Whether you’re just starting out in business or you’ve got a few clients, it’s important to think about how you manage your clients. Not only will it save you time and make your work hours more productive, but you can really provide an amazing experience for your clients that will make them refer you like crazy! 

As with anything else, there isn’t a right and a wrong way. I firmly believe each business is different so if you’ve got a system that’s working for you – GREAT! If you don’t have a system or you feel like emails and parts of your client process are falling through the cracks, I want to help you out by sharing our system. Feel free to steal it and make it your own 😊

How to Manage Your Clients

Let’s break down the process into a few steps that will help you get a handle on all the details. Depending on how you work with clients, this could vary slightly, but we’ll keep the steps general enough to apply to most service-based businesses. 

LEAD > CLIENT

Before your clients ever become clients, they are LEADS. This is just a fancy way of saying they are someone who is interested in your services or is considering hiring you, but they haven’t officially hired you. They’re potential clients. 

All of the digital marketing strategies you use in your business are done for one goal – to find people who need your expertise and want to hire you. Clients = business ❤️

All those people you’re reaching + nurturing with your Instagram posts + stories, mailing list, Facebook posts, pins, and tweets are LEADS, and at some point, some of them will want to reach out to you either for more information or to ask how they can hire you. 

Usually, at this point, they will send you a DM, comment on a post or fill out your contact form. Yay! Someone wants to hire you! Now what? 

If you don’t have an automated workflow set up then you likely respond with more information and offer to get on the phone with them for a discovery call so you can find out more about what they need and see if it’s a good fit for your expertise. 

This step may involve multiple emails back and forth, but hopefully at the end of it, you get to chat with your lead on phone or video and close the sale (because obvi you’re good at sales calls #chicboss). But again, now what? 

LEGAL STUFF + PAYMENT

Do you need to create a proposal for review? Do you have a standard contract created or do you need to scramble to pull one together? Do you have a way to get an online signature? What about getting paid – do you have a way to invoice your new clients? These steps are all critical in the onboarding process because without a signed contract and payment, your lead doesn’t ever become a client. 

Once you have all that stuff handled you’re feeling great, right? You’ve got a client! Go you!

INFORMATION GATHERING + COMMUNICATION

Now you’re going to need to communicate things with the client. You may have questions for them about their preferences, or need more information in order to start your work together. This may involve more back and forth emails. Once you have the information from the client, do you have a centralized place to store it or will you need to search through your inbox every time you need to reference the information? 

Do you need to create an account for a client in another system, give them access to a planning tool or schedule more calls? How will you communicate those things to the client? If you’re seeing the pattern here, you can guess that it’s probably via more emails. There’s nothing wrong with email, we’re just looking at the time it takes to complete all these steps manually and how difficult it could be to find the information you need in your inbox (unless you’ve got a killer inbox organization strategy!).

FINAL PAYMENTS + FOLLOW UP

If you don’t require payment in full at the start of the project, then you likely have a final payment due. If the client doesn’t pay it on time, do you have a plan for how you’ll handle it? Since the project is complete, this is a great time to request a testimonial so you can show social proof to your future clients! Do you send an email requesting a testimonial or do you ask them to leave a review on your Facebook page (or another industry-specific platform)? Do you ask for referrals or provide any kind of follow up after the project has ended? How do you remember when it’s time to follow up? 

WHEW! I’m tired from all those questions and all that manual work – I mean emailing counts as cardio, right? 💪🏼

Let’s Simplify + Automate the Process

So we walked through the steps that you might have to take before, during and after you work with a client. It sounds pretty easy to keep up with until you add multiple clients to the mix. Your inbox will be overflowing and you may start to struggle with keeping all the details straight in your head (or your inbox!). 

This is when I cue the dramatic music and introduce you to the most amazing, holy grail tool for client management there ever was – DUBSADO. (Yes, that’s an affiliate link, but it will give you 20% off your first month or year. You’re welcome!)

Why do I love Dubsado SO MUCH, you ask? Allow me to break it down for you. 

Dubsado handles client management LIKE A BOSS and makes me look like I’ve got a team of professionals attending to every detail. I’m able to deliver a seamless and streamlined client experience without being bogged down in details. #automationforthewin

LEAD CAPTURE FORMS + QUESTIONNAIRES

Dubsado lets you create forms for leads and clients to fill out. You can ask any questions you want, allow files to be uploaded and even embed code into the form. You can use the link to the form to post it on social media or embed the form on your website so all your leads’ information is saved in one place. 🙌🏼🙌🏼

Questionnaires work slightly differently, but you’re still able to create a custom form and send it to your clients and keep all the info organized under their lead / job within Dubsado. No more searching through emails for information! 

PROPOSALS + CONTRACTS + INVOICES + CLIENT PORTAL

In addition to your custom forms, you can create custom proposals, contracts and even provide a client portal so your clients can see all the emails, forms, contract and invoices linked to their project and take any required action on them. They will be able to log into their portal at any time and find answers to their questions instead of emailing you about it! 🙌🏼

You can also link your Stripe, Square and Paypal accounts so you can accept payment directly through Dubsado. The standard fees for the processors apply, but Dubsado doesn’t add any other fees onto the processing. You can set up recurring invoices, allow (or require) clients to set up autopay and even set up system-generated payment reminders that go out automatically. 

PACKAGES + PAYMENT SCHEDULES

You can also set up your standard packages in Dubsado so they can easily be applied to a proposal or invoice. You can create packages for add-on services as well so you could build a custom proposal or invoice within just a few clicks. Once you’ve set up your packages, you can set up payment schedules that bill your clients according to how you prefer to be paid. Require a deposit up front and at a set schedule during the project? No problem. Want to be paid in full up front? Great. Want to allow clients to make monthly payments? Fabulous. The options are nearly limitless. 

WORKFLOWS

This is the best feature of all the features, let me tell you. Workflows are LIFE. You know all those steps we outlined before we got to the list of Dubsado features? How about all the features we’ve been dishing on, remember those too? Well, this handy dandy part of Dubsado right here allows you to create an AUTOMATED process that moves your leads through the onboarding process, moves them along the client process and then offboarding. 

You can really get creative here and set up 100 steps or 5. Whatever YOUR client process looks like, you can likely translate it into Dubsado. You may not be able to automate every. single. step. of your workflow, but even automating a few steps will save you so. much. time. 

CANNED EMAILS

This is another mind-blowing feature in Dubsado. Yes, I’m aware you can create canned emails in Gmail, but adding this feature into a program that also has workflows just makes it that much more amazing. 

Think about all those emails we talked about in the first part of the post. Imagine if you could write them one time and then use them with each lead or client who was working with you on a similar process. Can you even wrap your mind around how much time it would save you to not have to write emails from scratch each time? Hands down one of my favorite features in Dubsado because it really extends the usefulness of the workflows feature. 

THE KITCHEN SINK

Ok, I know I’ve mentioned A LOT of features, but we’re going to give you the good old kitchen sink round up of the rest. Dubsado also has bookkeeping functions, a calendar with Google Calendar integration, a task board section with kanban style boards, a time tracker, email integration, URL mapping for the client portal, ability to add users and custom mapped fields and they recently released a scheduler (goodbye Acuity and Calendly!). 

If all of that isn’t enough to convince you that Dubsado is THE BEST EVAH, they also just updated the user interface to a sleek + modern new design and have THE BEST customer service around. Their Facebook group is super active and you get direct access to Becca, Jake (co-founders) and the Dub team. 

Basically I’m a #dubsadofangirl4life ❤️

SIGNUP + DISCOUNT

If you’re ready to ditch your old, slow, overwhelming client process for a new, streamlined client management workflow, then Dubsado is hands down the best choice you could make. (Remember the link will give you 20% off your first month or year) 

If you sign up for Dubsado and need help getting your workflows set up, I can help with that.