The Problem

Frustrated and disorganized with managing new clients as a growing Marketing Agency our client was seeking assistance in streamlining the onboarding process and service offerings for clients. Without an admin in place the CEO of the Marketing Agency was managing sales calls, manually booking leads, personalizing prices and service packages for every single lead, writing new proposals and subsequent contracts for those custom offerings as well. Once clients were signed the CEO was also burdened with manually billing and collections to receive payment.

Although fulfillment for this organization was completed by a team of contractors, once payment was confirmed and services were to begin the CEO was still involved with collecting needed intake such as assets, branding, account access, etc. in addition to providing task lists and timelines for deliverables to her contractors via messaging platforms and folders in BaseCamp. Once clients were fully onboarded and contractors were completing the bulk of the services for clients the CEO was still scrambling to manually schedule progress calls and complete monthly analytics reporting to keep her clients updated on their progress.

All in all, the CEO was so involved with onboarding and beginning client fulfillment. The time spent acquiring a new client severely limited the CEO’s ability to take on new Sales Calls. Hiring an administrative assistant or sales representative seemed too daunting because of all the customizations and implicit knowledge that would take too much time to disseminate and train for things to run smoothly. The company struggled with scalability in its onboarding process, as it took too long to begin fulfillment with new clients, which hindered their ability to consistently grow the business.

Additionally billing was a major concern for this organization. They took many payments via ACH but could never figure a way to get around manually tracking and emailing clients for payment even thought the amounts were the same every month. Once again the CEO was spending end of the month manually creating ACH versus Credit Card Invoices for each and every client. In the long term billing in this format would also hinder their capacity to scale and sustain business growth.

What We Did

The first step was to dive into the Client’s current service offerings and recent proposals. We knew the easiest solution to start with was developing standardized packages. This would eliminate the need to create custom prices, deliverables for each proposal and contract for every lead. It would also streamline how the CEO prepared for and communicated with leads. We were able to develop and refine Five Packages and additional add-ons to cover the typical needs of most of the leads/clients that had entered the Sales Pipeline over the last three quarters. We consolidated company information & success stories alongside deliverables & pricing information for each package on a custom branded landing page complete with an automated checkout process.

Once these packages were finalized we knew we had the first step in automating onboarding for this company. Painstakingly we created automations to seamlessly guide prospective clients from the checkout landing page mentioned above through the entire onboarding process. For each and every package and add-on service combination we setup automatic steps to replace all the manual work being done by the CEO. This included:

• Creating a custom landing page with checkout widget for each possible Package and add-on option to collect initial payments to kickstart onboarding

• Automatically filing said contracts into Google Drive and sending signed copies to clients for their records as well.

• Filtering out clients wishing to pay via ACH vs. Monthly Stripe via CC and automatically redirecting those clients to complete a service contract post checkout with the appropriate billing terms based on their preference

• Post-contract completion prompting clients to schedule their onboarding call via a calendar booking link as well as complete an onboarding form collecting information needed for fulfillment via a form versus extending the length of the onboarding call.

• Slack notifications once every step in the process above was completed so that the CEO while not completing the steps manually has full transparency and awareness of prospective clients onboarding steps.

We also worked to ensure billing was no longer such a time consuming process for the CEO by creating automations to replace tedious manual billing such as:

• Creating invoices each month for the length of their contract terms for either ACH payment or auto-paid subscriptions in Stripe depending on their payment preference as well.

• Slack notifications for every payment received including failed payment.

• Automatic reminder emails when a failed payment is triggered to gain payment without manually emailing and calling to complete transactions

After streamlining the onboarding and billing processes we were not truly removing the CEO from the day to day without solving the issue of getting new clients started with fulfillment. By creating specified packages we were able to filter based on the package selected during checkout and automatically get the team of contractors started without the CEO directing them. We worked with the CEO to develop specific tasks for each package and service offering. We built ClickUp Templates with specifed assignees (based on which contractor managed which service), due dates and more so that the work did not need to be manually communicated but automatically assigned. Responses to the onboarding form mentioned above were sent directly to each specific contractor so they had access, assets and guidance to getting started on Day 1 of onboarding. Additionally we setup automations to automatically send calendar booking links for progress check-ins and recurring tasks in ClickUp to ensure no monthly analytics tasks were missed.

The Result

As a result of building and implementing our Zero Touch Onboarding™ System our Client experienced the following:

• Saved over $250 per new client by automating onboarding versus hiring a sales consultant or administrative assistant

• Reduced Manual Actions completed by the CEO to onboard a new client from over 10 manual actions to just sharing one single link

• Freed up ~20 hours of CEO’s time per month to grow and scale the business instead of manually onboarding and billing clients

• CEO was able to onboard enough new clients in just the first quarter to grow the team and hire a new Project Manager

• The timeline from payment received to fulfillment starting with the contractor team went from ~5 business days to 5 minutes

• By simplifying the process for accepting ACH payments versus subscriptions with high transaction fees, the company was able to increase the number of new clients paying via ACH by 25% in the first quarter, resulting in saving over $3k in Transaction fees alone per year