Post-Project Follow-up Workflows for Repeat Business | Photography Business Example

Moving. So today I am back live on the virtual whiteboard, here to talk about nurturing workflows. And first, let's just explain what exactly. Once again, what do we mean by nurturing? I'm not in any way prescribing anything here. This is not a prescription. Say, hey, this is what you have to do when you are nurturing a contact or a lead. I'm not a sales coach. Instead. Thank you, Brandon. Audio is good. Instead, what I'm going to talk about today is how we can be more intentional in our nurturing process by having an actual process. So nurture, in the way that I'm using this, nurture is about how you stay in touch with people in your world. So nurture or nurturing is another word for sales, resell and follow up. So all of those things are synonyms for nurture. Why I like to use the word nurture is because it implies more of a building the relationship, helping where you can help giving back, doing things like this that are, you know, not asking things of your people. You don't always want to be selling, you don't also want to be reselling, and you don't also want to be, hey, did you see my email? Did you see my email? You just become the needy friend. So instead I use the term nurture to give a better aisle to what I refer to when I'm talking about nurture workflows. So at its best, nurturing is this expression of love for the people in your world. Especially when we're talking about nurturing past clients, it can be sort of a serenade where it's reminding them why you're so awesome. Just like in this kind of romantic situation here, we could easily end up being creepy when we are trying to serenade by being that creepy person that's following you around. So we need to be very intentional when we are, when we are designing our nurturing process, that it's intentional, that it's consensual, that it is strengthening the relationship we have between a past client, a future client, or just a referral partner or peer, depending on who you are targeting or who are you are communicating with in your nurture, the way you're going to do it has to be different. So again, all of the stuff I'm suggesting here is not going to be a prescription. So let's just dive in to an example here. I'm going to be using the example of a photographer today because I've been speaking with a lot of them lately and I know photographer. Wow. I Know that photographers are in a tough place right now because of, at least in the US because of the COVID 19 shutdowns, many of them are not able to practice their trait. They're not able to do the work that they set out to do. So they've got a little bit of time on their hands and figured, let's focus on the photographer follow up process or nurture process and give an example of what is normal and what I would recommend instead. So there we are, let's just keep on moving. Okay, let's start. So the normal photographer follow up process would start when the project ends. So that last step of the project for a photographer is right after onboarding. So onboarding goes to here, onboard and then we start the nurture process. The objective of our nurture process is to get someone back into the machine of our business to buy again or to just keep us top of mind so that they can refer other people who will buy from us in the future. Also just to be a good person. But you know that that's obvious. So the way a lot of the times I see photographers who I just start working with, how they're handling nurture is something like this. They deliver the photos, they've sent them the photos they're in the digital images. They're saying, all right, here you are, we're done. They collect the money if they haven't already, the prints are delivered and then it is silence. It's terrible to say, but the most common follow up process I've seen from any small business, especially photographers, is radio so silence that there is none after you finish offboarding. There is absolutely no plan in place for staying in touch with that person to have them keep you top of mind. To me that is a huge opportunity from, to go from nothing to something is a huge chance to improve the process. So the very beginning of what I would suggest changing here when we have no follow up is to have something some kind of social media based wrap up post. This is basically a broadcast telling your community, maybe on Facebook, I've seen this done a few different places on Instagram and basically announcing that this person has finished your photography session and look at how beautiful their photo is. You're giving them free publicity as a wrap up. So we've got their photo in here, photo of your client looking awesome. You'll see a lot of photographers actually do this. It helps them populate their Instagram feed and it also tags the client getting it, making it very easy for that client to then share it with their Community. Is that really staying in touch? I would argue yes. And it's also providing value to both people by ensuring that we have the, by ensuring that we have the social media post going out on platforms. I'm just going to check one second here. It seems like we have our audio a little bit funny. All right, you can still hear me, let me know. It looks like everything's going through, it's just a little bit delayed. All right, so we've got the social media post. That could be a nice thing to do maybe one to two days out. But photography is also quite complicated. When I get folders of images, it is overwhelming to me as a client and many photographers out there, you probably know this, it's overwhelming to receive all of those photos and try to figure out what am I supposed to use when we know that about our clients. If you're a photographer. And so we can do a little bit from the front end to build an education into our follow up process. Again, follow up or nurturing is about adding value and hopefully, you know, earning that love and respect to get those future referrals or future business. So here we are, we've got delivered files. What if, you know, one to two days after we followed up with a public Instagram post tagging them in their photo saying, wow, look at how amazing they look. And then what if three days later we sent them a personalized email and we said, hey, I wanted to just check in again. We're using the check in, we're going to use it sparingly here. We're going to check in and see if you have everything that you need in order to use the photos. I noticed you haven't posted anything recently. I just wanted to remind you of the difference between PNG and JPEG and which one you should use and should you use the full res or should you use the compressed images? I've, I've given you an explanation of what you've already given them before without asking anything of them, just giving extra value explaining what all this stuff was back here is an opportunity for follow up that is educating in your post project. Follow up at the three day mark. Okay, move that out of there. So that is an educational email at 3 days already we have gotten a world away from having nothing as our follow up process. We've got two moments here that we have built into our process. Every single time we have a client, we know that one day later or even, you know, we could schedule it that day. We want our social media posts to have something with them in it tagged. Then three days later we want to send them an email which we could even automate, reminding them of how to do everything and checking in on them. Then let's keep going. How can we continue to keep this relationship alive? Well, one obvious part comes down to the type of photo we're making. So if we are someone that does headshots. So I've had the privilege of working with Sam and Arate and he does headshot photography. The thing with headshots is while they're very personal and they're difficult to do right, and for people who do do them right, like Sam, you're in high demand. But thing with headshots is people don't really think about it until they are frantic and realizing that they have that same photo from five years ago on their LinkedIn profile. So considering headshots have a half life, you know, they become less valuable over time. We might want to build into our process a follow up for a renewal and maybe a headshot. And I don't really know here, maybe a headshot is good for about, you know, 12 months. So 12 months, this headshot is dead. So at the nine month mark, we might want to email and say, hey, it's been a while since you had your headshot updated. Do you want a new, do you want to schedule a new shoot for the 12 month mark 3 months out? I'm giving you a quarter of notice for a reshoot. And again, I'm working within the parameters of what makes sense for this business. I'm going to move these out a little bit to the future. So I have 12 months till dead. So at nine months, maybe we want to send an email or maybe send a text, whatever makes sense for the way that you work with your clients. I know a lot of photographers are more casual, but ask about that reshoot. You're giving them the service. Just like a dentist reminding you, hey, you haven't had a cleaning in, you know, eight months. You were supposed to have that done. This is again a service. This is a render and not selling. So they don't have to worry about remembering when to get their photos updated. You are reminding them of best practices. This one was education, the other one was a service reminder. Maybe we want to do that again at 11 months and so on and so forth. The way we do this is where we're inserting the personality into this process. The way we write these emails, the structure we have, the tone, all of those things are going to set, set the expectation about what the relationship is between us and them. So these could easily become very spammy emails. But done thoughtfully, that is ideally not the goal. So rather than having that headshot be dead in 12 months, maybe we'll have it be refreshed with whatever their new look is. So it's a refreshed headshot. All of these are based on milestones that matter to the client. So this matters to the client. Having a fresh face matters to the client. We're building our follow ups around what matters to them. Free publicity that matters to our clients. If we're doing a B2B space or even not a B2B space today, all of these moments are built around when matters to the client. So if we're looking to expand our nurturing process, if we're looking to make this more robust, maybe we're saying, well, you know, we're seeing a lot of people maybe go to competitors or just forget about us in this middle and we want to add more follow up there. There's a few things we can do, but I would suggest thinking about what matters to the client in that middle period and let's build our follow up around that. So one example that I've seen be pretty fantastic. And this isn't quite for this middle part, but it certainly could be. I've worked with Heike recently. If you know Heike Martin Photography, she's a brand photographer, she's from Fabulous and she has a pretty sophisticated process in the beginning of her service. So we're doing a callback here back to the beginning of her service. In her onboarding, she asks all of her clients to fill out a form and it's a pretty complicated form telling you about your brand vibe and all this stuff, the things that you value, your goals and that for her can become a ingredient into a follow up process. So I want you to think about this. In your business, if there's information you're gathering about your clients, see if you could use that to guide what you do later on. So it's all connected for her. When she asks about goals, she asks about things like what do you have, what are, what are your hopes and expectations for the next six to 12 months to two years or whatever. The exact question is if one of her questions, and I'm not saying this is it, but imagine you or she or someone had a question in their onboarding, say what are your six month goals and how does my business fit into them? Again, just an example here. What are your six month goals for your business and why is this photography shoot Going to help you with those. If that's a question we have or maybe a question we want to have right here. As we approach the six month mark, we might want to send again an email, text, call, whatever makes sense for you. Imagine this is a phone and we want to check in. How are your goals? I like to get into the practice of using a client's words back to them. So in this example if we were using software like Dubsado, we we could use a custom field and say you said your goals were this exact quote from them. How is it going? We could have this be a templated email or again just something that prompts us and we write it by scratch, from scratch. We don't have to overcomplicate things or over automate things here, but what we're doing here is again making it about a value point to them. They said their goals were six months. You are photographer but you're sitting here adding accountability support because you're following up on their goals, the things that matter to them. Hey, I know your goals. Your goal in six months was to launch your ebook. How did that go? Did the photography work? I know a question I also hear from other photographers is how are you using the photos? Not in a self serving way, but more in a art. Are these being useful to you? Are you able to use these? And it invites that conversation of if you're not using the photos, do you need help with anything? So I've given you some suggestions of what this follow up might look like, why these pieces might go into it. But let's go into a little bit more of the abstraction of nurturing as a process. So when we are trying to do a nurture sequence, when it comes to workflows, it doesn't look like a normal flowchart because the nature of people are that maybe you'll have this set process but then you see someone at the supermarket because you're in a small town and that isn't on your schedule obviously, but you don't want to follow up with that person automatically a day later saying haven't seen you in a while. So what I like to do with nurture process is instead of having them as hard and fast rules, pure automations that ignore spontaneous moments that you might see somebody instead make them suggestions. This is not here to template your relationship with a vendor, with a partner, with a referral entity. Instead it's a suggested flow and you can put this into technology. I know there was a recent question that came up when it comes to the technology to do this. We can be as low tech as a name on a piece of paper printed with our five step process. That's only 4, 5, 2 day, 3 day, whatever it is later and we can just cross it off as we go. That's low tech printed piece of paper, still system, still good in my book. We can use a workflow automation tool like Dubsado or like any other automation tool that works externally. I would suggest one that's one on one like a CRM, not something that does a mass communication because that's inauthentic. But here we can automate our emails to go out changing them as we need to to make them customized. We could also use our CRM or our task management tool like ClickUp or Streak or Copper. Any CRM will do. And we could have a workflow set up in our CRM. Maybe it looks like a pipeline kind of thing. And as we move our people through our pipeline we have a checklist appear that's reminding us what kind of follow up we want to do in that moment. But for these two examples, we're not automating anything. All we're doing is prompting ourselves. So that way when it's been, you know, eight months and three days, maybe that's when we have an automation happening eight months and three days from our, our client engagement ending, we're reminded to say, hey, you haven't talked to this person in a while. It's not to automate the relationship, it's not to turn human relationships into relationships. Instead it's just to help you out. Because otherwise when you have, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you know, once you start having double digit clients a month, it's pretty much impossible to remember when it's been eight months. So rather than trying to rely on your memory, waste more of your precious mental space. Instead let's set up some reminders and prompts. So that way when that reminder just saying hey, it's been eight months, instead when that reminder, whatever that looks like for you, goes off, it says, hey, ask about how they're using photos. It can be templated, it can be automated, it can be 100% manual, it can be a text, but it's prompting you with what to say. I think so often the people who don't follow up are the people that are really, really nice and are just afraid of the word sell. So when we are thinking about nurturing, we want to work with that limitation in mind. If you're someone that doesn't like to sell, then maybe Your work, your follow up workflow needs to be more about adding value. And even if you like to sell, I feel like this is a more natural way to do it. A service reminder, reminding you of goals, educating you, checking in, sharing value by giving joint publicity. These are ways to sell without selling. These are ways to remind them that you exist to provide extra value on top of what they paid you for. It's a way to ensure that your last that of, you know, give me money which I don't know if you've seen the social media posts I'll be putting out but if your last impression is just an invoice, that's not a very happy last impression. By having all these touch points that add extra value as a service provider, you, you are ending a service with service which is, you know, as you've probably gathered by this point, my prerogative. So we've got that in there. Let's see what else we want to add here. Talked about how it is a reminder based system, not an automated. In this example I, I know we talked about there was several different types but I've been talking about following up post project, what I would call project nurturing. The reason I focused on that and not cold acting is because post project follow up is more likely to be a valuable use of your time as a small team member than cold prospects. Look at the statistics, look at the numbers again, yours might be different but most likely it is going to be easier for you. If we think about our business as a machine again. So we've got our machine, we're going to, we've got in onboarding, we've got offboarding. Whoop. Offboarding has two ends or two Fs. Once we have this machine here, this nurturing process is what happens after you are more likely to get people to come back again or to refer you if they have worked with you before. It's just easier. It is more likely because they've had an experience that is hopefully positive. Let's it make this a little bit wider. Because they've had an experience that is hopefully positive with you, it's going to be easier for you to make that cycle or make this cycle of a referral than it is to get someone random off the street who doesn't know you to consider working with an unknown entity. They'd be much more likely to say yes. If someone they know. Sorry about that. If someone they know is over here saying yeah, this person's the best and vouching for you. So that is why in this kind of follow up salesy workflow, you'll notice I'm not focusing on cold prospecting. Not that cold prospecting doesn't work. Not that it's bad, not that you might not want to be trying it right now. Just because if we're focusing on the low hanging fruit, the low hanging fruit are the people that already know and love you and and getting them to tell their friends is going to be a lot easier than getting some stranger off the street to become convinced that you are worth taking the risk on. There are a lot more follow or there are a lot more followers than leaders. But if you get a leader, which is your clients, right, they're awesome and they're going to tell their friends, it's much easier to get the followers to come along to get them to tell their friends and get that influx through referrals that way. That's a little bit of a messy draft, but I hope this makes sense. I gave the example up here at the top of top of the show. This whole thing is based on a photographer follow up nurture sequence. It's a totally different type of business than what we were talking about before. And obviously if you are a high end consultant, if you are working corporate, if you are, you know, a landscaper, this is going to be a different sequence for you but the stay the same. Thinking about adding value. You're working with businesses. The idea of sharing something about them is going to add value. If there's something in your process that people get confused about or something that keeps them from implementing what you give them, Education is something you can probably apply. I know we talked about accountants last time. Accountants, you can the lootly do something in this education or share space, especially the education space. There's so much that needs to be educated about taxes. All right. And then we've got the kind of how's it going? Goals check in again. That would work for an accountant, a consultant, even a hairdresser. You know, you're getting your hair and the person's talking about how they, you know, they've got their wedding coming up. If you, if you're the hairdresser, if you're the high end hairdresser that sends the email in five months to say hey, how was the wedding? You can bet you're going to get return business from that individual. But this piece, how's it going? Especially if you're doing more of a conversational service like a consultant, a hairdresser, even a landscaper who's having a conversation outside a Wedding venue, whatever it is you are. This does require some good notes. Now you'll notice in my example the person had a form filled out. If you don't fill out forms, you are going to want to have some good notes so you can reference them when you're doing this follow up and able to schedule the follow up. But anyway applicable to everybody. Next we've got a service reminder. Many services, even systems work that I do. Yes, I'm training people, those skills should be there forever. But as my software updates. So for example ClickUp 2.0, when that was released, if I had a bunch of people on ClickUp 1.0, it's probably pretty fair to assume that if we had a big update at ClickUp, I should reach out to my people and say, hey, need help? And maybe we would end up having another project scheduled. Helpful to them, helpful to me and just making things timely and relevant to the people. If you let me give another industry, if you're watching this and you have an industry that you work in, I would love to hear it so I can make it applicable to you. What else do we have? Graphic design. Let's go with graphics design here. So if you are someone that does graphics design, you do quarterly plans. Quarterly plans are quarterly follow up every quarter and check in on how's the next plan. You're going from being just a service provider to someone who's actually part of the team that's helping them out, that's keeping them on their game. Who knows, maybe sometime you'll ask them about their quarterly plan and they'll say oh my gosh, we never even got that out the door. Thank you so much for the reminder. We're going to get on that now and then you are adding that extra value. So there is always going to be an opportunity for a reminder. Unless you are selling like pools and maybe they only need their pull pool installed one time, but even still they need pool maintenance. Right. So there is likely a way that you can have a reminder based system in your follow up. So we've got those, we've got those, we've got those. I got rid of my creepy man, my creepy stick figure guy. But just to remind you, should be coming from the heart. I mean I know that sounds really cliche here but this nurturing stick stuff, when templated, when automated, when modeled as a process, can scale, can be delegated, can make it very easy for anyone on your team to follow up for any other person. But it can also run the risk of being creepy or being Soulless or being inauthentic. Like those emails you get saying, you know, special offer just for you, and you're like, no, they're not. So we want to make sure we are being very, very, very intentional and personal here. And if we're not being personal, be clear that this is an automated message or this is just checking in. This is an automated reminder that it's been nine months since your photo shoot. Be authentic. Do not lie to your clients. That's not cool. Okay. And just to conclude, that is a brief recap, a brief walk through, whatever you want to call it about Nurture workflows, what you might also call sales follow up. Oops, chunky. All right. Sales, follow up, post, project sale. I call Nurture. If you're looking for some benchmarks about frequency of following up, it's going to depend on you. But a few days later, a few weeks later, and a few months later is probably a good framework. Depending on the type of service you have, you might even want to be following up for a few years. If the frequency of your service is one that is only every few years. Another random tip here. Odd numbers are better. So rather than following up in two days, three days, instead of following up in two weeks, three weeks, six months, seven months, it just makes it feel a little bit less rigid and a little bit more organic. Just feels better. Not really sure why. So that's the nurture process. And let's skip on down. So, as always, I want to pass it back to you here. If you have any thoughts on this, let me know in the comments. And more importantly, next week, next week, we're going to be jumping back to the front of the process. The process. Process. And we've been talking about in going onboarding, offboarding, Nurture. That's nurture. And this is the machine. Oops. Money machine. That is not very pretty. There we go. So we've covered so far. We've covered offboarding, we've covered nurturing. So next week we're going to be focused on onboarding. This will have a little bit more meat and potatoes than what we're seeing in Nurture, but it'll also be just like everything else here, very different based on your industry, your service model, or whether you're monthly, recurring or one time. But if you would like to come on here, or whether you want to join me live, whether you just want to send me some stuff and have your onboarding process reviewed, which is what you do when someone says, yes, I want to work with you, whether they're off the street or not. If you want to have someone talk through that. If you want to go through it live and find areas for improvement, or leave a comment below with your process and I'll probably reach out to you with some questions. But we will get you a process on here. We will go through it together to go through the steps and where there are some obvious areas for improvement. This will not be a one on one consulting, it'll more so be giving examples for how anyone could take that process, add a little love to it and change a step to be a little bit more on brand or a little bit more creative. So if you want that onboarding review, leave me a comment below in the Facebook group here and we will dive into it next time. So that is it for this one. I know we have some requests for more some technology focused videos so I'll try to get those out to you at this as soon as I can. Also Got some Dubsado vs ClickUp videos coming soon. They are scheduled. I'm not sure when exactly they're coming out, but they are coming and that is it for this video. Questions? Leave them below. My friends, thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful rest of your week. That is a weird you. There we go. All right. And with that we are out.