“I’m sure on my client’s side things are running smoothly during our projects, but on my end it feels like a hot mess 🔥”

SPOILER ALERT: They’re probably not that great for your client either, they just don’t know how much better working with you could be.

As an operations consultant, the area I see overlooked in creative businesses every time is client management, especially the inquiry process (which is why I’m launching a workshop all about it – get on the waitlist for it here) IMHO, the inquiry process is the most important part of your client management process because it’s how you turn fans of your marketing into paying clients – you know the people who pay your bills.

Your inquiry process allows you to leverage the messaging you’ve been putting out into the world and actually get people in the door to work with you. Without a clear process to get in touch with you and receive an engaging response telling them how to work with you, your marketing will always fall short of your hopes and expectations.

When someone shows an interest in working with you, you have an opportunity to provide a supportive and intentional inquiry experience that solidifies you as a trustworthy professional and an established creative visionary.

Let’s break down how you can infuse your inquiry process with the intention, planning and strategy it needs to convert leads and support you as a creative visionary instead of adding more work to your plate.

Segmentation Is Key

Break up your audience into marketing segments based on how they’ve interacted with your business, This will allow you to tailor your approach to your people based on whether they’ve worked with you before or not, what capacity you worked together in or even how long they’ve been in your community. That way, you can better speak to their exact needs and convert them into clients more easily than sending a bunch of generic or irrelevant info their way.

There are so many great ways to segment your audience, from email marketing platforms like Flodesk to direct messaging automation with a platform like Manychat. Using marketing platforms to segment your audience also opens the door to tons of automation that can get more members of your audience to your contact form. You can also create messaging funnels to those segments to reach out to them after you’ve worked together with more relevant offers and messaging to keep them coming back for more.

Customize Your Client Journey

Your inquiry process should support your offers, which means the messaging leads receive should deliver info relevant to their interests. Customizing your lead’s journey means creating an experience that deepens their interest in the service they want from you and gives them a clear path to work with you in that capacity.

Most client management systems like HoneyBook and Dubsado allow you to create different automated responses and lead funnels based on your different services. Use these to your advantage to give your leads clear on-brand calls to action based on the service they want from the moment they submit their contact form.

That can look like giving them immediate access to the free consultation booking link, giving them a timeline of when they can expect to hear from you, sharing a service guide where they can learn more or a questionnaire they can fill out to qualify themselves as aligned clients. After that, you can continue to use those service-specific messaging funnels to deliver onboarding info and welcome them to your project management space after they give you a big “Hell yes!”

Automate Wherever You Can

Some pushback I get when I recommend that my clients automate their inquiry process is that their process is just too custom to automate. If you’re nodding your head to that, I have some tough-love realness for you:

A.) Just because you manually wrote back to someone doesn’t mean you’re adding any value with that “personal touch.”

B.) If no two projects you do look the same, streamline the way your services are structured to make client work easier on yourself. There should be a through line across the work you do as a creative professional.

Automating parts of your messaging doesn’t have to mean sounding like a robot or being unable to customize your services. It should really mean:

• Not having to drop everything to send each lead the same thank you message;
• Leaving back and forth emails finding a time to meet in the past;
• Using your time where it counts in your client’s journey to be present and add real value instead of barely keeping up with going through the motions.

Combining your brand voice with automated messaging is a perfect way to show your leads what they’re getting themselves into while keeping them engaged in the process and hyped to start working together. It also allows you to stay in touch with them in a timely manner and close those communication gaps between initial inquiry and onboarding.

If you’ve gone above and beyond with your visuals but it’s crickets when someone gets in the door to work with you, you’re missing a major opportunity to convert leads with your amazing brand presence and creative proficiency.

When you invest this kind of intention and strategy into your inquiry process, you’ll have to do less work to get leads in the room with you. That means spending more time where it counts, whether that’s delivering killer results on client projects, working on exciting new developments for your biz behind the scenes or just living your best life.

Dive Deeper Into Client Management

I know how much quality client management processes can improve the way you work and run your business. If you’re about to head to your CMS to start implementing these creative systems tips, I wanna officially invite you to my next workshop, The Passion-Driven Process.

In this three-part workshop, we’ll dig deep into ways to make your client management process do the heavy lifting for you from the initial inquiry to offboarding so you can focus on bringing your client’s vision to life. Want in on it? Here’s where you can join the waitlist for first dibs on a spot when the cart opens!