After Someone Says Yes

The moment a lead says yes to engage your services, that is when they are more enthusiastic and more nervous than they will be at any other point in the relationship.

When businesses win a new client, you usually start preparing contracts, invoices, and send over the PDFs asking for signatures. Then the client goes quiet for a week. Note: you will see this same pattern when you send a proposal to a lead after your discovery call.

What we want to cover here is the customer experience that sits after the enquiry, and businesses like yours assume that once an enquiry has been received the customer no longer comes back to the website. That is far from the truth, and businesses don't plan for it.

Think about what a new client needs in their first week of saying "yes". They need to know you are committed, that they will get what they have engaged you for, that they have not made a mistake, and that they are not going to have to chase you. They need to know what happens next and when. They need to know what sort of information, files, access, and approvals they need to give you. They need somewhere to look when they have forgotten what they had agreed to.

Almost all of that is currently handled by email, over the phone, by hand, by you.

That is expensive. It costs you time, which is obvious, but it also costs quality, because a manual process is inconsistent. A client who has a scrappy first fortnight of getting bombarded with emails, PDF files, invoices, and so on has already begun revising their opinion of you downwards, regardless of how good the eventual work is. You can get your website to carry more of this than businesses realise.

Structured kick-off. Instead of an email that says "can you send through everything you have", a short guided process that asks for what you need, in order, with examples, and does not let somebody submit a document in the wrong format.

Real-time status. A portal where clients can see where things are, what is with them, what is with you, what is next. This is far superior to a regular status email, because the client can check it at 10pm without asking you.

Knowledge base. Every proposal, invoice, brief, and approval in one location. Businesses can use a shared folder, which is a fine and good starting point. Over time though, as you get more clients, you need to consider security, access, and permissions to those assets.

Online delivery pack. When the work is finished, what does the client end up holding, and where? Access to your products, documentation, training videos, how-to guides, the ability to change things themselves, and so on. Businesses that make this easy for clients to go back to time and time again are, in our opinion, more likely to get referred, because their clients can describe what they got when speaking to another prospective customer.

Caveat: the above only works once you have a certain volume and repeated pattern of how work is done across your business. If you are starting out with 4 to 7 clients in year one, then email and phone calls are the way to go. Explore the above once you need scale and are onboarding 3 to 4 clients a month.