How to Onboard New Design Clients

It's Monday, January 16, 2017. I'm grilling some hamburgers. So several. Several of you asked about onboarding new clients. You need to think about new clients as new relationships, new friends, new people to work with. And it's not all about, like, closing the deal immediately. You just get to know them a little bit. You don't go and ask someone at the bar to marry you the first time you see them. You start a conversation. You know, there's a natural progression to relationships, and a client relationship is no different. I want to make something clear up front. It's all about them. It's all about. Oops. Is it ready? Sorry, my wife's distracting me. I'll show you what I can see. It's all about the client. It's all about them, what they need, the value that you can provide them. You need to frame everything in the context of the value. No services are paid for unless the person who is buying them thinks that they're more valuable than what they're worth. So if I want someone to cut my grass, I want the grass cut. I don't care how long it takes somebody to do it. I don't care if they're pushing the lawnmower or riding the lawnmower. I don't care if it's a green lawnmower or a yellow lawnmower. I really just want shorter grass. That's all I want is shorter grass. So if they start talking to me about the new lawnmower that they have and how much horsepower it has, zero turn radius, I. I actually don't care. All I want is shorter grass. So think about the value that you're providing. What does the client really want? Do they want a new design or do they really want to increase sales? Do they really want to increase newsletter signups? Do they really want to increase video views or people to visit their store? You know, like, find out what they actually need. All right, what else? You gotta listen. Listen more than you talk. Listen more than you prescribe. They may want a redesign, but it's your job to ask the questions about why they want the redesign. Just because they're tired of looking at what they have, or do they really have some kind of UX problem and people who are signing up aren't applying for certain things, or people who are coming through their funnel drop off at a certain point, and they think a redesign will help it? The more questions that you can ask them, the more times you can ask why and ask why? Why do you want to do a redesign? What makes you think that a redesign will help you do this? So on and so forth. If you can ask why in a non abrasive way, you know, don't get too pushy with it. What makes you make that decision? Find out why they're making decisions before you try to prescribe or offer any type of service. So after your first phone call or your first email, you need to clearly define the next steps. Always, and I mean always, have actionable next steps. Tell them, hey, I'm going to follow up with this email with this information or alright, just so we're clear, I'm going to be waiting for you to send me that stuff next Tuesday that I need to review before I can provide a proposal. You always need to end every phone call, every email, any interaction whatsoever needs to have clear next steps. So we all know, project manager, client, whoever knows what the next steps are. So, so no one's lost and it's not fuzzy. Too many, too many people kind of leave things up in the air, leave the status kind of to be determined. But you need to always make sure you don't want to leave the conversation open ended. You want to have action items that you can follow up. I can't complain because she is making us some ice cream. We're back to the lawnmower metaphor. It doesn't matter if somebody cuts your grass and takes them two hours or if it takes them 20 minutes, as long as the grass is shorter and it's cut the way you want, it's worth a certain amount of money. And actually if they do it faster, it could even be worth more money to you because it was done without them being at your house, making a loud noise the whole time. So if you do something quicker, then that is often more valuable, not less valuable. That's why hourly billing starts to deteriorate. Thank you. That's. I think I'm gonna leave it, I think I'm gonna cut it there. Those are some good things to think about for new client onboarding. If this resonated with you and you want to hear more about more process beyond like initial contact, leave me a comment below and ask, ask me any question you want about that. Smash the thumbs up. If you like the video, don't forget to subscribe below. Hit that red button up there, red button. And I will see you on the next video.