Transcription
Hey Nick here, and in this video, I'm going to show you how to nail onboarding for an automation client. Let's get into it.
So, first things first, this is just my personal process. It's not the only way to do onboarding for automation, but it's what I did and what I managed to scale to a little over $70,000 a month doing. Uh, take what makes sense to you out of this video and then just throw away whatever is not relevant. Um, and the last thing is there's no gatekeeping. I'm actually going to build some of these onboarding automations in front of you. I'm going to show you everything that I've done, and I'm going to give you just all of my my thoughts behind it. So, this is going to be a pretty chunky, long video, but I anticipate that it'll be a lot of value for a lot of people here that are looking to start their automation career.
Okay, so first things first, the three big problems that onboarding solves. There are more than just three problems that onboarding solves, but here are the three big ones. And here is how I want you to think about onboarding. Essentially, onboarding is a tool that lets you solve the main problem of buyer's remorse. It lets you solve another main problem of client expectations, and it also allows you to essentially like frontload a lot of the BS and inoculate yourself against problems with logistics later on.
What do I mean by logistics? I mean stuff like, um, not having credentials to a software platform. I mean stuff like, you know, not fully outlining the timeline where you're going to be delivering stuff, and then the client ends up like calling you rushed two weeks later being like, "Hey, where's the project? I needed it by today." Essentially, this is another form of leverage. If you just spend a few minutes upfront dealing with this problem now, you will save dozens, if not hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of the next couple years of your career. So, it just makes sense to figure this out like ASAP.
Essentially, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to discuss every problem in detail, just that you guys understand the problem space, um, so that you understand sort of like my own mindset here when I came up with these solutions to these problems. And then I'm actually going to show you how to solve every one of these problems, um, as I mentioned, including building a few simple systems. I'm also going to provide you some templates. I have a few little assets and documents here, as well as just a couple of step-by-step checklists that I personally used quite heavily when I was first starting out. Obvious, the better that you get on the stuff, the less you need these assets in front of you while you're selling, while you're closing, or while you're building stuff. But they tend to really decrease the learning curve, or I guess your ability to get out there, close your first couple of clients, and and get up and running. So, highly encourage you guys, make use of them.
All right, so problem number one that onboarding solves is buyer's remorse. Now, if you're unfamiliar with just sales in general, um, or you know the concept of buyer's remorse, here's basically how it works. Somebody just sent you a bit of money. No matter how good the process that you use to sell them is, the fact that the money is no longer in their wallet, or I guess their bank account nowadays, will create buyer's remorse. There's going to be some sort of remorse, some sort of doubt at the back of their mind, essentially like, "Did I make the right decision partnering with the service provider instead of, you know, other service providers, or instead of doing it myself, or instead of finding some other solution?"
So, if you think about onboarding from sort of like a sales perspective, um, it's an additional tool that you get to use to to streamline, uh, the next steps immediately after the sale. And your goal running an automation agency is to minimize buyer's remorse as soon as humanly possible. Good onboarding helps you do this. Great onboarding helps you turn this buyer's remorse into like buyer gratitude, essentially for being super, uh, super stoked to start with you. And when you have projects that are like that, when people are extremely extraordinarily excited to get started with you, uh, and you also have like very strong and clear expectations put out, uh, those clients tend to be the ones that retain for a very long time, where you start getting to take advantage of the multiple of this business, right? Like your first project with a client, it's a small one, and you're selling automation services, might be like $1, $2, $3K, let's say. If you, um, nail onboarding and nail everything that I'm going to show you in this guide, uh, you essentially have the opportunity to turn that $2 or $3K client into like a $5K a month client for the next year. And that's 20 times more money, if you think about it that way, than you'd be able to get immediately. So, very, very big point of leverage and something that, you know, I, I, I wish more people would think about in advance.
The second big problem is client expectations. And this is like one of the biggest issues just in all service businesses, not necessarily automation. One thing I'll mention here is automation is particularly terrible for it because of the presence of scope creep. Like, um, if you think about it, right? I used to run a content writing company called One Second Copy. And what's really involved in content writing? Well, there's like two or maybe three subservices here. There's the writing, there's the editing, U, maybe there's like the outlining, right? Very simple and easy sort of business model, um, comparatively. Whereas with automation, if you think about that way, there are like 5 million subservices. There's obviously like the scoping, there's like the process flow charting, there's like the Make.com scenario building, there's like API integrations, there's like your ability to like drag and drop modules and know how that specific platform works, but also understand programming principles to be able to like put something together. You have to know like, I don't know, let's say you're working with a Pipedrive, you have to understand Pipedrive, you have to understand Pabbly, you have to understand all this. And honestly, when you have all of this stuff going on, um, client expectations, uh, and their scope can can blow up. And that tends to happen pretty often, especially if you don't really know what you're doing.
So, if you're just getting started with automation, maybe you've got like your first couple of clients, you you'll probably understand what I mean by this intuitively. But having a good onboarding process can inoculate yourself against a lot of that stuff. It's sort of like a vaccine or something against, you know, some some virus. If you just like deal with it right now, you eliminate that from ever being an issue. You eliminate all of the time, energy, and money that you waste, um, later on dealing with it.
Here's the fundamental paradox of client expectations. In order to grow your business, business, you have to win clients. In order to win clients, the simplest and easiest way to do so is to increase your expectations. So, sorry, increase the client expectations. What I mean by that is, sort of the whole process of selling is incentivizing you to blow up this project and make it look even better than it probably really is in reality, right? That's just how sales works. But in order to grow your business, you also have to deliver projects. And if you think about the way that delivering projects, um, works through incentives, it all involves reducing expectations, turning a complicated project into as simple a project as humanly possible. And so, essentially, what you have here is you have two, like, incentives that are butting each other, right? In the head. Um, the first is sort of the sale incentive, which is, "Sell them the dream, sell them this, you know, super big, complex, comprehensive project. We can get as much money as humanly possible out of them." And then the second is, "Sell them something small, something packaged, something manageable that I can do in, you know, a weekend." The issue here is that most people will always do the former a little too well because they want to get the deal, which is totally understandable, and I've done this a million and one times myself. And what that means is, when it comes time to deliver the project, they are screwed, right? Because now it's like, "Oh, okay, um, sure, we might have made an additional $10,000 or something like that, but the cost of that additional $10,000 is now our delivery team has to spend another three weeks creating all these additional systems, right? It's a pain." Yes, excuse me.
What oper, what onboarding does is it provides you the opportunity to frame those expectations ASAP and upfront. And by doing this, it lets you inoculate yourself against dozens of common gotchas. And by gotchas, I mean just like things that most service providers deal with, like, uh, communications being an issue, timeline being an issue, your working style being an issue, not knowing what the win condition of your project is, like, when do you actually know when your project is done? You got to talk about this with the client, otherwise, what are you going to do? Do all the work and then deliver the project, and the client's going to be like, "Well, it's not really done." Right? Why not just do it immediately and save yourself that stress? Basically, what your goal is, um, with client expectations, is to give the client all the info that they need upfront so they never have to bug you later, and so that they'll be satisfied when you deliver what you said that you were going to deliver, uh, which sounds pretty easy, um, you know, theoretically, but in practice, it can be a lot more difficult. And I'll show you how to solve all that.
Now, the last part here is very specific to automation, uh, and it's sort of like logistics. This is what I call automation is a lot of moving parts by nature. At its core, what automation is, is it's like juggling 5,000 different platforms and gluing them all together with an automation platform like Make.com or something like that. And, you know, when you're juggling all these different platforms, you can imagine how, uh, in order to like logistically manage the work, you need to gain access to all of them. You need to deal with two-factor authentication concerns, you need to deal with the right subscription plans, you need to have good credentials, your customer needs to know the credentials, you need to go the credentials, you need to deal with sub-accounts and all that stuff. This is sort of like the, the, the nitty-gritty, dirty part of doing automations. And if you don't have all of this upfront, and I meant to write you, uh, you end up having like a much more difficult time later because then you have to drip this stuff out over time. Every time you ask a client for some information, it'll take them some time to get back to you, sort of like this cat and mouse stuff that a lot of beginners unfortunately fall prey to, especially with 2FA stuff, because you need to like be in the same time zone as your client or whatever at, like, the same time, and they need to be available and all that. And it ends up just like really hurting your professionalism. And not only does it hurt your professionalism, it very negatively impacts your ability to deliver on the schedule that you said that you were going to do.
So, your goal in solving this problem is to minimize friction and get access to everything ASAP. You should not need to ask the client for any sort of credentials, accounts, two-factor auth, authentication codes, change the subscription plan, none of that stuff, um, after the first day, basically, just because it really, really hurts your ability to get that client again in the future. And if you solve all this upfront, the client will think that you're super prepared, you're super professional, and that, like, you know, you know your business really well, uh, which will obviously allow you to retain them super easily later on.
All right, so how do you actually solve these three problems? Well, each of these three problems, um, I solved in three ways. So, the first, buyer's remorse, I solve by, by basically front-loading the dopamine and front-loading, um, notifications, front-loading gratitude, and basically just filling up their email inbox as quickly as possible after they make the payment, um, so that they think that, essentially, the perception of process, sorry, perception of progress. And I'll show you how to do each of these three in a moment, and I'll build out systems for them as well.
The second, to to manage client expectations, um, there are three solutions here. The first is that you need to define your communication style, as well as the frequency with which you will be communicating UPF front. The second is you need to set a timeline, which is basically how long every step will take and what sort of deliverable you have at every step. And the third is you need to define the win condition. The win condition, you know, sounds super fancy, but it's basically just like, "Hey, how are we going to know when our project is done?" Right? Like, if I'm delivering you a lead generation system, how do I actually know that that lead generation system is finished and I can like take a step back? Um, when do we start on my retainer, for instance? Like, like, what's the next step after the project is done?
The problem number three, which is the logistics and the moving parts and all that stuff, you solve them in three ways. The first is you itemize all the platforms and you basically provide them a list that they can use in order to sign up to them for you. The second is that you have an onboarding call that just front-loads all of the that you otherwise would have to drip out over time. And, you know, tons of people have tried to do the the logistics step, uh, through forms and whatnot. They're like, "Oh, well, I got to automate this because I'm an automation engineer." But you really shouldn't. This is like the highest leverage point of you being in front of your client. And then, um, you can use secure credential management, essentially, to to solve the problem of password sharing and and all that fun stuff.
So, yeah, we're going to go into detail and build all of them, um, right now.
So, first and foremost, let's talk a little bit about, um, the first solution here, which is transactional alerts. This is going to sound really simple and really basic for a lot of people, but if you pay somebody and you pay somebody a fair amount of money, let's say $4,000 or something like that, and you don't receive, like, a receipt of that purchase, um, basically immediately, you're going to have a very, very bad taste in your mouth, and that buyer's remorse is going to sort of snowball into, uh, like, "Who the hell am I working with here? Is this person professional? Like, like, what's going on?" Basically, there needs to be some type of transactional alert or notification immediately after the person pays you all this money, and they just need to have, like, a receipt for it.
So, um, this depends on your payment processor. A lot of payment processors do this automatically. Thankfully, in Stripe, uh, which is the payment processor that I personally use and that I recommend for a lot of people, uh, you need to specifically go into customer emails, enable receipts, um, and then, you know, have those receipts sent basically immediately after the the purchase is done. So, what you would do, um, here if you're doing this for yourself is you'd have to open up the Stripe homepage and then go to settings up here in the top right, and then go to business, and then you'd have to go more, uh, customer emails, I believe, and then under payments, you'll have to go successful payments and turn that on. And essentially, what this is going to do is, uh, every time that somebody sends you, or sorry, every time you send somebody money, you're going to get something that looks a little bit like this, right over here. Um, so every time, sorry, you send somebody money, you get a receipt. Um, and obviously, make sure that the experience that they have when they get a receipt from you is as high brow as possible. Make sure that you've done all, like, the Stripe BS of, like, adding your logo and making it look all pretty, having your brand colors, whatever your payment processor is, obviously, this will differ. Um, but I personally always recommend, um, anybody in my community or anybody watching my videos, just to, like, use Stripe. It's super simple, it's very well supported, and it's super integratable, which, as an automation specialist, makes a lot of sense.
So, you're going to want something like this, um, basically to happen within 30 seconds of somebody working with you or choosing to work with you or paying you money. And this is just sort of like a quick little hit. It's like, "Yeah, you did make that payment, um, and, you know, all of the logistical stuff is like taken care of on our end. Don't worry, your receipt's here. We're professional about it." I know it sounds super simple, but you'd be surprised at how many people don't do this.
All right, the next thing I want to talk about is gratitude. What do I mean by gratitude? Well, I mean expressing sincere gratitude to your clients for choosing to spend time, energy, and money with you. I know this sounds simple again, but turns out that most things in the agency space are very simple. You can go very far simply by remembering to thank your client for doing things for you. What do I mean by this? Uh, every time a client sends me a message, I, uh, I thank them for reaching out. Every time they follow up with me after I haven't heard from them for a while, I thank them for doing so. Every time I jump on a call with them, I thank them. Every time I get a payment from them, I thank them. This makes you look extremely professional. But not only that, I've worked with enough clients at this point in my life to definitively be able to say that the situations in which I've consistently expressed gratitude for being able to work with somebody, um, tend to yield me substantially higher ROIs. Like, our relationships go way, way further. And I'm still not 100% sure if it's just the professionalism or if it's just the fact that, you know, I, I'm just like, I'm acting like a human being when I do it, and people tend to pick up on that and think that I'm a lot more genuine. But it works.
Now, the great news about gratitude is, if you are truly gracious, so you can build a very simple system that just watches events or uses a webhook, and when you receive a new payment transaction notification, uh, you can just send an email, uh, that's like, you know, like a one, sort of, I don't know, three or four-line email, which I'll show you in a second, uh, that just thanks them. And you can do it within about five or five or so minutes of receiving the payment. And by doing it this way, um, it tends to be, it tends to seem a lot more like handwritten and customized and that sort of deal, uh, which obviously customers or clients tend to like a lot more. And that tends to seem just a lot, you know, a lot more genuine. So, again, the goal is basically, and I do this in separate emails, but the goal is we want to provide people the perception of like customized, high-quality care. And I actually send them a bespoke email with a thank you on it, in addition to the receipt. And here's what my personal one usually looks like. I mean, you know, it's evolved over time, and I used to do all the stuff manually, but, you know, now I, now I automate the vast majority of it. It's just, "Hey Nick, thanks for taking care of that invoice so promptly. I'm beyond happy that we get the chance to work together and excited to nail this for you. I'll send you some onboarding instructions plus a calendar in a moment, and we can then book a call to kick off our project. Looking forward to chatting, and I appreciate your business."
So, that's it. Doesn't have to be super magical. You're literally texting, or you're sending somebody an email as if you would text them, thanking them for doing something for you. And on a more general note, I find that that's just the best way to proceed with all client communications. Just proceed with them like you're texting a friend of yours, because, um, clients tend to pick up on that and treat that as substantially more genuine than what a lot of other people do, which is they write these big, fancy, long email sequences that just seem like, uh, just seem like you are treating them like another cog in in in your machine, if that makes sense. But yeah, so my goal is, I want them to get a bunch of emails simultaneously to minimize buyer's remorse, to just make it feel like shit's happening, like they just gave me their money, I want to give them something too. And the number one thing that you can give a client is just the impression of, of progress, and things are moving in the direction that they want them to.
And then the last thing is indeed that perception of progress. And what do I mean by this? I really just mean, like, next steps. Um, now that they paid, it's essential that you provide the perception that you are getting their project started, like immediately, like within five minutes of them getting paid. If you do this, the clients that you provide the impression of progress within five minutes are going to go much, much farther for you than the clients that you don't do this for. I don't know, like several hours or days. As mentioned previously, tons of situations where I've hired a service provider and I haven't heard back from them for like 48 hours. Frankly, if I'm being honest, I think that sort of thing is unacceptable, especially given that, like, basically everybody on planet Earth has hired a service provider for something at some point, and so they at least understand how it feels from the other point of view. The fact that, you know, a lot of these business owners can't put that together, I think it's the primary reason why you can crush it in this industry so easily.
So, yeah, um, again, we can build a very simple system and we can have the system just watch events or use a webhook and then send an email from you. I'll do that right now in a second, um, and then I would encourage it, you do this within five minutes. At this point, they've received three or four emails in a very short period of time, and which makes them feel really good. It also makes them feel like you're on top of things, you have a very defined, streamlined process for this, and they've done this multiple times before, which eliminates a lot of, like, the perceived risk of working with service providers and is basically the most straight-line way of maximizing the, uh, the customer experience.
But okay, how do you actually build this out? Super simple and super easy. Um, I personally do this in Make.com, an automation tool that, uh, I'm quite, uh, I mean, popularize a little bit, but I'm definitely famous for, like, the Make.com stuff, not the Zapier stuff or the n8n stuff. If you are using another automation tool, it's very simple. Just follow along, sort of the process logic that I'm doing here. We're going to pretend that there is some event that is occurring, U, maybe some type of booking. And then, uh, what do we do when we, uh, receive that booking? Well, if you have a CRM or something like that, you're going to have to pull data from the CRM. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to set a bunch of variables, and I'm basically going to pretend that I'm pulling them from my CRM. So, one will be like, "Name," we'll just say Nick. We'll say, "Email address," we'll say my email address right over here, nick@leftclick.com. And then we just use the mail module here to send an email. You will create a connection up at the top right-hand corner, um, in Make.com, and you'll use that to sort of, um, this will be your "from" email. And then the "to" email, I'm just going to map this as the email address. The subject line, I'm just going to use "Thank You and Welcome Aboard." And I'm going to do it in HTML, but you don't necessarily have to. You could do this in a plain text if you wanted to. The way that you do it in HTML is HTML uses, um, some tags, specifically this one tag called BR. And so, basically, every time you do a BR, it's a new line. So, I'm doing two BRS between every, um, piece of text here, so that there's two new lines between them. And then between this one, I'll do one. So, when, you know, somebody receives this email, well, we can actually test this right now. When I run this module, and then I type in the email address, and I think this is going to work, I mean, I am sending this to myself, so maybe there'll be an issue of some kind. Oh, sorry, I need to reauthorize my connection. Just give me one second. We'll just add a new one, call it Google, and we'll go, nick@leftclick.com. We'll go July 19th, 2024. This is what you have to do if you've never set it up before. It'll, um, open another window that allows you to select your Gmail account. And once you connect to the two, it'll verify. Once it's verified, this little button will go purple. Then you can go ahead and send it. And I think you can send it to yourself. Not entirely sure. Yeah, you can. Okay, great. Um, and, you know, at this point, I've just automated this, this email. Um, the benefit here is, you know, the way that I've written this copy just seems very incidental and it seems very, like, "Hey, how's it going? I totally just wrote this myself," which is great. Um, you can imagine how you could do the exact same thing for our other piece of copy. And, what else you could do is you could add a little bit of a sleep module, and you can say that, I don't, I want to delay, let's say, 240 seconds. So, I want to delay four minutes, basically. And this is going to be, "Wait four minutes." I'm going to call this, "Grab data from CRM." Right? If you're using ClickUp or Monday or Pipedrive or whatever, you would just use like the retrieve record, um, module here. And then what we want to do is we need to use a router, uh, because we just want to send this to two places. So, this is going to be "Route number one," and this is going to be "Route number two." This is going to be "Send thank you email," and then this one's going to be "Send onboarding email." And then all I'm going to do is I'll go over to next steps and then I'm just going to change, um, the email copy so that instead of what I had before, now I have this. And because I'm going to be doing two BRS in a row, I'm just going to copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. And then, uh, because it's HTML, if you want to embed a link, you need to use this format, this A tag with an ending A tag, and this needs to go to where you want it to go. I'm just going to pretend this is going to this calendar right over here, which is my like, discovery sales call calendar. Um, and the last thing is I'm just going to write an email here, call it "Next Steps." Make sure that, you know, the connection is correct and everything. This looks good to me. Let me just make this a little sexier. And then what I'm also going to do is I'm going to add one more sleep here so that when I do ultimately send the email, um, there's some, like, offset between the first one up here and then the second one over here. Make will run these, um, one after another. So it'll start up here and then it'll go down here afterwards. So, let's say it'll take me another three minutes or so to to write the email or something, hypothetically. And now what'll happen is, um, we'll grab the data from the CRM when the new event comes in. We'll wait four minutes. We'll then send the first email. And then we'll go into the second route, wait another, uh, what's this, three minutes, and send the second email. Now, just for testing purposes, I'm just going to turn the delay here to one because I don't actually want to wait that long. And then, uh, I'm going to pretend that there's no event here, and I'm just initiating the flow from this. But we'll just call this "Onboarding Emails." I'm just going to give this thing a little run. We're going to send that first email, going to wait three minutes, send the other email. If we go back, you'll see that essentially we've replicated the same event, or the same idea that we had previously, where they'll get a receipt, um, you know, with a Stripe transaction, and then they'll get a thank you and welcome aboard, and they'll get a next steps email, uh, which is very, very simple, as you can see. This is really one of those automations that I should you not, it takes you like less than five minutes to set up. And then it's one of those automations that if you spend that five minutes to set it up, this will make you thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars over the course of the next 12 months, simply for having the foresight to put that infrastructure in place. Obviously, you're going to have to connect the beginning part here with this webhook to your payment processor. So that's something that I'm leaving out because I don't know what payment processor you're using. If you're using, um, Stripe here, you would go to the Stripe module, go to the watch events module, and then you have to configure it to watch payment intent events, essentially, whatever the payment, uh, that you're that you're getting. If you're using something like, I don't know, QuickBooks, hypothetically, um, you could watch a new event, you know, anytime an invoice is sent or received, you could, you know, have that run a variety of different ways to do it. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to export this blueprint and I'm just going to, um, use this in my materials as sort of like, sort of like sales materials, um, sorry, sort of like as a, as a lead magnet. And then I'm going to put this inside of the YouTube video so that you guys can just, you know, copy and paste this if you need to.
All right, so that's for that's it for gratitude and perception of progress. Um, at this point, as I mentioned, they've received three or four emails very quickly, and it's just super straightforward and easy for them to get started, um, which is nice.
The second major problem, as I mentioned before, is client expectations. Now, client expectations, unfortunately, in the automation world, are very, very difficult to get right. And, and I mean, if you haven't done a lot of projects before, you will basically always screw this up. The simplest way to make some serious progress, you know, on this problem is just to spend like two minutes thinking about how much you want to communicate and how you want to be communicated with in a client relationship. Most agencies and service providers will never even spend like two minutes just thinking about this, and it's why, you know, they're very, um, they, they tend to struggle with scaling their businesses and doing good things. But as I mentioned here, it's the simplest lever you could pull to eliminate 90% plus of problems. All you're doing is you're telling the client, "Hey, this is how often I'm going to communicate with you. This is where I'm going to communicate with you. For instance, hey, I'll be available 12:00 until 2:00 PM PT on Slack every day. If you have any questions, and you're going to get progress updates on Tuesdays and Fridays EOD. Hey, I'm going to send you an email at the end of the day every day, Monday to Friday, just going to summarize where we're at, if I have any blockers, if I need your help on something, or whatever, we'll deal with it then. And the goal here is just to ensure we consistently make progress towards your delivery."
There are dozens of more, uh, dozens more examples that you could pick from. I'm just choosing a couple of random ones, uh, that you can use as inspiration, whether you're Slack, whether they prefer email, how some of them might even prefer a call, and it's really up to you to determine whether or not that's something that you're willing to do. So, I acknowledge here that there is an optimal communication style and probably an optimal communication frequency, um, but you can probably deliver more than 90% of the results here by literally just telling them how often you're going to communicate with them and then just sticking with it. So, maybe you communicate with them once a month or something, I don't know. If you just tell them you're going to communicate them once a month, and then you give them that expectation, and then you hold to your expectation, um, you're going to do much better than somebody that communicates with somebody 30 times a month, but they never really tell them when and why they're doing it.
My own personal SOP for this, um, in the past, I did once per week, and I thought once per week was good because it would, you know, allow me to be very autonomous and I wouldn't have to communicate with them often, and I don't really like jumping on all these silly calls just to give progress updates and that sort of deal. But I did occasionally run into a few issues, and the specific issues where clients felt like I wasn't keeping them in the loop, they tended to wonder when things were going to be delivered, um, even though I told them before, and essentially they just sort of forgot about me. And it led to a couple of client blow-ups from every now and then. It was nothing major, but, you know, if we're trying to be as efficient as performant as possible, obviously that's something that I could have changed, right? So, now what I'm doing is two times per week, and I give them a defined Slack availability where they can expect me to respond to them within 10 or 15 minutes, um, and that tends to be, you know, about an hour or two-hour slot. What I do is I just batch all of my clients for that hour or two-hour slot, and then I just know, "Okay, like, I got to be by the computer for, you know, two hours, 12:00 to 2:00 PM PT, for instance." In practice, clients will rarely ask me questions, and usually what I do is I just work on other during that time anyway, and I'm just like, "By my computer." So, that adds a ton of value, this defined Slack availability, although obviously, you know, you have to make sure that your client is the type of client that wants to work on Slack a lot. A lot of clients don't like Slack, a lot of clients use Teams instead, or they use email or whatever. So, just make sure whatever your offer is, is sustainable, essentially.
Okay, problem number two, um, that you can easily eliminate is kind of the stress at how the project is proceeding and when the project will be completed. And the simplest and easiest way to do this is to spend another two minutes upfront just setting the timeline. As most of us probably unfortunately know, the vast majority of projects that any service provider will ever do for any client, uh, will be behind schedule. Their project timelines are almost always optimistic, and as a result, uh, there's always some things that they didn't really account for that, uh, crop up during the project. They end up being late. For simpler automation projects, especially some of the ones like what I was just showing you back here, I mean, this is like what, not even 10 modules here, it took me five minutes. It's absolutely ridiculous that you would be behind schedule for something like that. Like, that is something that you should be able to do in a few minutes. You probably shouldn't do it in a few minutes because you do want the client to feel as if there was some work that goes into it, of course, we need some social, you know, we need some nuance here. U, but it's not something that, you know, you should set a timeline for three weeks for and then deliver in five, right? You can realistically do most of the work that you're going to be demanded in a few hours if you're smart about it, and if you work with software platforms that you know, and if you take advantage of templates like I've talked about in previous videos.
So, one of the simplest ways to retain your automation clients and to basically multiply your revenue is to set a reasonably generous schedule, not super generous, but reasonably generous, and then just exceed the expectations by delivering ahead of it. So, for instance, if you wanted to set up some big email system, let's say we had like 10 of these scenarios or something, hypothetically, 10 times five minutes takes me about an hour to do. I'd probably set like a three to five-day turnaround time for that, and then I'd deliver it by like the second day or something, and I'd say, "Hey, how's it going? You know, had a lot of additional time I wanted to make sure that we could deal, that I could handle this and give it to you ahead of schedule to see if there's any more work that you needed or something like that." Very, very simple thing to do, but you'd be surprised at how much money that it leaves on the table when you don't do it.
Okay, another thing is, this doesn't have to be complicated. I give a quick example here of some AI scenario where you're doing some prompt engineering. July 19th to 22nd, I'm doing prompt engineering. July 23rd to 26th, I'm doing the Make.com scenarios. July 27th to 30th, I'm doing testing and delivery. And then when you deliver your final project on July 27th, as opposed to 30th, the client will be really impressed, right? I give you a quick example of just some little snippets that you can write to them, um, in order to to drop that.
The last thing that you could solve very easily with onboarding is the win condition. And what I mean by win condition is, I mean the set of conditions that a client needs to see before they consider the project completed and done. So, a lot of the time, we'll never just have that conversation. And if you think about it, it's a very logical conversation. "Hey, when am I going to be done? Like, what sorts of boxes do I need to check before our project is over?" The problem with not doing this is a lot of the time, the client's internal win conditions will be different from your win conditions. And so you will deliver a project that you think is done, and that you know delivers the win condition, and they'll be like, "Huh, I wonder why I didn't deliver X, Y, and Z." "Hey man, when are you going to do X, Y, and Z?" Now you're doing more work than you were initially banking on, the client is unhappy, and this is just a sort of way that, you know, um, um, projects lead to unfortunately.
A quick example of this is, you know, a lot of the guys in my community right now are starting to sell lead generation projects because I've shown, um, you know, I've provided ample amount of material showing people how to sell lead generation projects, and it's quite an easy and productive offer. But if you are selling a lead generation project, what is, what are you actually giving to the client? Like, what are they actually getting at the end of it? They're not just getting leads, right? Your deliverable is a lot more specific than leads. Your deliverable is hypothetically, on July 30th, you will have a completed Airtable that automatically populates with new positive responses from your Smart Lead campaign. Your campaign will operate Monday to Friday from 7:00 to 7:00 using our best-in-class copywriting formula. And you'll also get Slack notifications every time a new one comes in to minimize the response time. You'll get an SOP sheet that you can use yourself or to hire an outreach manager to do the response management for you. And I'm also going to give you a video walking you through the system from start to finish. Okay, that is a perfect example of a win condition. If you check all of those boxes, the project is completed. If you leave some of those boxes unchecked, your end of the bargain is still not completed. Just have that conversation with the client ahead of time. And if you do, the vast majority of the problems that most other service providers have, like with repeat revisions over and over and over again, or with client scope creep going out of control, they're not going to be a problem for you. And all of the other people that are in your industry are going to be looking at you being like, "How the hell does that guy deal with these super unscop difficult projects? I have no idea what sort of magic witchcraft he's doing," because, you know, I get a lot of people asking me that.
Okay, so that is the second problem, which is client expectations. Right? First problem was, um, buyer's remorse. Second problem is client expectations. The third problem is, uh, the logistics, and basically how do we deal with all the 5 million moving parts that automation contains? Well, there are three very simple ways to do so. The first is by prepping for. So, what I always do is I always do an onboarding call. And I realized now, I probably should have had this before this, but, anyway, I normally do an onboarding call. And, you know, that's why the person books, uh, an event in the calendar link that I sent over, right? And on that onboarding call, I will have them sign up to all the platforms that I need them to sign up for in order to do the job and make sure that it's all done. And the simplest way to streamline that onboarding call is simply to itemize all of the platforms that they're going to need access to in advance and then build them a list of very simple instructions they can follow on that onboarding call in order to sign up for all those platforms that they need. You can send this in the above email, like, if you wanted to create a PDF and, like, you know, attach something, you could do that. But either way, you just need to know what they, they need to know what they need to do in order to make your onboarding call success. It's sort of like the win condition of the onboarding call, right?
A quick example of what I mean by itemized platforms is literally just, let's say they need to sign up for Make.com. It's super simple. This might take you like 15 minutes to put together for all platforms. You just give them instructions on how to get going. "Hey, head to this thing, sign up with this for hosting region, select us, click register, right? A, B, C, D, E, F, G." The fact that you have all this preferred will make a very big impression on the clients, and they'll tend to think that you know, you've done this again, tons of times before, and you know, you're very on top of your. It'll also just make it very easy for them and, um, make the onboarding call a lot less, basically, you're going to mitigate a lot of friction on onboarding calls.
There's also some situations where the client has signed up to a platform on their own using OAuth or similar, meaning they'll have two-factor authentication. And if you guys have built any automation projects up until now, you'll know two-factor authentication is like the bane of an automation engineer's existence. It's freaking terrible, uh, because, you know, in order to bypass it, you need to, the client needs to get a text message, and they need to send you the response, and then you need to plug that response in within a certain amount of time. If they don't do it within a certain amount of time, the code is wrong, so it resends it, and it's just very difficult to coordinate, you know, when that occurs. Some platforms also require you to do this.
multiple times, which can be a massive pain in the ass. And, uh, generally speaking, you know, that's really where like a lot of the value in an onboarding call comes from because you just get to sidestep all, like, the logistical [double line break] that typically plagues most automation specialists. The other edge case here on onboarding calls is clients don't understand the underlying technologies and they struggle with things like giving you access with the username and password, giving you credentials, that sort of thing. So, um, you know, having an onboarding call where you are just physically present and you screen share with them essentially, uh, solves so much of this because now you can just, like, guide them through, "Hey, you don't remember your password for that? Well, let's see here. Do you mind sharing your screen? Okay, great. Why don't you click on this button and then click on that button and then go there?" Right? Or if it's two-factor authentication, "H okay, you just got a text message. All right, that makes sense. Yeah, sure. What's the code?" And then you just deal with it right then and there. This usually takes about 15 minutes. And the benefit to this that not a lot of people talk about is it lets them feel in control of their data and their security. Like a lot of automation specialists, um, will just sign up to all the platforms for them. That's is what I used to do, uh, because it just, you know, moved me a lot faster, if I'm honest. But by doing this, I've noticed the clients just tend to respect our relationship a lot more. They tend to realize and understand the value that I'm providing because to a lot of them, like, all this tech stuff is super intimidating, right? And then it also makes them feel a little bit more secure, which is nice. They're not like sending their credentials and plain text over email or something. Um, they're doing it, you know, directly through, um, through through like a call, and I'm there to see it, uh, which is quite nice. And, you know, again, it's not necessarily the most secure thing, it's just we're providing the impression of security, which to the client is the thing that matters the most. By the end of the onboarding call, you'll have everything that you need in order to finish the project, and the client is also going to be really excited to kick off. But the big question is, obviously, Nick, what the hell is the onboarding call? And don't worry, I put together a lovely template for you that I used. I used to use in basically every onboarding call. Now, I don't actually really use this template anymore just because of, like, memorized all these steps, um, and I sort of have fun with it, um, as needed. But let me just jump over here. This is what the template looks like. It's very simple and very straightforward, as you can tell. Literally just, "Hey, thank you very much for joining." So we're, you know, giving them some gratitude. And then I just, um, explained to them the schedule of the call and, like, what I'm going to be doing and why I'm doing it. So, um, I'll always just say, "Hey, so thanks so much for jumping on the call. Uh, you know, the biggest issue in this space, and I work with dozens of people, hundreds of people on projects at this point, is logistics. Um, if you've ever had a project on automation, you'll know that two-factor authentication is a massive pain in the ass, passwords are a massive pain in the ass. All of this stuff ends up being a massive nightmare and can really prevent projects from moving forward. So I just sidestep all that by front-loading the onboarding call, and, uh, it's just the most effective and simplest way I found of doing this." So that makes sense? Everybody's like, "Yeah, of course." And then, you know, I outline the call by giving them my roadmap. What are we going to do in the next 20 minutes? Well, first, we're going to cover timelines. I'm going to show you, or, uh, we're going to talk about how best to stay in touch with each other. What you can expect, basically, at every part of the project, and that sort of deal. Then we're going to sign up to all the platforms listed. I've already prepared a bunch of detailed instructions, which I just sent you in the chat. Um, this will enable you to literally just go from top to bottom, sign up to all these platforms, and then I'll have access before the end of the call. And then if any of these platforms require two-factor authentication, I'll be able to, like, request a code immediately right in front of you. You'll get it on your phone, and you can just tell me what the code is. That way, I don't need to, like, I don't know, borrow you for 15 minutes randomly at 8:00 AM on a Tuesday, right? We can just streamline all of that right now. Um, the last thing we'll do is we'll just have a little Q&A period. And if you have any questions that you've been wondering about, um, before we actually start the project, I can just answer them then. Does that make sense? Great. All right, let's get started. And you just proceed from top to bottom. It's a very simple process. Of course, and there are better onboarding procedures out there, to be sure. But this is one that I've used, and it's one that worked for me. From there, all you have to do is actually go out there and do the freaking project, which is obviously the more complicated part. But the good news is, you have everything that you need in order to thrive. Um, at this point, you have every platform access, piece of credential, two-factor authentication, you have all that stuff taken care of. The client also understands the timeline. They have great expectations in place for when you're going to be communicating with, and you've essentially inoculated yourself against the major issues in providing services. Right. On the good onboarding process, uh, makes for a good project. And ever since I started implementing, like, a consistent onboarding, I found that the value of my projects and, like, the, I guess, uh, retention rate on the clients that I get, especially initially because I usually do, like, a small one-time project to start, and I do, like, a repeated, um, retainer afterwards, is like five or 10 times higher. It's stupid. Last thing I'm going to say to this before I jump off here is that you can do this with yourself or with a small team. You don't have to do this with, like, a big giant, like, you don't need a giant team in order to do onboarding, right? One, uh, unfortunate thing that I've seen a couple of companies do is for whatever reason, like, I was actually just working at a company that did this, like, two months ago. They had a team of, uh, maybe six or seven people, and every time they onboard a new client, they got all of their people on the call to, like, say, "Hey, hello, how's it going? Thank you very much for signing up." And I kind of get the idea of this, but, uh, it was, it was massive overkill. You don't need to do this at all. As you saw earlier, you can do the automations in less than five minutes, and that's including the receipts. Um, all you have to do is, you know, you can use some of my copy, borrow it if you want, or you can just come up with your own. Um, all you need to do is just think for another 15 minutes about how best to define your win conditions, how best to set a timeline, and how best to define your comms and frequency. That's something that all of us here can, uh, can do within a few minutes, which is quite nice. And then, uh, you know, you just follow a simple onboarding call SOP. Do it a couple times, and you'll know, like, the back of your hand by the third or fourth. So it's very, very simple and very straightforward. And automation is the leverage here. Um, you know, this isn't something that requires really more than just a few, maybe an hour of thought max. As I mentioned a couple times throughout the call, onboarding just provides a lift to everything else: your attention, your relationship, the ticket sizes that you can charge, and that sort of thing. Um, and the number one thing that it's actually done for me that I did not include here is it's really improved my reputation. This is a much smaller market and a smaller world than most people think. I mean, technically, you know, if you're in automation, you can work with anybody because you're just improving their margins, and you're improving their top line, and increasing the efficiency of their processes, and that sort of thing. But I find in practice, my name gets around quite a lot more, and it has been not just because of this YouTube channel, um, but because of just the way that I work with clients. So if you're looking for a type of business where, you know, you have, like, very high referral rate, you know, for every one client you, uh, 10 clients you get, they refer you to an average of five or something like that, the best way to do it is with a very strong onboarding process, um, and just setting yourself up for success. If you guys want something more hands-on, uh, just check the bio. I have a community, and also have a website where I'm going to be starting to, uh, provide resources, uh, at cost to people that want to shave several hours off of the process of building, like, a CRM for a specific industry or doing a specific template or getting a cold email system up and running, that sort of deal. Otherwise, I sincerely wish you the best, best of luck, and I hope that everything that I've talked about in this video made sense. Again, this is just one way that you can do it, but I hope that I provided you guys the knowledge so that it's not that I'm just, like, talking at you and telling you to do it this way, it's that you guys understand why this is being done. That's the sort of thing that will give you guys autonomy and agency over being able to create this process for yourself, and maybe even improving on my process too. If you guys have any questions, feel free to drop them down below as comments. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, do all that fun YouTube stuff. I'll catch you all in the next video. Thanks so much.