. Because when it comes to leading your client it's up to you. Sometimes I like to think that there's no such thing as a bad client. I learned this from a calligrapher that I look up to and I've learned a lot from, but over time she said this a lot and I thought, I don't know if I agree with that, but I've really learned that it's kind of true. Sometimes when there's client issues it was a red flag that I could've alleviated earlier on. Whether I didn't even need to work with this person or whether it was an opportunity that I didn't necessarily communicate everything that I needed to communicate to them. So it's up to you. It's on your shoulders when you're leading them through your process to do this elegantly, gracefully, and in a way that gets them to trust you with their money. It wouldn't be a leadership slide without a John Maxwell quote, good leaders communication vision clearly, creatively, and continually. We maybe have a vision in our head of what leaders and leadership look like, but again, for this process, for your business, that people associate your name with it's up to you. You are the one that this is dependent on. So one of the first things that you can do as you lead your clients is set really clear expectations and boundaries. This one is absolutely paramount and I really believe in this, because you need to tell them what you're gonna do and what you're not gonna do. As you get further along in the process if you have an opportunity where they're asking for something that isn't quite included these are gonna be the moments that you have up front to set these. Now in my welcome packet that we send to our clients and kind of what I coach my students to do is spend some time here on a few things. And I'm gonna run through them, hopefully they'll tee up some ideas in your head of things that you can communicate to your clients as well. And one of the first things that I want you to do is communicate your office hours, when you're working and when you're not working. And I want you to stick to that. This can be something that is really helpful for them. If you've ever had a problem or heard horror stories of people who had their clients text them all the time. I've never had a problem with that, 'cause we always communicate up front. This is when we're in the office and this is how to communicate with us. This one is really, really important. I also want you to communicate here the expected response time. Do you try to get back to every single message within 24 hours? Maybe you need 48 hours. Maybe you are a mom and have kids and you only work two days a week. Communicate these things to your clients. Another thing to communicate here is if you have a certain day, I batch my days in my business with my work. Tuesdays is my client workday. I pretty much don't change out of my gym clothes and I put up a ponytail and I work all day. So I tell that to my clients. I say, Tuesday is your day. If you need me, not my team, if you need me, I'm probably not available on that day. I can get to you the day before or the day after, but I try to be really clear and let them know up front that that day is reserved for them and I'm gonna be working on them on that day. Another thing I want you to do is communicate to them the tools that you're gonna use to communicate all of the process. So if you use different kinds of software in your business, we'll get into this in just a sec, but I want you to start telling them about that up front here as well. You may wanna tell them how to schedule a call with you. You may wanna tell them the project timeline, when to expect things to come in. You wanna communicate this all up front. So the next tip that I have for you is including how-to guides. A great way to do this is just with video demos. You can create a video demo and link it in your welcome packet or in your welcome email, that will be really helpful for them. I mentioned HoneyBook a few times, that's the CRM tool that we love using in our business. And this is something that I wanna make sure my clients feel comfortable with. They probably don't use HoneyBook as much as I do, so I wanna communicate that to them. I also include a little video on how to schedule a call with me, how to get feedback in Google Box, which is the tool that we use. But go ahead and think in advance what things do they not use that you use regularly that you can explain to them? I also want you to give a little bit of insight here into your company culture. I talked about this a moment ago, but sharing that why, sharing that why you do what you do, including images of your office or your studio. So many of us work online and remotely, so how can you let them feel like they're stepping into your world and working with you? So once you've got all of this welcome packet information compiled and you've thought through it, I have one more tip for you. I want you to update it constantly. One of the best tools that you can use here is a frequently asked questions document. So any time you're working with a client and a question comes up once, maybe comes up twice, definitely if it comes up twice, I want you to consider adding that into your welcome packet. So as people work with you they understand things like how to pay, how auto pay works, all of these nitty gritty questions that may come up, this is where you communicate that with them. Now to wrap it up I wanna talk about something that I feel really strongly about and that's offboarding your client. So you've brought them on, you've worked them through your experience, and now it's time for you to communicate that it's done. We did a great job, moving on. So how, if you've ever worked with somebody and you kind of wonder at the end of the project, are we done yet? Like is there anything left to do? I know I've definitely wondered that before. So I want you to end things with a, tie it up with a neat bow, end it with a good punctuation mark. There's a few different ways you can offboard your clients. You can use a offboarding, a goodbye packet, you can make a PDF, like of like we talked about earlier, and send that along. You can include testimonial information, asking for that testimonial. We're gonna get to that also in a second. You can also tee up and automate things, like maybe a three month check-in with them, a six month check-in. If they had a birthday or an anniversary, maybe you work in the wedding industry, put their anniversary on your calender, so you can continue to communicate with them over time. So then here's a little quick run through of some offboarding examples. Maybe you wanna send a goodbye gift or a packet, like I said. Automate those dates. And let's get into your testimonials as well. So a lot of times I see that creatives have testimonials that are big paragraph chunks. They basically copy and pasted that information that somebody gave and I have no doubt that the things that that person said back were great and glowing about you. You probably really are super easy to work with and fabulous and wonderful and all the adjectives that they're throwing your way, but my concern as a copywriter is are people reading it? Is it useful to other people who may want to work with you? A lot of times also I see that there is a whole page reserved on a website for testimonials. And while that is important, we don't spend a lot of time on websites. I know you spend a lot of time on your website, but your clients aren't spending as much time as you are when they visit your website. So we have to make sure that the right information is getting in front of their eyes. Are they seeing these testimonials that you have? So what I want you to start doing is start peppering them in across your websites and across your communication. And I have five tips for you to get better testimonials. The first thing I want you to do is be okay that you can reorder the information that they're giving you. You can totally rearrange the sentences, that's keeping, you're keeping the copy the same. If that scares you we can go ahead and jump to five, get permission on the testimonials. Make sure that your clients and customers understand that you're gonna use their words to communicate to others why to work with you. But you can reorder it. And I'm saying this, because a lot of times people that are looking to work with you need to know that you solve their problem. So what if you lead with the problem instead of the resolution? Typically testimonials end with she was so great, she did everything right, blah, blah, blah, blah, but what if you turn that around and you start with saying were that person was before, what their problem was, then they worked with you, then the resolution. I have a video telling a little bit more about that in the bonus packet for this. Also, we need to ask the right questions. Again, I dig into that in the video, but it's important that instead of saying, hey, can you just give me a testimonial? That you direct them a little bit and you tell them what you need them to give back to you. Don't forget that you can also have testimonials about your character or your skill. Maybe you haven't worked with clients yet, but you have colleagues who trust you, other vendor relationships, you can use those and the words that other people have said about working with you on your website and in your communications as well. Like I said, to end this, you don't wanna put it all on one page, okay. It's okay to to have that page, but I want you to consider pulling those testimonials into your work with me page, into your about page, onto your homepage. Just sprinkle them throughout your website, so no matter when someone lands on your website or pages they click on they come in contact with your testimonials. I am so grateful that you tuned in today and I'm so grateful to my friends at HoneyBook and CreativeLive for having me on. I know I threw a whole lot at you and like I said at the very beginning, having, the noisy market can definitely be overwhelming, so I really want you to focus on honing in on the right things before you go crazy and feel like you need to be marketing at all the places and all the times, 'cause you don't, okay. You just need to be in the right places. So I have some homework for you. What I want you to do is start figuring out your workflow. I really want you to spend time, hash out your workflow, use that bonuses section and I want you to download those guides and go through them and see if you can get a little bit of extra help figuring out what your workflow is and how you can start communicating more clearly with your clients, so you can lead them through the process with copy that is exactly on point with what they need to hear. Told you, quotes, here's one more. But, our greatest fear shouldn't be of failure, but of succeeding at the things in life that don't really matter. So I'm gonna drive this home. I don't want you to worry about marketing to all of the places, but how can you figure out what enough is for you, what enough looks like for you, your family, what your take home needs to be, communicate to those clients, serve them really, really well with good communications, and then rest, and then relax. Take a load off, so you can do it again the next day. That is what good work looks like and I really want that for you as a business owner. Thank you again so much for tuning in. I'm so excited to have gotten to bring this content to you even with my little raspy voice here at the end, but I would love to talk to you online, I'd love to hang out on Instagram, ashlynscarter is my handle there and you can also head to ashlynwrites.com. I've got loads of freebies, quizzes, and templates there for you to grab so you can market your business better. Thanks again.