This is the third episode of the Client Experience Series! Now that you’ve mapped out your client experience, it’s time to turn those steps into workflows inside your CRM. In this episode, I’m breaking down how to structure your workflows into phases, determine what should happen automatically versus manually, and set up the triggers that keep everything running smoothly. If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode on mapping your client experience, go back and give it a listen first!
This is part 3 of a 4-part Client Experience Series!
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Find it Quickly:
01:19 – Breaking Your Client Experience into Phases
02:32 – The Four Essential Workflows
04:21 – How to Assign Workflow Triggers
05:13 – Automate vs. Manual Steps
06:11 – Does It Need a Personal Touch?
07:07 – Example: Building an Inquiry Workflow
10:26 – Creating a Workflow Recipe
12:41 – Testing Your Workflows
13:56 – Final Thoughts & Next Steps
Mentioned in this Episode
Ep. 195 – A Breakdown of My Audit Process
Ep. 196 – How to Begin Mapping Your Client Experience
Review the Transcript:
Hello. Hello. And welcome back to another solo episode of business first creatives podcast. Now, today is part three in a four part series on creating the ultimate client experience. If you haven’t listened to episodes one and two, I highly recommend that you go, you download those episodes and then you come back to this episode.
But bare minimum, you should listen to episode two where we mapped out your entire client experience before you attempt to tackle the tasks that we are going to be talking about in today’s episode.
So after last week’s episode, you should have your entire client experience mapped out. If you haven’t pause and go do that first because we can’t automate chaos and it’s way easier to start this process with a list of what you want to do, before you start building the individual workflow steps.
So if you’ve got that in front of you, what we are going to do now is literally divide our all of those steps into different phases and each one of those phases is going to become its own workflow. I am a big believer that your workflows should be small and mighty and that you shouldn’t use one very long workflow in order to run your business.
The problem comes in when you are mid workflow, and you decide that something needs to change. Maybe they decide to go a different direction. Maybe they initially inquired about a maternity session, but then they decided to book a newborn session. Like there are a lot of different things that could change in between the inquiry and the delivery.
And so you want to make sure that at each step you have the opportunity to choose a workflow that will best serve you and your client. I have talked ad nauseum about my favorite four workflows that every photographer and creative entrepreneur should use in their business. And just in case you haven’t heard that podcast episode, I’m going to give you a very quick refresher.
The first one is your inquiry process. The second one is your booking process. The third is your onboarding processes, including the service. And then the fourth is your offboarding, including asking for those amazing client testimonials that you want.
Now, I’m not saying that you have to use those four phases. In fact, if you’re HoneyBook, I now recommend that you combine your inquiry and your booking workflows, because the new automation builder 2. 0, the one that has conditional logic has made this way easier to do . My four previously recommended workflows will not work for everyone, and they’re not the best fit for everyone.
But now that you have laid out your entire client experience, you are in the best position to divide all of that information up into phases that make total sense for your business. Because the phases are going to be the backbones of your workflow and for each one of these workflows, you are going to be able to decide whether that workflow is going to trigger automatically, or if it’s going to need to be started manually by you.
Okay, so client experience, you now have it divided into the four phases. Now I will say when you outlined your client experience, if you did not indicate how that client was going to come into your CRM, there might be a trigger in action that you are missing. So, for example, if when you mapped out your client experience, you didn’t include that client filling out your contact form for your website, that is actually going to be the very first step in your client experience.
And when they fill out that contact form, the very first inquiry workflow is going to start inside of their project. Okay. So for each phase, I want you to ask yourself What triggers the next action? So i’ve already hinted that you are going to start your inquiry workflow when someone completes your contact form or if you are someone who requires consultation calls, you could always have the option of embedding a scheduler directly on your website and having the first step that they take be to schedule that consultation call.
The second question that I want you to ask yourself is, does it need to happen automatically? Not every single action inside of your workflow will happen automatically. There are going to be times where you are going to want to add an approval button so that you have control over whether or not that action is started.
We also have conditional actions inside of both the Absado and HoneyBook, if you have Automations 2. 0, where you will be able to trigger something automatically based on an action that the client has taken. This is where those super awesome, if form not completed, Actions inside. This is where those if form not completed triggers inside of Dubsado that make my heart so happy will work.
And if you are inside of HoneyBook using the new Automations 2. 0, the conditional steps where you are going to be able to watch a form. A scheduler and you, whether or not they viewed it or they completed it, you are going to be able to make the next step happen automatically after a certain amount of time.
So not everything in your workflows is going to happen automatically.
The third question that I need you to ask yourself is, does it need a personal touch? Again, this is where if you feel the need to customize the form or customize the email, you are going to want to add an approval button, if you’re inside Dusbado or in HoneyBook’s new automation 2.0, you will be choosing create email draft instead of create email.
Okay. So I’m going to give you an example that’s kind of going to bring all this together so that you can have a solid idea in your head. Let’s say that when someone inquires, I love starting with this one because it is the most basic workflow that you can create, but it’s also going to give you the most bang for your buck because you are not going to be trying to figure out how to chase your leads and how to deal with your leads. If we can put that on autopilot, you can focus on more important activities. Like the booking phase and the onboarding phase.
So the trigger of your inquiry workflow is going to be either when they complete a contact form. Or when they schedule a consultation call, if you are choosing to embed a scheduler directly on your website, the first action inside of that workflow should be to send your automated lead response email.
Now, this is an email that I think is an absolute 100%. Everyone must have it. There should not be a chance where there is going to be a pause while you try to figure out if you want to work with someone before they hear from you initially after inquiring about your services. This first email doesn’t have to be, um, super specific.
It doesn’t have to offer them the opportunity to book. You are simply acknowledging that you have received their inquiry form and you are giving them some information to read and consume, before you were able to get back to them personally. Now, this email should tell them when they should expect to hear from you next, give them next steps if that’s appropriate, but you should also include those beautifully crafted blog posts that many of us have on our website that you want to make sure that that client and that lead has read before you actually talk to them. This is also a good opportunity. If you have like an amazing client testimonial, you can include it in this email or some frequently asked questions. If you tend to get a lot of objections at this stage,
Your second action is going to be to send that personalized follow up email. This is after you’ve actually had a chance to review their contact form, see what they’re interested in, see if you’re available, and then you are going to make the decision on whether or not you are going to move to the next step. Now, if they fill out a contact form and you are someone that requires a consultation call, this is the email that should include the scheduling link so that they can book that call. If you are someone who can pre qualify your leads just off of their contact form, your next step may actually be to send them the actual booking proposal. This is totally dependent on what your business needs are.
And so the last action that I tend to ask people to put inside of this workflow is a follow up email because humans are busy. And in this day and age, everybody gets so distracted easily. So you always want to have a follow up email, that either happens automatically or that you manually trigger to remind them to do the next step after you have indicated that you are excited about working with them, scheduling a consultation call, whatever your next step may be.
Now these steps can happen with or without you. They can be done automatically or you can add an approval button to kind of put a pause until you are able to do them. But having a semi automated inquiry process is going to save you so much time and energy inside of your business.
Okay. So first we talked about breaking up your client experience into the different phases. In step two, I’m talking about specifically assigning the action triggers. So you are going to choose the action, like send email. Send form, send scheduler, create to do task. The second thing that you are going to do is indicate whether or not it’s going to happen automatically, or you’re going to add an approval button.
And the third part of that is the timeline. So remember, when we originally mapped out your client experience, I had you guys write down what the optimal timeline was for each of those steps to happen. That is going to be critical in terms of timing your workflow.
So now we’re ready to move into step three, which is to actually build your workflows inside of your CRM and then test them.
You started with your client experience. Each one of the steps in your client experience is going to become an action and a trigger with a timeline. You’re going to have all of these written down and then you are going to go into your CRM and actually start building the workflows. Now, if you do it in a way to where it’s very nicely laid out, creating the workflows should take you no more than 10, 15 minutes.
I mean, it really is that quick. But in order for you to do that, you should have all of the actions, all of the triggers, all of the timelines written down, and at this point, you should also have every single asset that you need for your workflows created. So, if you are going to send them that automated lead response, you should already have your automated lead response, inside of your email templates, with the appropriate smart field.
So between mapping the client experience and turning them into a workflow recipe, you do need to make sure that you have a list of every email, every form, every scheduler that you need, and literally check them off one by one as you add them and as they are ready to be sent inside of your CRM.
Okay, so once you have created all of the assets, and then you’ve created the actual workflows. This is when you’re going to want to test it. I guarantee you are going to have errors. Why? Because I have errors when I set up other people’s. I mean, there are tiny things like maybe I didn’t notice that the spacing in an email was off. Maybe I didn’t notice that I accidentally deleted one of the braces from a smart field, and so it’s not populating correctly. Literally, the only way that you can find these errors is by testing your workflows completely from beginning to end.
Now, hear me on this. Make sure that when you are testing your workflow, you are using a personal email address and not the same email that you use for your business.
Of your CRM, this is so that you can see the emails that are for clients separately, for the emails that you get as the business owner that kind of send you the notifications of what’s happening. You wanna make sure that those emails are being sent to two completely different emails so that you can see what happens both as the photographer or the business owner and as the client.
And that’s it. That is really what it takes to efficiently craft workflows for your business. It’s not just a set of fancy checklists. They are your secret weapon for booking more clients and giving each and every person that comes into your business a consistent experience. Now all of this is actually not what I do with my own clients inside of the CRM blueprint.
If you are in my course, You actually don’t start by mapping out your client experience first. I have told you what the ultimate client experience is. I have told you every single asset that you need, and I have actually given you a template for every single one of them. So if you are in my course, Or if you are thinking that you need a little bit more help with this inside the course, everything that you need is there and then you just have to customize them for your business. It is a different mindset, but at the end of the day, we all get to the same place.
If you would like additional information about the CRM blueprint, there is a version for both HoneyBook and Dusbado, and you can find out additional information by going to coliejames dot com slash blueprint.
So what I really hope is that you actually pull out your calendar and you schedule a one hour block to start this process. I can’t guarantee that you’re going to get everything done in an hour, but at least it’s a good place to start. And I promise once you get in the groove and you start creating the workflow actions and triggers, you are going to be so motivated to see the process through now, please come back next week because.
I am going to be discussing part four of the client experience series, and this is when I’m going to be talking about what I see is probably the most important part, and that is creating a five minute booking process inside of your CRM. All right, that’s it for this episode. See you next time.
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