 If you build websites for clients, then you know when you get that lead, any lead, it feels really good. I mean, when you get an email with somebody saying, Hey, someone referred us to you to help us build your website. Or you get another email and somebody saying, Hey, we really like your work. We like what we see and want to talk to you about you helping us with our website. It's a great feeling. I love it. I know you love it too. I mean, it's almost like a shot of dopamine, right? Like you get it, you get that rush. Now, but what's really important after we get that lead is how do we nurture it? And how do we turn that lead into a call, a discussion with the client into an initial consultation or discovery call, which then could lead into a pain project. What's up, everyone? I'm Jeffrey at Lightbox. And what I want to do in this video is I want to give everyone an inside look into my own onboarding process, how I nurture leads that come in. Also, how I turn them into initial consultations and do it in a way that is automated and in a way that qualifies the lead and best prepares me for the conversation with the client, which gives a very much higher success rate in landing the project. The first step to all this is going to be automation. Now, automation is key because here's the thing. Sometimes we get so busy, we're in the zone, working on a website for client and the design in something we get really busy. And if we get that lead while we're in the zone and busy, one of two things usually happens if we don't have a process set up. The first one is we stop working on what we're working on, take time, craft up an email and try to land that new project. And that interferes with our current project and can set that project back. Because, you know, when you deviate your attention from anything, it takes a good amount of time to get that attention back to it. So what might seem like a 30 minute task could actually end up costing more around a couple hours or even more. The other problem that happens is that we're so busy in our current tasks that we're like, we'll get back to that lead when we got time. In fact, this is a one thing I used to be guilty of because I didn't want to break my concentration from what I was working on. And then time goes by fast, you know, gets so busy and a day or two could go by before responding to that new lead. And then you already lose that window. Like the window is very short to nurture a lead. We need to be able to respond right away, but to respond right away in a way that does not take us away from our current work. Flow, we need to automate things. So here is my automation process. First up, we got to have the scheduling tool and this I cannot emphasize how important this is to have if we are a freelancer or running an agency. Now we can use Calendly or we could use tidy cow. Both of them are going to work just the same for what I'm going to show. They're both effective in the process I'm going to share with you. Now they aren't expensive at all. In fact, the Calendly one, you could do what I'm about to do and show you with the free plan. The only problem is on the free plan, you can only have one calendar. And if you look at my tidy cow, you can see I got several calendars right here for different situations, different clients, etc. All right. And then if you go for tidy cow, well, tidy cow is 30 bucks for a one time purchase. So this is a very great investment. So anybody could get started with that. It's only 30 bucks. Now there are a couple of big reasons and purposes for having a scheduling tool like this. One is that clients tend to be in different locations in our line of work. So we may be getting leads that are in different locations. So this helps to match up the time, the different time zones. Also, it creates an automated system and process for a client to be able to find and pick their time. And that's pretty much what we see as like the standard benefit, but there's one more I'm going to show. So the first part of automation is going to be setting up the calendar. And it's pretty simple to do. Just go ahead and go in and choose your times that you want to keep your calendar open. You know, all it does is take about 20, 30 minutes to go through and set up. So that part right there is the first part of the automation, the second part. And this part right here was the game changer for me. This is where I started to see the most results, the biggest results come from. And that are the list of questions that I have prepared for when a client does want to book. So let's say client messages and I send them a link and they get a link. Here is the link to schedule a call with me. So they'll pick a time and they'll find one. Let's say they pick Wednesday and they'll pick it at eight. I'm an early bird. So I wake up early. It's all good. And now I have a set of questions here for the client to answer before they complete the schedule. Now this right here is far more effective than trying to add questions on your form. The problem with adding questions on your contact form on your website is the more that you add on there, the more clients are going to bounce. I mean, it's crazy if you just knew how many times somebody started to fill out the form and change your mind. I've done a lot of UX and UX testing and heat map testing. And I saw that even with basic forms like just a name, email and send or name, email message and send. During that process of filling out the form, the client has second thoughts, doubts or just a bunch of different reasons why they don't hit that send or submit button. So the more things you add to that contact form is more time for the client to change their mind before reaching out. Keep the form as simple as possible because the thing is once the client fills out the form, they just take in their first step to connect with you. They just made their first commitment. Now going back to our form here, when we send the link out to the client and the client clicks on it and chooses a time, they just made their second commitment. They just took the second step into having a call with you. They're in the flow. They're in the process. They want to talk. So by adding these questions at in now at the end, you're adding it to them while they are already committed to fulfill this engagement right here and to get this started. So let me go through the questions and I want to show you which questions I have that I ask clients. And I'm going to encourage everyone copy this replicated. Please feel free to 100% replicated and use it in your own. That's the reason why I'm showing it. All right. So the first are the basics. This is part of just County name and email. I also want to know the company name because with this I could do some research on LinkedIn before a call. And then we got the website address. Now this one I leave optional because they might not have a website yet. But every other question on here is not optional. Like if they're mandatory questions, I need to get that information because it's going to help me in our call. The next one, I want to know the business size. How many people are actually in their company? This will show me if it's a small company, a startup, somebody just working on their own or if they're a large company. Because I have been surprised before where I thought I was getting on a call with somebody. I thought it was a small little business and it turned out to be a very large company and I wasn't prepared properly for that. So I want to know a little bit about their business. You know, they could just let me know what they do. It helps out. This is something I've recently added and that is asking them what services are they looking for? Now I've only added this recently because we started offering more services at my agency. We're starting to do SEO, branding, logo design, stuff like that. And I found that clients were reaching out to us for their website design and development because that's what we're known for and didn't realize we were also capable of offering other services and they were going to other companies for those other services. So I snuck this in here on my questionnaire because first this is going to position us as somebody able to complete these kind of services for the client. But also to let us know what does a client need? Do they need marketing? Do they need SEO? Are they thinking about it? And it'll get them thinking about it as well. And then over here, I want to know where they're located. This helps me out with understanding like their time zone and where they're calling from. And then here is the big one. What is a budget for this project? This gives me an idea of the ballpark they're in. So if you see someone going anywhere from, you know, 1000 to 5000, we know that they want just a basic website. If it's under 1000, well, they're looking for something that is not, you know, really priority. Like they're not really willing to invest quite yet. If they're looking at 5 to 15k, okay, they want something good. They got a good budget. They know they need something proper, 15 to 25k, the same thing. And if they go for 25 plus, they're thinking of something bigger, probably a custom project. But this helps me to get prepared. And then this is for my own marketing research. How did they find us? And once they filled all this out, now I'll be prepared, ready to go into our call and have a higher chance of closing that project and making it a paying project for us. And the last thing we need to do is integrate either Zoom or Google Meet. And you can do that with Calendly or Tidy Cow. They both work the same. In fact, everything I'm showing you works the same on them. But by integrating it, once the client fills out and schedules, everything is done. You have your meeting link sent to both of you. It's going to both of your calendars and you have your list of questions to prepare you for your call and your meeting with the client that we could go in and just rock it. All right, cool. There's one more thing now, one more thing I want to show. And this is the last part of the automation. And that is to have an email template. So here is my email template right here. All I got to do is copy and paste this over over here. I would just put in the client's name. I have a little section that adds something personalized here. I wouldn't spend too much time if they reach out and say, hey, we got a Shopify site. I would just put something like, hey, we'll be excited to work on your Shopify site. Something just a little bit personalized because the goal for this is to set everything up. Take your time on it now. Spend like a good hour on it now. Build out the process. Have everything ready to go because once it's ready to go, all I got to do is go here to my templates. Copy this, paste it into the email, make a couple little tweaks, and I'm not deviating from my current workflow. I'm able to message the client right away. The client, they just reach out to us about, you know, a project and they get an email back within 15, 20, 30 minutes. We're already building goodwill with the client. I hope this helps out and please, I encourage everybody to copy and paste this. That's the reason why I wanted to show it because it took me a while to get to this point. It took a lot of trial and error. And I went through freelancing and building the agency and I had to build systems and processes like this. And I want to share this with everyone so it doesn't take you as long to get to that point. You can get ahead a whole lot faster. And if you already do have a system in process, maybe there's something in here that you could add into yours to help improve it a little bit. The one thing about systems and processes, first off, we need them when either freelancing or building an agency. We need them inside our business, but they are always on a constant evolution of improvement. They're always evolving. And once you get into that mindset of looking at how to continuously improve processes and systems, well, you're going to see just a drastic improvement in your overall business. Well, I hope this video helps out. If you have any questions, drop them inside the comments and I'll be back again with more web design and web design business related content again soon. Thank you.