Takeaways
- Often when we are having problems with boundaries, whether it be through communication or something else, we find that we haven’t clearly set expectations for our clients.
- If you are going to be responding to your clients within 24 hours, 48 hours, or once a week they need to know that up front. You want to pick your preferred method of communication whether it be email, Vox, etc. and then let your client know how often you’ll be reaching out and responding.
- At first, automating things can give you a feeling of losing control, but you actually create and control every single automated thing that is going out to your client.
- When it comes to automation the things we want to automate are those repetitive manual tasks such as sending contracts, sending emails, following up on a questionnaire they didn’t answer, or sending an invoice.
- We want to make sure we are doing certain things person to person such as asking for testimonials, referrals, and follow ups/client check ins.
- You’re going to use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) such as Dubsado for nurturing your sales leads, follow ups, proposals you may be sending out. This is also where you’re moving into onboarding such as contracts and welcome emails.
- Some CRM tools have bonus features, Dubsado has a great scheduling feature along with all of its automation capabilities.
- Once you are done onboarding a client and ready to get the work done you move them into a Project Management Tool such as Trello or Asana. Project Management Tools are less about sending things out to your clients and more about tracking where things are with a project. A Project Management tool is more internal than a CRM.
- Which tool to use depends on the needs of your company, you may start with Trello and feel the need to move from there into Asana based on growth or if your needs change.
- The DISCO framework Melissa uses starts with D-Define, the business owners role and workload, I-Identify, gaps, drop-offs, redundancies; S-Streamlining, take a close look at emails, how can we make this more efficient? C-Create, phases and milestones. This is where accountability comes in. O-Outsource and Automate, once the first 4 are in place automating becomes very easy.
- Deciding what is worth delegating vs doing yourself comes down to asking “if you never saw this would it impact the end result of this project?” If not it can certainly be outsource or automated.
Highlights
- (1:30) Knowing your boundaries with clients and what boundaries you’re suppose to have.
- (3:05) Setting expectations when it comes to communication so that you aren’t expected to answer emails at all hours of the night.
- (5:25) If you had specific days of the week that you take off like the weekends, you need to let your clients know so they are not reaching out to you in a panic when you are not looking at your phone or computer.
- (7:10) How do you help business owners maintain a high touch experience while not doing everything manually and incorporating automation?
- (9:10) Automation can really help with making sure that things are on time, which becomes incredibly important; especially with bigger, higher capacity clients.
- (10:02) Understanding when automation is too much, what should be automated and what should still be done person to person.
- (13:02) Talking about which tools to use to help automate vs which tools you will use to help manage your business.
- (14:20) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and options of different companies that offer this kind of software.
- (16:10) Talking about when and how to move your client to a Project Management Tool and the various options offered for the software.
- (18:05) Comparing the differences between the two leading Project Management Tools Trello and Asana based off of Melissa and Rachel’s experiences.
- (20:35) DISCO Framework to start streamlining and start automating to help get her clients to start saving 5 hours a week or more.
- (22:58) How do you decide “What should I do myself?” and “What should I delegate or automate to get off of my plate?”
- (25:50) What does it mean to make an impact to Melissa? “Leaving something better than I found it.”
Quotes
“Did you tell this client that you stop working at 4? Well that’s step one!”
“I see this fear that if we start to automate things that their clients aren’t going to feel loved and that stems from our desire to massively deliver and massively support our clients.”
“Do you think you can over automate things Absolutely!”
“Stick to automation on things that you might even consider outsourcing.”
“DISCO – Define, Identify, Streamline, Create, Outsource.”
Resources
Connect with Melissa:
Website: melissavmorris.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/followmelissavmorris
Books Mentioned in the Episode: The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks
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