How to Onboard Your Design Clients
Onboarding is the process of familiarizing a new client with your services, process, boundaries, timeline, and anything else they need to know about your business to have a pleasant and productive experience as your client. It also can be used as a tool to set the tone for the entire project.
Having a smooth, stress-free onboarding process that sets expectations and is informative to the client ensures a successful experience for everyone involved.
As designers and business owners, we spend a lot of time attracting clients and trying to get them to sign on for projects. We do this by having a custom website that’s organized, easy to use, and showcases our best work. Once your client signs on, that high level of organization and quality of work needs to continue.
You want to meet all of your client’s expectations. If your onboarding process is sloppy or disorganized, then your clients will be disappointed and it will reflect poorly on your business.
In this blog, I’m going to walk you through my onboarding process that is designed to represent the professionalism, expertise, and quality that I want my clients to experience when they work with me.
Every designer has a different process based on their services, so I encourage you to take these ideas and adapt them to your own process and business!
Lead Inquiry
You’ve put all the hard work in, optimized your website for search engines, created a gorgeous portfolio, and you’re rocking it on social media. This all leads to a potential lead coming to your site and filling out your contact form.
Your website needs to have a contact form that collects necessary information from the client. This is the main point of contact and the basis of your first conversation with this potential client, so take the time to build it out to capture all of the information you need.
From here, you’ll want to connect your contact form with the CRM you use for your business (if you have one). A couple common CRMs for designers are Dubsado and 17Hats.
Once you’ve scanned the inquiry for red flags and think it may be a good fit, it’s time to reply to their submission and schedule a sales call.
Sales Call
On the sales call, you want to talk about what the client is struggling with and how you can help solve their problem with your design solutions.
You’ll also want to talk about the timelines, the scope of their project, and further evaluate if they will be a good fit to work with you.
I typically give a high ballpark quote to the client, and then let them know that they’ll get a proposal that outlines the scope of their project details. It’s always nice to set the quote a little higher, and then they are pleasantly surprised when they receive the proposal and see that the price is a little lower than they thought it would be.
Proposal
Your proposal should include some of the goals you talked about with the lead and what they hope to achieve by working with you.
It also needs to include the scope of the project. For example, if you offer branding, you can break it down into what branding means for this project - brand strategy, brand identity, collateral items, etc. Get really specific about what you’re offering to the client.
If you know a rough timeline for the project, you can include this in the proposal to give the client an overview of what to expect. You should also include pricing, payment structure, and terms of the payment.
Once the proposal is complete, email it to the client within 24 hours of the sales call. Ask them to review it and get back to you within 48 hours. Be sure to follow up with a friendly nudge if you don’t hear from them!
Contract
If the client decides to move forward, it’s time to send them a contract. This should further outline the scope as well as any policies or copyright terms. I highly recommend consulting a lawyer or purchase a contract from an industry specific website, like The Contract Shop.
I send contracts via 17Hats (my CRM tool), so the client can seamlessly review and sign the contract all online.
Invoice
Once the contract is signed, you’ll send the client an invoice. CRM tools are also really great for invoicing because they take out the need to manually follow up and keep track of what invoices have and haven’t been paid.
Tip: Never start the project without the contract signed and invoice paid.
Welcome Packet
Once the contract is signed and invoice is paid, it’s time to move to the final phase of onboarding: the welcome packet!
A welcome packet can be a webpage or PDF that you send to the client. It should outline anything your client may need to know about working with you that you haven’t already covered in the proposal.
A few things to consider including in your welcome packet:
Educational videos
More detailed timeline
Questionnaires
Project management tool
Contact information and available hours
Boundaries
Revisions policy
One last optional step is a small welcome gift. This can be as simple as a $5 Starbucks gift card or an elaborate welcome basket! This will let them know that you’re thankful for their business and excited to work with them.
As you’re creating your onboarding process, keep in mind that you want it to work for your specific needs, as well as provide a seamless experience to your clients that makes them excited about their project. This not only gives them confidence about working with you, but will lead to happy clients that may refer other businesses to you in the future!
One Time Purchase gives you immediate access to the masterclass where I’m sharing how I onboard my design clients.
A masterclass with Hayley Fedders that covers the onboarding process for clients in your graphic design business.
Easy to understand descriptions for how to make implement steps immediately into your business (no need to be an organization whiz).
