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Automate Your On-Boarding Process

Lesson 25 from: Turn Your Service Into a Product

Tara McMullin

Automate Your On-Boarding Process

Lesson 25 from: Turn Your Service Into a Product

Tara McMullin

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Lesson Info

25. Automate Your On-Boarding Process

Next Lesson: Get Attention

Lesson Info

Automate Your On-Boarding Process

So once you go through and I mean, we went through that very quickly and there was more things that they do repeatedly and there's more things that they struggle with, that we didn't get to. But as you go through that process and you start filling in that chart for yourself, you'll start to come up. I love sticky notes, spreadsheets and sticky notes it's like my things on lego, you give me those three things, and I'm going to be a very happy person, but if you know, if you do that process, go through an answer, those questions, you're gonna have a litany of things to put into your on boarding process, going toe know what the needs are, and you gonna have some ideas of how you can meet them using either motivation or by helping your people to create habits, because ultimately, those are the two ways that we create behavior change, right? That's what learning comes down, teo taking advantage motivation, helping people form habits now that all seems like a lot of work, especially if you k...

now if if you're may be listening to this in a few days, you've bought the course, and you're listening. It you know and you've spent just an hour going through and poring through all these ideas and you got this long long list what seems like an awful lot of work I thought this was supposed to be about making my life easier and more efficient not about making it so much harder so the key here is that we're going to turn all of these findings on ideas into an organized streamlined process and streamlined is in bold because that is the key now a word of warning your organization and streamlining is not going to be perfect this is another aspect of the curse of expertise right as an expert you can't predict when to send that email you don't know when people are going to get stuck you don't know how far they're going to get you khun guess but until you actually do it you're not going to know for sure and so part of this organization and streamlining is actually something you do overtime as you bring people in we spent a lot of time this summer working on the quiet power strategy on boarding system and we've identified a few things that were going to tweak as we move forward because they just didn't work out quite the way we thought they would and that's okay but when you're doing the streamlining there's a few questions you can ask to help get you closer to that goal the first question is what can be combined is there overlap between my tasks so actually wantto look here at what cory came up with in our last hot seat this one this one is the email management system I just wrote e m s we have talking about yourself which was giving them some prompts and also helping them tio you know when to use it when do I talk about myself? When do I use this stuff I've come up with? We talked about maybe having a flow chart to help them make decisions but went to research their marketplace we talked about getting them to print off a sign that reminds them to take a picture to share their work I also I want to add one more sticky note that we didn't put because remember this is the first action that anyone has to take they have to buy they need to buy and that needs to be seamless is there anything you're into may not be because we didn't go through the whole list of things? Is there anything here that any of you see that we could combine or that there's overlap between them? Yeah uh sign that they put out to as they're triggered their first prompt could be to take a picture of that sign and share it yeah that's fantastic that's actually a really cool way of tying these two things together because that then takes away the question of well what am I supposed to take a picture because part of korea know what's important for you is you don't want them just talking about the work you want them to talk about themselves in relation to the work and if part of that is I'm going to be on a campaign to try and show you more behind the scenes and this is my first step it's like a behind the scenes that's fantastic I love that so let's go and let's say that this is going to be kind off like that any other things there and like I said there may not be any any other overlaps I don't see any other obvious ones all right? The second question is what must happen now and what can happen later so this is the key to getting rid of overwhelmed just like yesterday when you guys were talking about your minimum viable product and you were talking about what could you take away for the first time you offer it for the on mourning process you could go through you could have a hundred things on that list and what I recommend is that you actually take a step away like go have lunch or go you know to the other room or whatever literally take some time and step away and then come back to your list and say did they really need to do all those things right now do they really need to do all those things right now? The cat? The trick here is that you don't want to defer things that require high motivation, so just because they don't need to do the email management system off the top doesn't mean that we don't still want them to be thinking about that earlier because their motivation is high it's the habit things that we might be able to push off later so you might want them to get them. I love this idea of taking that printing out that picture right away and hanging it up, but then you may not start prompting them in those e mails. Have you taken a picture today for a week or two in right? Let them get a little bit of space before you add another thing to their to do list, right? The third question to ask yourself are what are the key behaviors that causes other things to happen? So in the quiet power strategy, for example, you start by getting the email was the trigger, which then causes you to click through, listen to the lesson. The next behavior after that is to do the homework that's the thing that naturally follows that's kind of a chain. We don't have to create triggers for each of those behaviours because one thing is the trigger for the next thing in the process. And so when we look at this, uh, one thing that I see, I mean, obviously by is gonna come up here to the top that's going to be our first trigger behavior behavior, which is a trigger for another behavior, which is probably a welcome email, and I think I think that these two things drawn arrow, my sticky notes are failing. I think that this is then aki path right there going, goodbye. We're gonna welcome they were going to ask them to introduce themselves, and then we're going to ask them, teo printout, this sign, which we're going to send them as part of their on boarding information, or maybe in the second e mail, and we ask them to print it out, posted somewhere, take a picture of it and share it on social media, and even if it's just in that group where they've already introduced themselves, that could be enough if they're doing an introduction in that group, we know that in here somewhere we're going to need to have them join the group, right, so you can start to figure out what's the key behavior will buying. Is a key behavior that then we can get them to join our community that's a key behavior which then can lead to them introducing themselves that's a key behaviour that we can use to trigger them to share the sign photo maybe that's part of their introduction no that's actually what you introduce yourself with is here's my sign I'm ready to go what have you asked people to make the sign instead of printing yeah yeah yeah making stuff really exactly for that aside it must say these three things on it yeah and then share your science everything that's brilliant I love that and it's also getting better at this it's also one of things where when you do that you actually I love giving homework zero or pre homework right given assignment before things actually start and that actually is really useful for the fourth question that you want to ask yourself which is what order can I put things in so you'll have you know you over reduce some redundancies by asking, you know, where's my overlap you'll have streamlined a little bit by saying what can I do later first what do I need to do now and you'll have started to look at some path thing for how things naturally flow but what's really you know the final thing was going to put this all together is what order can you do things in that will remove friction deliver value and reward behavior these three steps actually come from a book called the membership economy by robbie kellman baxter and there's a chapter in that book about on boarding your super users the people who are going to be like your all star fans and she says that the first thing you want to do is remove friction best place to do that make buying as easy as possible if you use a membership site if you khun you know create their account for them that's a good example of removing friction then deliver value so out inviting someone to create their own sign share it that's a value right that's a that's a piece of that you're getting them to do something to take action homework zero is fabulous for delivering value because people are getting something even before you've actually started. How cool is that right before the programme's actually started? I've given you something of value to you and then reward their behavior get them to post it on social media then the responsibility becomes for you someone on your team or sometimes I even say invite alumni in who are like your secret superstars in there to respond to say this is awesome thank you to get that conversation going that's the reward it could be something as simple saying hey, this is fantastic welcoming I'm so glad you're here that can be rewarding in and of itself we talked and hinted at this a little bit, but once you kind of got the stuff outlined, you could start to automate it. Now, the first time you do this, I don't want you to automate it very much. I want you to go through it because you're doing with small group, right? You're inviting on ly a small handful of people to your m v p actually want youto onboard those first users yourself or with someone on your team, probably yourself for the first one or two, and then someone else on your team could do it for the rest of them. But I actually want you to do it yourself just to make sure that it works the way you think it'll work and that if there's feedback on the process that you get that once you've outlined, though, you can start to automate the process. This is one of my favorite example. This is an extreme examples a company called hit reach, which they fully automate the sequence of events for some when someone orders a website review so they, you know, they do an audit of your website, and I'm not gonna go into too much detail here, but someone orders papal, takes their money, they get added to a man list, magic stuff happens, and at the very end it even turns the kettle on. In the office so that they can do the website review like how cool is that someone buys and the kettle turns on your office you're like ok, I can sit down into this website review now this is an extreme example because the on ly thing that the customer has to dio is by they fill in the form and they pay their money and everything else happens automatically don't have to worry about it the tools that they used to do this our two primary tools there's one I f t t t if this then that and zap here some people call it xavier but the ideas you're zapping information from one system to the next and basically what these two tools allow you to dio is they allow pei pao if papal gets a payment then it sends information to mail ship if male chimp gets information then it adds a project your project management software or it sends an invoice very simple software to use their free a t least that they both have free plans and free versions and they literally set up once you have your system you say if someone buys then I want to send them an e mail with the link to my facebook group if someone uh you know he has been in the program almost send them an email inviting them tio introduce themselves email is the simplest automation you don't even need to use these tools if you don't want to go super crazy if your trigger for most of what you're asking people to do is email, just send e mails right schedule your e mails you don't even need an email management platform to do that gmail allows you to schedule stuff to send out later if you really want our outlook or whatever you're using most of them allow you to send later if you really want teo it's too bad marie's not here today because this is one of my favorite examples this is digital strategy school of her process so marie's digital strategy school has two streams one is the d I y stream and one is the mastermind street so you can see at the start here they both start with a by decision either an application or the payment itself and all we're here you can see she's actually she's very systematic laying out what tools she's using so she has a form that they apply through, then there's an approval email and she has a template for that was just an email script that she changes out a few details and sends it on then in that email there's an invitation with a link to go pay and paypal or if someone's buying the diversion they go straight to paypal, then she has that all hooked in through the back end she uses it is in that to hook in her male champion a spread sheet so automates the data flow from piece to piece to peace all the way down she has you know, sending them information this is the on ly riel manual step you'll notice manually add to social media networks and she's out we've actually talked about that she's hoping automate that in the future it orations there's just program he stuff that she's working on all the way down to if that's in that auto archive their information in ever note so that it's not filling up the applications aren't filling up forever note for example down teo sending out that welcom e mail which is through her e mail system now that's this is pretty complicated it's pretty complex you don't need to go to this level you can you know this could be really simple which is someone pays where I send thee in moment invitation I get the payment notification and I add them to male chimp and then mail trumped us the rest for me or my email management system does the rest form because I have an auto responder that schedules the email to go out two days after they signed up five days after they signed up and that's where you you experiment the timing because we don't know how long it's going to take someone to get to that point you start playing around with it and see what works so this is the last question that I want to ask you guys today I want you to think about everything we've just talked about over the last seventy minutes or so and I want you to think about what could you use and apply with your existing clients from what you've discovered today because on boarding works one on one it works in groups works and hybrid models what could you implement right now with your existing clients from what you've learned today anyone I see you're nodding you have some ideas yeah I think just even once a affair if a center eating books with somebody I'm going to develop like a pdf what was that I was gonna develop a pdf with some of the most frequent question because often when they're content as their high distress so things about insurance things about the location, encouragement and then maybe even just a quick follow up e mail too and like reminder put this in your calendars and some just little notes about directions so but make it look as beautiful quick pdf that myself for the team could just send out right afterwards and then ask them questions and then and then kind of said it maybe one more time if needed but at least that so that's kind of going through my mind right now that brings up a really good point terror and I often bemoaned the fact that people don't read you will have to tell them more than once, but when you give them a package like that, that also gives you the ability to reference back to that. So that's what? We didn't wipe our charges we created ah, welcome kit, which has all the information you need to get the most out of the q p s program, and so then when questions come in, we can remind we can actually become that trigger. Have you checked the welcome kit, which then gets them in the habit of looking for that information on the note of streamlining and organizing, though when you're streamlining, organizing, that doesn't absolve you of responsibility for telling people information more than once no, right, you want to streamline it, but not so that you're getting rid of redundancy and telling, the more they want to streamline its just easy to consume as possible. So I like what you said about send that right away, but then send the follow up in the master class. I've just been working on the on boarding process for that, and I've got a welcome kit, but the day before the program starts, there's going to be an email that goes on, says, have you done these three things? This was your pre home work have you done these three things were getting started tomorrow make sure you please make sure you've done these three things or or you're not going to be able to get the full value of what you've purchased and received anyone else have an example and terra while we're getting things out but you can come on up because we can do some questions um because my event you know, pre cells and then it's it's in january a lot of people that are coming are emailing me or they're talking facebook thing is in january yet so I can put together a serious is it january at yet emails that are triggered about like every every three to four weeks and just like funny gifts her like videos or silly things just to keep them yeah and as a brand new what if attendee like yeah it's a little intimidating and we have the room and everyone's hugging and kissing right on dso to be ableto odd word people you know, maybe send out dossiers on some of the people that are like these like if I would have known who cliff wass before what right really would've been way well we have a new on boarding process for a first timers as well they price yes yeah yeah you should have thought about that at the break I will cool all right, yeah. So do we have any just general questions about this whole on boarding process thing? Natalie sometimes look like I know for my one on one service is I've been doing a lot of these things where I create like a comprehensive timeline and I give them their workbook all at once I introduce them to my project management system and I do all that all at once, but after going through this I kind of feel like maybe that's too much information too quickly. Yeah, some of the most effective on wording systems will I'm a big believer in bite size, so break what I would say is break things down toe action points when do you need the client to do something and every action it's the same as when you're doing email marketing right there's only one called action per email ideally in an on boarding email or trigger you want to trigger one behavior so whether I mean that behavior contributor further ones so you see someone introduced themselves and then you can welcome them and give them further instructions or whatever that looks like get the thing you see them upload something and if you use appier a soon as a document shows up in base camp or whatever you can have it send them an email saying okay, here is your next step but I think if you focus on this act shin then this action than this action that's going to be more effective than giving people a big long to do list because people don't read yeah, I spend a lot of time making like a little welcome kit type thing yeah, and then I have to explain again and getting people have questions it's like well, have you looked at page three? You know, like I have the processional yeah, yeah, yeah so so that's helpful validation that what I often do in that case I give I would give the welcome kit entirely up front because there will be keen keener's that do read I'm one of those people I generally read everything I've given you my favorite get a lot of students yeah, we did her like, sorry to be the nerd and it's like, well, that's the tenth female gotten that says sorry no welcome to our community yeah, so you can create you can send that whole document at once, but then just back it up with the idea they're reminder like okay, we did that in gps with the the email for the first module is remember here's something that we mentioned the welcome kid but it's going to be relevant to you right now so we're going to remind you because this is something you need to know right now, for example michelle, did you have another question just gonna add on because there are like certainty junkies like I want to know what's next, but I don't necessarily need to know the whole picture and there's sometimes like because I'm one of natalie's client it's and I like to know like oh this week in november I need to make time because I have to send her all of this stuff so there's like you have to identify those points where this is going to be where you need to put in some time and prepare them for that as well. That's a great example of one of those things in the where two people get stuck section that's going to be one of the things that they got stuck every web designer knows when my people get stuck with they need to send content right and that's where problem projects tend to sit and so if you can get them to do something again, take advantage of the high motivation to make it easier. Maybe what that is is you say you know, start go right now and, like, write the draft bitter about paige all right, do it right away when motivation is high and that makes it sending it over a whole lot easier later on on michelle what you said also triggered something for me, which is and not exactly what you said but certainty junkies also tend to be introverts introverts really like to know what to expect, so if you've got an audience that has a way, a lot of introverts in it as I d'oh, then you need to be able to say you need to be able to prepare them for what's what to expect because that's going to help them feel more comfortable, so that might not be applicable to everyone but it's applicable. I think a lot of people it's that idea of boundaries creates a fact with strengths in place, which lets people know where they can freely explore play around. Yeah, absolutely too many online questions about on boarding, riveting in general ok, great when he has had a question, how do I make sure I don't throw away what's working brilliantly as I try to make what isn't working better? The first thing you have to do is identify what's working. I think a lot of times when we think about getting feedback, we we focus on what's not working it's the same idea of should you should you strengthen your weaknesses and what the strengths finder people would say is no to more to your strengths, the first thing to do is to figure out what it is working and don't throw that away figure out what's working so that you can do more of it. And that actually naturally will help you get rid of some of the stuff that's not that's not working as well. Yeah, I live brie and take on the feedback gathering after our last session of q p s because I wanted her to really like, dive in and figure out what was working on what wasn't but often when I've gathered feedback in the past, it's been specifically about asking what's worked the best it's like it sometimes the negative like I know their stuff that doesn't work, I could guess what the things that don't work are I want to know what's working best so that I don't get rid of those things and so that I could do more of them so I could give you more value from what's already give you value because that's probably going toe not only is it going to be easier for me, but it's probably gonna be easier for clients a swell was there another one? Yes, hoops asked. I'm and I'm in a pivot right now and focusing on re clarifying strategy is taking a lot of time and energy. I'm also feeling burned out from spinning wheels when things weren't working. Any tips for keeping momentum will also navigating with grace making money uh, so why you say that and I like you were talking about motivation and rewards and in my business the easiest way to create motivation will not create motivation, but tap back into motivation and to create rewards is to help people make money as quickly as possible. And I think that when you're pivoting, it can often feel like there's so much uncertainty and there's so much going wrong that the easiest thing that you could do is figure out how to make money now, and that gives you the motivation to keep moving. And so, you know, putting together an m v p for where you're headed and putting together an invitation letter that's designed for the people that you want to be working with now and making those sales happen this weekend, even I can get you on the path to keeping the motivation to feeling like you're headed in the right direction and getting the feedback that you need to actually be able to validate those things and not just, you know, pat yourself on the back, I think I mean, I don't know how you feel about it, but that's, that's, what I do when I'm what I'm feeling weird about where I'm at or not knowing what I'm doing, I make money, yeah, it's I mean it's also worthwhile it's true it's also worthwhile to intentionally take the timeto pause. And look back at where you've come from. Yeah, because that's, what gets us into trouble, that's actually where a lot of burnout comes from is when you're on the hamster wheel and your go go, go, go, go, go going! The problems that we don't take time to stop look at where we're at look at where we've been and see that we've actually made progress that can that's a really good way to tap back into that motivation and remember that fire because it's not that you're just spinning your wheels in vain, you're actually moving somewhere. Yeah, absolutely well, let's, give free on a big old round the clock thank you. Wait, let me just tell you what's coming up, we've got just a a few more lessons to go here's what they're going to look like in the upcoming lessons you're going automate your lead generation in sales process. Yeah, so that you always know where the next sale is coming from. Your create content that gets attention goingto ask for micro commitments, what is that you're going to build by in through communication? And then finally, I'm going to ask for the sale.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

The Observation Engine - Multimedia Pack
Intro to How to Thing Like a Marketer - HD.mp4
How to Think Like a Marketer: The Who - HD.mp4
How to Think Like a Marketer: The What - HD.mp4
How to Think Like a Marketer: The How - HD.mp4
Create a Product That Resonates Workbook
Turn Your Service Into a Product Workbook

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