Today, I’m going to be going over point number five in our recently launched Small Business Comeback eBook. “Leverage, what makes you special”. Now to get the full ebook, you can go to www.bigredjelly.com/comeback. You can come here and download the free guide e-book for free, no strings attached. These are five things that we did in 2020 that not only helped us get through the covid-19 pandemic but actually helped us pivot, niche, and scale faster than we ever have despite such a crazy time. Today’s video is just going to dive into point number five here. “Leverage what makes you special.” But don’t forget to get the free guide by coming to the website bigredjelly.com/comeback. I’m going to start off by reading some interesting facts here, which are provided by WP forms. It costs upwards of five to six times as much to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Customer service means a lot. 80% of people claim they’ll quit doing business with the company after a poor customer service experience, 73% of people prefer to do business with brands that personalize the shopping experience. Today, I’m going to be focusing on a stage that I particularly enjoy, which is the onboarding experience or those transition experiences that all businesses deal with. And I don’t think that small and local businesses put enough focus on these transition phases enough. So, I’m going to talk about onboarding specifically and how you as a small business owner can leverage what makes you special sprinkle in that secret sauce into that phase so that you can really differentiate yourself from Big companies.
Personalize Your Customer Experience
One of the first things I like to say about this is I see all too often these small business owners who are trying to copycat or mimic and mirror big corporations. Right. If I’m an e-commerce store, I’ve got to act and brand and operate like Amazon to a certain extent. Maybe so. But you really are missing out on 90% of what makes you special, which is the fact that you’re a local business and you can add a personal custom touch that Amazon cannot do because they’re simply at a different scale. So, if you’re a manager or a small business owner, you’re part of a small team or just a small business team. Think about in particular the ways that you can leverage what makes you special. So, we’re going to jump into the onboarding phase right now. And I’m going to show you really quick, just an actual example of what we do with some of our what we call build clients.
Build Clients
So, when we get a client who has completed their branding phase and they’re ready for what we call the build phase, we’re ready to start building their website and connect it with a CRM and other digital tools. In other words, we are ready to start building their online platform so they can do better business online. Their information comes into this board here, which is called the Pre-build Board. This is some steps that we take before we actually start the build project. So, let’s use Mountain West Pest Control as an example, you can see Joshua Richardson is at the front of the website as the builder. You can see some basic information. Now, this could obviously be duplicated as a spreadsheet. This could be done in any project management tool like Trello, base camp, Ossana, etc. Use a spreadsheet. Many of these tools have three versions or very affordable versions that just help you track this type of stuff and try to put what I’m saying here into your own terms. Right. So, if I’m a tax preparer, if I run a tax preparation company, think about a client here that is about ready to start their tax returns.
Onboarding Calls
When’s the last time you had a video call or one-to-one phone call that was actually valuable with Walmart, Amazon, Target or some other H&R Block or Turbo Tax? They can’t do it because they’re a different business model. So why are you trying to copy their model and be so robotic? Why not start that off with at least a video call? Put a face behind the name and start off that relationship on a high note. So, for us, the first step is that onboarding video call. Now, if I’m a dentist, if I’m an attorney, if I’m a chiropractor, this might be represented by when they walk through the door and I have that first conversation between my front desk person and a potential client or customer of mine. Right. That is the most important moment and if you don’t have a really strong pulse on what’s happening in those 20 seconds or 30 minutes, then that’s a big mistake. Because you could be losing customers. You might be losing on an opportunity to really create brand champions.
So, we have an on-boarding call. Now, notice what happens after the on-boarding call. I see this happen way too often. There will be a meeting that I have as a client for another business and after the call is over, I have no idea what I need to do. What’s the next step? What’s my homework? What do I need to do in order to move the ball forward? If your client or customer is asking, “hey, what’s next?” Or Where should I go now, you’ve missed an opportunity again. You should be preparing for those questions that they’re going to throw at you before they even happen. So, after our on-boarding call, we then send them a personal email with a summary of what the call covered, what the next steps are. And again, just a summary of the entire process as a whole.
Now, importantly, in the on-boarding call, we have our very own script that we go over. But our team has at least some guidelines so that we stay structured in our onboarding call while also allowing some flexibility so that what they ask a question and they get a unique answer or something’s different or interesting to our builder, we can ask what we feel is most natural. But there is a script or a guideline there for our build team. We have the on-boarding call, then the client receives a personalized email, then our team sends notes or tasks to our integrations team.
If the client brought up specific needs like they need a CRM, they need a live chat, they want to do online booking, online scheduling, they want to be able to take payments online. Our build team knows to add a note for integrations team to start work on that and then our integrations team will start working on that. There might be some unique situations for you where maybe during the onboarding call they mentioned several things where you need to bring in other teams or you need to prepare a separate document. You can have stages for that as well.
Creating Personalized Emails
Now we use HubSpot as a template. You might use a different platform like Milchan Constant Contact. You might not even have an email marketing platform, or you just might use Gmail or Outlook. That’s OK. You can create a template email anywhere. We’ll create a template email and Gmail in Outlook, make it look nice. Spend some time actually writing out the text, add in some graphics. Add in what I’m going to talk about in a second. An embedded video or a road map showing the process, and then that email gets sent to our clients as well so they receive a personalized email. Then we start the build. There’s the prebuild process that delights our customers, it answers all of their questions, It gives them a personalized email, It gives them a template, an email after we’ve completed certain steps, and guess what? We have these kinds of template trigger points, as we call them, throughout our build process.
Personalized Videos
Start to add in that personalization where you are embedding short videos of you, the face of the owner or the manager or the director, and you can send in check-ins or follow-ups that not only include written text in your email but also really easy to record embedded videos. So, video art is a great one. Loom is a great one. They both have really good free versions as well. If you need help setting those up, please contact us and we would love to help you out. Another great tool that we use a lot based here in Utah is PrivateLabelChocolate.net.
Another great example of using a local business and creating something that’s really going to help you stand out. With Private Label Chocolate, you’re able to order delicious chocolate truffles and put your own logo on the wrapper and deliver them straight to your client. Unforgettable, it literally is the chocolate on the pillow when you go into your hotel room and it just it’s that extra touch that’s exponentially more valuable than what it costs. So, there you have it. There are so many fun ideas on what you can do as a small business owner to leverage what makes you special and look at this as an opportunity instead of focusing on all these big corporations.
They have all of these things that I don’t have. They’ve got capital, they’ve got the bandwidth, they’ve got the tech, they’ve got experience, they’ve got a humongous team. Instead, focus on, well, I’m small, I’m agile, and I can talk to my customers one on one that they simply cannot do. That’s my recommendation for you. It’s helped us out a lot. Go to bigredjelly.com/comeback to download your free guide and you can read more about the other four points here. You can schedule a free consultation with us to talk about any of these tools or processes here.
