Client Onboarding for Professional Services

When a new client signs up, it’s not enough to leave them alone to jump into your service by themselves –  you’ve got to have a clearly written process to make sure they know they’ve made the right choice.

Settling a new client into your business and establishing a good relationship is one of the best ways to reduce churn.

 ‘If you hold a customer’s hand for 90 days, they’ll be loyal for life’. – John Jantsch

The process of perfect onboarding differs depending on your business, but the essence is the same. Of course, you’re updating your CRM and complying with legal regulation, but that’s not going to make the customer think you’re the best choice and quell the buyer’s remorse. You’ve also got to build a relationship, get to know the customer’s individual needs (once they’ve signed up, they’re not just a vague profile or target audience) then integrate them into your existing business process.

Bonus: Looking for a real example use case from the super-successful DoubleDutch team? Click HERE to unlock it.

At Process Street, we’ve put together 14 templates you can use to get new clients settled in with minimal hassle. The templates include sample documents, ready-to-send emails and industry-specific advice for criminal lawyers, marketing agencies, and financial planners.

Want to get straight to the checklists? No problem! Here they are:

• Client Onboarding Checklist for Financial Planners
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Marketing Agencies
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Criminal Law Firms
• High Touch Client Onboarding for SaaS Companies
• Website Design Client Onboarding Template
• Landlord Onboarding Checklist
• Client Onboarding Checklist for an Accounting Firm
• Patient Intake Checklist for a Dental Clinic
• Patient Intake Checklist for a Medical Clinic
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Real Estate Sales
• Client Onboarding Checklist for a Managed Service Provider
• Client Onboarding Checklist for a Software Development Company
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Management Consulting
• Client Onboarding Checklist for an Insurance Broker

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Part of the reality of trying to manage operations in organizations of any size, is understanding that sometimes things go wrong.

In an ideal world, we don’t want anything to go wrong. We want our processes to run smoothly and all tasks to be easily completed.

But that isn’t just something which happens. It is, however, something we can work towards.

The first step is to create a critical culture where people can identify when and why a process has had a problem. From there, you can track problems, investigate them, and improve processes to stop those problems occuring.

But you need that first step.

That first step needs to be done each and every time, it needs to be done with the right amount of detail, and it needs to be quick and painless to take.

This is the art of an exception report.

Done well, this can illuminate your problems and be a crucial linchpin in a broader effort to improve processes and, in turn, outcomes.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is an exception report?
• Why you should use exception reports in your business
• How you can record exception in Process Street
• How to use Zapier to generate an exception report

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Universal Modeling Language (UML) is a way of visualizing a software program using a collection of diagrams. That is perhaps the simplest way to define it.

If you’re looking for a full-winded definition, here it is:

“The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was created to forge a common, semantically and syntactically rich visual modeling language for the architecture, design, and implementation of complex software systems both structurally and behaviorally.” – Lucidchart, What is Unified Modeling Language

UML has many advantages including flexibility, an abundance of tools, and the capacity to model systems from both a structural and behavioral perspective.

Nevertheless, it can sometimes be overwhelming.

A focus on simplicity is, therefore, essential to not only creating actionable diagrams, but also to avoid pulling your hair out in the process!

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The importance of efficient purchase order management

Effectively managing purchase orders is a critical component of any business with vendor relationships. And yet, according to the founder & COO of Procurify, Kenneth Loi:

“Many organizations unwisely forego purchase orders because they perceive the paperwork to be a hassle that slows things down.”

He’s right. Paperwork is a hassle and does slow things down. However, this is not a good enough reason to forego purchase orders, hence the word “unwisely”.

From creating a requisition to gaining approval and receiving an invoice from the vendor, there are up to 7 documents involved in the purchasing cycle. That is a lot to keep track of for a single purchase.

And this only gets more complex as a business grows.

Maintaining a paper-based system at the enterprise level is virtually impossible. For smaller companies, it’s do-able, just incredibly inefficient.

The frustration and inefficiency that comes with managing piles of paperwork is no longer an unavoidable obstacle to overcome. By establishing an automated purchase order workflow, you can centralize documentation, seamlessly track progress in real-time, and shorten purchasing cycles.

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Gone are the days where signing contracts involved figuring out how to connect to a printer, scanner, or photocopier.

And don’t get me started on fax machines.

Now we live in a glorious new world of rapid digital signature workflows.

There are many kinds of digital signatures. Some may think of the high-tech encrypted keys people like Julian Assange have used to prove whether messages came from them or not.

But let’s be honest, outside of our international secret agent daydreaming we’re not likely to need to use those. What we need is the simple act of being able to add our signature on to digital documents with the fewest number of clicks possible.

Those interested in soccer may remember the high profile signing of David de Gea by Spanish giant Real Madrid from Manchester United. Or, actually, you won’t remember it. Because it didn’t happen. The documents were to be sent in the last moments of the transfer window, and the whole multi-multi-million dollar deal fell through due to a broken fax machine.

Digital solutions to contract workflows are important.

That’s why in this Process Street article we’re going to look at:

• The 5 best digital signature tools
• Digital signature integrations you can use today
• How to connect digital signatures with the workflows in your business

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Processes are all the rage right now, and we’re very pleased to be leading the charge in making processes agile and actionable for organizations of all shapes and sizes..

We’ve written countless pieces about creating a process, writing standard operating procedures, or building business systems.

But sometimes we’re guilty of assuming that having a process automatically makes something organized. It doesn’t.

If you’re a solopreneur or working in a startup, managing processes is fairly easy. You have a limited number and you can easily scroll through to find the one you need when you need it.

But what about large organizations? Companies where people on different teams are in different countries? Businesses where different departments speak and operate in different languages?

How can we manage processes on such a large scale, and what does that tell us about managing processes for small businesses looking to scale?

This is where a process library comes in.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is a process library?
• Why you should build a process library for your business
• Determine your information architecture before building your library
• How you can build a process library in Process Street

All while taking inspiration and advice from some of the world’s largest collections of knowledge!

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Modern business is a fast paced game and there are always new ways you can discover to improve your operations and output.

One of the easiest and simplest ways to improve the day to day running of your business is to supply your team with better tools.

With the array of modern SaaS products available on the market there are specialized tools for a host of use cases.

We use Close.io for our sales team, Intercom for customer support, and Process Street for our business process management throughout the company.

But if you’re a department within a larger company, or a team within a department, how do you convince top management and finance to sign off on a new software product to boost your team’s performance?

In this article, we’re going to give you a step by step guide of how to make that happen. Including:

• What is a purchase requisition?
• The difficulty of bureaucracy
• 3 important factors to convince finance
• How to write a proposal for a new software purchase requisition
• Create or improve a purchase requisition process

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Writing perfect processes is a dream all Process Street users share.

But a perfect process isn’t necessarily a process where all the steps work perfectly all the way through.

In real life, processes come up against external forces and unforeseen circumstances. A perfect process doesn’t have to predict all these external influences in advance; it needs to be able to adapt to them in real time as they arise.

Fortunately, there’s a concept for this: Process Flexibility.

Process flexibility helps keep our processes working even when everything else is going wrong.

In this article, we’re going to outline what process flexibility is and the main approaches to managing it:

• What is process flexibility?
• What are the main approaches to process flexibility?
• Flexibility by design
• Flexibility by deviation
• Flexibility by underspecification
• Flexibility by change
• How Process Street is designed for agility

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One of the impacts of technology on how we do business is a greater ability to structure our companies differently and to leverage advantages which would previously have been difficult.

At Process Street, our team is based remotely. Which means we’re able to draw on a wealth of talent based all over the world.

Technology means that communication between remote employees can be as effective as it is within an office; sometimes conferring extra advantages.

I wrote for AppCues about how our internal systems are so robust precisely because we’re remote based and we need to take every step possible to make sure we don’t suffer any information loss in our communication. This has given us internal processes which are much stronger than many brick and mortar firms.

Being remote is not the only benefit technology can bring. New tech can flatten organization structures, effectively delegate more responsibilities while retaining accountability, and help to create cultures where everyone feels valued.

One of those factors is the ability to bring multiple stakeholders into decision-making processes; a shift which holds a fundamentally democratic ethos.

In this article we’re going to look at:

• What is democracy?
• What are the positives and negatives of incorporating democracy into an organization?
• The democratic ethos in practice and how you could use it
• 5 suggestions for how technology could facilitate democratic input

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Here at Process Street, we’re always talking about the importance of workflows.

Workflows help you define what work you do and the order in which you do it.

According to the Powering Productivity report from Planview, poor processes and workflows are the number 1 cause of inefficiencies in organizations. Plus, the Chaos Theory report from Projectplace revealed project managers lost 2 hours 45 minutes each week due to poor workflows.

When you document your workflows and improve them, you optimize your work. This results in better work done more quickly.

It’s one of the simplest ways to improve the performance of your own work, or that of an organization. From basic workflows with only a couple of steps to company wide workflows with multiple stakeholders and variables.

This principle remains true in countless use cases and industries but is most powerful in areas where work benefits from standardized practices.

This brings us to an area of business where standardization is a true sign of quality: accounting.

Effective accounting practices require a strong understanding of how information flows throughout your business.

In this article, we’re going to look at:

• What is the accounting cycle?
• What is a workflow?
• How to construct processes for your accounting activities
• 11 accounting processes you can try today

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