Client onboarding automation with Zapier, ClickUp, Content Snare & more

in this video you'll learn how to automate your client onboarding for your digital agency or basically any client-facing service business it's kind of hard to define where client onboarding starts and ends but the parts i will cover in this video include the screening questionnaire the initial call or briefing stage with your client the contract or your proposal setting up new clients in all your systems and then collecting the information you need to do the job now you might not need to go through every single one of these steps it's really going to depends pretty heavily on your business so for example if you're running a productized service you probably don't need a full briefing stage or a full scope that goes in the proposal it might just be a simple contract that they sign but going through all of this you will still get an idea or two about something you can automate in your business that will save you a ton of time there are just a couple of things uh you have to know first one i'm going to be talking about zapier which is a tool that helps automate workflows between the different apps you're already using if you've never heard of zapier before this might be a little bit hard to follow so i will link up to my zapier tutorial video below in the description and i'll also chuck it on top of the video if you want to go and watch that first and secondly i'm going to talk about a bunch of different tools you know for proposals there's a whole lot of different tools you can use but you don't have to use the ones i talk about in this video the critical part is just that whatever tool you use needs to have some kind of integration especially with zapier and you can find that out for yourself by going to zapier.com come up here to the main menu and go to apps that work with zapier and then you can have a search around so let's say you're using better proposals you might type that in here yep looks like there's an integration so just do that with whatever tool you're using and just make sure there's an integration with zapier and then you'll be sweet for the rest of this video okay so part one is your screening questionnaire now this comes in so many different shapes and sizes i'll just give you a really quick example of one we used to use in our agency so when someone came on for a website we just had a simple form that someone can go and fill out so just ask for a bunch of questions that we need to get a pretty good idea of who this client is and what kind of project they need from us so obviously every business is going to have a different kind of questionnaire with different questions but some good questions to ask are things like the client's budget what time frame are they expecting for this project like if they say they want something in two weeks time you can probably say nope this is not a good client or you're going to charge them a rush fee what kind of expectations they have their basic business information and any other red flags questions that might give you an idea that this isn't someone you want to work with just keep it short and to the point because you don't want to create too many roadblocks for your clients at this early on in the process but how can you actually automate this onboarding form so first really it just depends on what tool you use so you want to use a really good forms tool so some examples are gravity forms which is the one you're looking at here that is a wordpress-based one another one you might want to look at is fluent forms if you don't have wordpress or you don't want to use a wordpress-based one check out typeform great great tool and google forms is a pretty good free option it doesn't create the best looking forms but it is an option but once you've created your form now we're going to jump over to zapier the most basic automation you can do here is simply that when someone fills out your form you want to add them to whatever crm you're using in this case i'm using activecampaign so we might just add them in there to say hey this person's filled out our form and then you might have an automation set up in your crm that says when a new contact comes in create a task for one of our sales people to reach out to them again totally up to you what your process is another option here is to drop a message into your company chat so we're using slack and you can drop a message into the client's channel just to say hey someone's filled out our form and if everyone in your organization is using slack and they can see that channel's now got an unread message in it everyone's going to be across your sales pipeline all the time so i think that's a really cool way to just to keep everyone in the organization updated of what's going on in your business and just as an example here in our slack we have a channel whenever someone signs up for our software product content snare we get a little message in here which is kind of just fun and for a little bit of motivation for the team but it also serves uh as an activity feed of uh what we've got going on in our business it doesn't just have to be for fun another cool thing you could do back in this automation is to send yourself an sms so there's actually an sms tool built in to zapier so you could send yourself an sms to say that someone has filled out your inquiry form so you can get on that really quickly and give them a call immediately which can look really good to your client if you're on top of your inquiries that quickly they get a call right away i could help you close that deal a bit faster so yeah pretty cool things you can do with zapier yeah so as soon as someone's filled out your form you could put that as a message in your company chat sms yourself and add that person to your crm now moving on to the initial call or briefing stage with your client keep this one really short i think that pretty much everyone should be using some form of booking system like calendly there are a lot of tools out there that allow your clients to book times with you i just think calendly is the most simple one there is and this is the kind of thing you don't want to add friction to the process at this point your clients just want a seamless experience and to me calendly is one of the best for this you know they can come here they click on the date they click on a time that's available and then they book it in it's really simple so that's a really simple automation that saves you going backwards and forwards on email trying to work out a time that you're both available so calendly is one of the best options there it also has the ability to automatically create a zoom meeting for you as soon as your client books secondly i love the tool otter.ai you can use this in two different ways there's an app you can get on your phone that you could sit on the table during an in-person meeting and have it record the meeting or you can get it to join your zoom calls so it'll come on and automatically transcribe your zoom calls as they are happening so check out otta.ai and you can see this is the zoom page here but this thing is unreal because it will actually work out the different people that are speaking so you can see here that it's worked out uh i'm speaking here and uh brian is speaking here you know and this goes on throughout the meeting with time stamps as well so this is a super cool tool that can help you automate meetings that way you don't have to take so many notes as you're going through okay and now on to part three proposals and contracts this is going to differ quite a lot based on what kind of business you have but i see contracts and proposals slightly differently so to me a contract is basically a lot of legal terminology for basically the whole thing and then there might be an appendix at the end that outlines the scope of the project and then has a signature block to me that you know black and white kind of plain document when i think of a proposal i think of something maybe a bit better looking like something like panda dock here which is still kind of looks like a pdf but it's a little bit more designed we've got placeholders for different parts of the document or something like better proposals which is an 100 online system where your client can actually go through just like browsing a website and they can click through the different pages like you might have you still might have your legal terms and conditions in here but other things about you know what you expect from them and they get to the end and they can still sign it just like a contract it's just more of a pretty looking contract that's kind of how i view proposals now there are some pretty cool ways you can automate the contract and proposal part of your business so this is a zapier workflow that starts when a form is submitted and you can do this in two ways you could have a form that your clients fill out with a bunch of information about the project kind of like the briefing form we had before or you can create a form that you use internally so maybe this form was filled out by someone on your team it just asked some questions like client's name company name when the project's getting started what's in the project this kind of thing and the purpose of that form is simply to kick off the rest of this automation so all you're really going to need to do here is create the proposal so in this case i'm creating a document in pandadoc and better proposals you're not going to do that in real life i just want to do this as a bit of an example because you probably don't need to create two proposals for the same client but what i wanted to show you that's really cool in pandadoc is you can actually map in information that's come from that form so jumping back over to pandadoc you can do things like this right you can say you've got a cover letter and we'd love to work with you because of whatever i'm not suggesting you say exactly this sentence in your proposal i just wanted to show you that you put some square brackets in here like reason right and that will show up in here as something you can replace in the proposal here it is here so as you create more and more of those placeholders they'll appear in here so you can put in data that's come directly from that form so you would start by you know who we're going to send this proposal to so we're going to send it to the person's email address and we're going to map in their first name sorry i just realized i went through that way too quickly but when you open up one of these boxes in zapier you can add data that comes from a previous step so in this case that's the form so that's where you're mapping in you know the person's email address name any information that has come from the form that started this workflow so in this case we've got the email and the name of course but now you can also map in other information if you've got personalized elements of the proposal that you want to add you add them as square brackets in panda dock here and then you can map those straight in here using zapier so that saves you going through and manually building each proposal so that's a really cool way to automate stuff now sometimes you probably still want to go in and just double check everything before you send it so you'll notice up the top here you get the option to send the document yes or no if you choose yes that's going to send that proposal out to the client right away whereas if you say no it's basically just going to create it as a draft so you can go into your pandadox account find it make sure everything's okay and then send it off manually there's nothing wrong with doing those kind of semi-automated tasks like that you don't have to automate everything you can simply create a draft and then create a task in your project management system to go and send it so you'll find that further down in this workflow you know we can say once the form submitted we create the document maybe that's created as a draft and then in your project management system you create a task that's assigned to yourself or someone on your sales team to go and finalize that uh proposal or contract before you send it out the only reason i've got better proposals in here is because i just wanted to show you that this process is similar right so you're only going to have one or the other in your workflow but better proposals works much the same you know you create the company you choose the template of the proposal you want to send to them and you know who you're going to send it to first name last name same kind of deal and the final cool part of proposal and contract automation is that many of the tools you can use to send proposals will actually allow you to accept the deposit right then and there so that's another part of the process right a lot of companies will receive that assigned proposal then send over an invoice for the deposit but what if you can just get the deposit right then and there as soon as the person signs the contract well better proposals for example gives you the option to accept a payment at the end as soon as they accept the proposal so you can say whether it's a fixed amount you know if you want them to pay a thousand dollars or um if you want them to pay a percentage uh of the amount so maybe 50 so that just takes yet another thing off uh you and your team's plate so you don't have to go and send an invoice for the deposit and now i want to move on to client setup which is the final thing i want to go over in this video and it to me it's where the real fun starts so there are a lot of different things you might want to do when someone accepts their proposal right like you might have set them up in your project management system you might want to create a channel for them in slack or whatever chat you're using you might need to send an invoice to them you might need to collect information from them there's tons of different things and a lot of this can be automated so jumping over to zapier again here let's have a look at a few things you can automate so we're using the trigger as proposal signed in better proposals again this can be anything you might want to use a form again like google forms or something that you fill out internally someone on your team fills out to kick off this workflow or you might just want to do it automatically when they've signed their proposal in better proposals or sign their contract in pandadoc or whatever system you're using that's the trigger and then here's a bunch of stuff that we're going to automate when that happens for the first step here i'm simply looking up the person in our crm right so when they've signed the proposal you might only get a little bit of information back so here you can see we've got you know the person's name and email address when they signed the proposal but there isn't a whole lot of information that better proposals is giving us so later on in this process if we want to send them an invoice or we want to send them an email we might need more information that's not included in in this trigger from better proposals so what you can do then is look up the person in your crm so this is a special kind of action in zapier called a search so in this case we're doing a find contact so when you're looking through the action events here you can see we've got typical actions up front but if you scroll all the way down we get to this search section so i've just said we're going to find a contact so that's going to go out to activecampaign and in this case it's going to search based on their email address so we mapping the email address from activecampaign here from better proposals here that's the person that signed the proposal so that's going to go out to activecampaign look up the person and bring back all the information we currently have in our crm so when we test that you can see it's brought back a bunch more information so this would be everything you've got stored in your crm about that person obviously it's going to differ from crm system to other crms you know some people store their clients in a spreadsheet and here you can just do get row from spreadsheet look up the row by the email address and then you'll get all the information from that spreadsheet back ready to use in the other steps in this workflow so i'm just going to quickly go through just a bunch of ideas that you might want to automate here right so at this stage they've signed the proposal and we've gone and got their information from the crm so again you might want to send a message in slack just to notify you and your team that the proposal's been signed congratulations you've got a new client on board it's kind of cool to let the team know that that's happened if you do need to create an invoice you can do that here as well so you might want to map in information from the proposal and that you've got stored in your crm to create an invoice in xero or quickbooks or wav whatever system you are using uh just for your own records or whether you need to send that to your client and i'm going to come back to this one shortly so i'm just going to skip over it for now you could go and create a draft email in your gmail account ready to send to that client so that could be some kind of welcome email or just a whole bunch of information that you normally send to brand new clients whatever they need to know you can create a draft ready for you to go in and just hit send it doesn't have to be a draft too you can change this to send the email directly i just wanted to show you that you've got the option you know if you want to proofread something you know add a little bit of personalization before you go and sends that just because you know automated emails can be a little bit cold so if you just create the draft you can instead go in there make those last few changes and send it off to add that level of personalization then maybe you want to set them up in your project management system so in this example i'm using click up so what we need to do is create a folder for the client we create a task list and that has all the initial tasks we need to go through to set set this new client up so first we're just going to create the folder in click up which is going to be the name of the company that signed the proposal and when you do this it will create the folder and give you an id and click up now let's jump down and go back up so when we're creating the list in click up this is where we map in the folder that we just created so you click in here you change it over to the custom tab here you open that step previously and find the folder id so that's basically going to say create this task list inside that folder that we just created and then the beauty of using something like clickup is that you can create a task list based on a template so you might have all the tasks that you normally need to complete for a client as a template and you just create that there and it'll sign the correct people now again it's going to depend so much on what project management system you're using but this is a pretty common workflow to be able to create a bunch of tasks and assign them to people you know if you're using a tool that doesn't have the ability to create an entire task list at once you can just create one step for every task that needs to be created you set up the whole project from within here in zapier so you could have 10 20 however many tasks you need to create all in a row here in zapier and finally you might want to create some folders in your google drive for that client now i'm going to go through this bit pretty quick if you want to learn more about how to automatically create folders for your clients check out the link below it's jimmy rose dot me slash auto drive but yeah i'll put that in the description below i go through this in more detail but just a quick outline of how this works the first thing is we're going to try and find that client's name in our existing google drive so we're going to look in our client files folder for the name of the client the reason we're doing this is because i don't want to go and create a new folder if this client already exists in our system so the first thing we're going to do is find or create the folder this basically says we look for it if it's there it will just give us the folder id back so we can use this in the workflow but if it doesn't exist yet we tick this box to say create the folder if we don't find it so that's really nice you get that in one action so now that gives us some information back for example we can create a filter here that says we open this one up there's all the information of the folder that we just created and it gives us this one here that says zap data was found so that being false means that it didn't find the folder so if it didn't find it it means it created a new one and if a new one was created then we are going to want to continue on with the rest of this workflow to set up the folder structure however if it was created before we don't want to set up more folders so that's what this filter step here is doing this will only continue the workflow under certain conditions and so we want to say if the zap data was found is false so that means the folder was created and now we'll continue with the workflow and create folders inside this folder so we're going to create a deliverables folder inside the folder we just created so that's where this parent folder comes in you will choose this step here where we created that new folder and we choose the id right so that says create the folder called deliverables inside the folder we just created earlier and and again we might create another one called client files so we're creating this folder again within the one we created earlier and because this is going to be the one we want to share publicly so that our client can access the files in this folder we can also create a step here that adds a file sharing preference so that is the action event here that you choose and what this does is to allow you to set the preference to be anyone on the internet who has the link can view it and that way you can send the link to your clients and they can access all the files in there and if you wanted to take this one step further you could actually move that draft email we had here you could move that further down and then get the link that comes back from this step because when this step runs it gives you the shareable link and then you can stick that straight in the draft email ready to send to your client so i hope you're able to see how all these things chained together uh to be able to create some pretty cool automations this last step here was just an example showing you that you also can copy files in google drive so if you had some initial spreadsheets or files that you need to move into that client folder you can create a bunch of these copy file steps to move those files into the folder they work the exact same way as creating creating folders you're just going to choose the file that you want to copy and where it's going to get copied to and the final thing uh is the one i skipped earlier so sending a request for content in content snare now i'm one of the founders of content snare and we built this product because we found that collecting content collecting documents from clients was one of the biggest roadblocks in many client-facing businesses whether that's because the clients just fail to send information on time or because they try to send it in an email barrage of like 55 emails which you know is not even exaggeration from what i've seen before where they've sent one file as an attachment to every email and before you know it you've got a inbox clogged full of client emails so we have tried to build content snare to alleviate this problem and make it easy for you to get content from clients and of course we have a zapier integration which you can see here this step in the workflow allows us to send a request for information to our clients so basically as soon as they've signed our proposal we're going to send a request for information in content snare we've got a template that in this case it's a website right so we're asking for all the information that we need to build this person's website we've got that set up as a template already in content snare it doesn't have to be a website you know if you are an accounting company you might have an initial questionnaire that asks for bank statements whatever it is that you need to kick off working with that client you have that request set up in content snare ready to go and this action here is just going to say send this template to the client here so we're sending in the email and the name then content snare is going to go out and request that information from the person and it's going to send them email reminders to make sure they stay on top of it and send all the information that you need so all in all this workflow should save you a ton of time just to quickly summarize when the person signed their proposal we're getting their information from the crm we're going to drop a message into our company slack channel send them an invoice request the information we need from them in content snare get an email ready to send them in gmail create them in our project management system and create them in our google drive so yeah a lot of different things going on there and it can take a little while to set up the first time but once you've done it you'll never have to do any of this again because zapier is going to take care of it for you and that's all i hope this video has given you some ideas for something you can automate to start saving some pretty serious time in your business if you've enjoyed this video please like and subscribe and if you'd like to check out content snare for automating the collection of information from your clients go to contentsnare.com and there's a free 14-day trial i'm jimmy from jimmyrose.me and content snare and if you'd like to learn more cool ways to automate your business hit that red subscribe button and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: JimmyRose - Automation & Productivity

Views: 3,451

Keywords: client onboarding automation, agency automation, client onboarding, automate client onboarding, client onboarding system, client onboarding software, onboarding clients, client onboarding process, onboarding new clients, creative agency client onboarding, creative agency client onboarding process, zapier for agency, jimmyrose986

Id: lTIrkdbM-Ww

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021