After the Sale: Onboarding & Offboarding

The Humane Marketing Show. A podcast for a generation of marketers who care.

This episode is part of a 12 days of Christmas read-along of the Selling Like We're Human book, recorded in 2021.

The book follows a similar concept to what you're already used to here on the Humane Marketing show with the 7Ps of Humane Marketing and the Marketing Like We're Human book: we start with the being and then go into the doing.

The 3 parts of the Selling Like We're Human book are : Being, Knowing and Doing (compared to Rumble, Rise and Resonate of the Marketing Like We're Human book)

Today I'm reading a small section of Part 3 on DOING, Chapter 10 called 'After the Sale: Onboarding & Offboarding'

Excerpt from Selling Like We're Human, Part 3: DOING, Chapter 10: After the Sale: Onboarding & Offboarding

Onboarding If you reached the end of the book, or almost, and think to yourself, “Yes, I adhere to the ideas outlined here and having beautiful sales conversations in my Serene Garden sounds lovely, but actually I’d still rather avoid them all together and have clients just call me and say ‘I’d like to work with you. So and so spoke very highly of you and recommended your services,’” then pay extra attention to this part of the book. While it’s important to focus on the gentle sales path, it’s equally important to not just take things for granted once you get the sale. Like John Jantsch says in his excellent book The Referral Engine: “The sale is not complete until the customer is so happy that he or she confidently makes referrals.” That’s our goal in this chapter. The Mistake of Seeing Small Items as “Leads” While a sale might look like the final destination of your gentle sales path, it’s often only the midpoint of your client’s journey with you. Especially in the online world, people often like to “try out” what it feels like to be in our world, so they make a small snack-sized purchase like an e-book, a summit, or any other small item. But this is where the nurturing begins! One might think that it’s not worth spending too much time and effort on the onboarding journey of such a small dollar amount, but quite the opposite is true. When I was writing the first book and knew nothing about self-publishing, I came across all kinds of marketing and publishing schemes. Quite a few of them were “self-publishing gurus” who sold the idea of publishing a book as a lead magnet. The idea per se is not bad; it all depends on the intention of the author. If the intention is “I’ve written this beautiful book and I want to share this knowledge with as many people as possible so they can apply it in their business,” then I see nothing wrong with sharing your book for free, or almost free. If, however, the intention is “Let me write a quick (crappy) book and use it to get thousands of new leads so I can then sell them my two thousand dollar program,” then I’m ready to bet that this author doesn’t care whether her content works for me or not. She cares about selling those programs and only uses her book as a lead magnet. Small items matter. Someone reading your book, attending your summit, or participating in a free webinar is entering your sales path, and every step of the way counts! Adam Kawalec, business mindset coach, did this really well with his Authentic Business Building and Marketing Summit. He told me that as long as he could keep up, he created a personal welcome video message for everyone who signed up. Yes, a custom-made video for each participant. Talk about feeling heard and seen! By doing that, Adam showed that each person counts to him and that it wasn’t about the numbers, but about each individual who showed up. Remember Adam’s “move the pay line” concept? In the service business, we call the phase after the monetary transaction “onboarding.” We’re bringing a new client on board. Yes, money has been exchanged, but maybe your client is still a bit nervous about your collaboration or about the purchase they’ve made. It’s your job to put them at ease, welcome them, and show them how you roll. The more personalized your onboarding, the better. When I signed up for coaching with Jenny Blake, I received the most gorgeous bouquet of white lilies I had ever seen. It was such a beautiful surprise. And after signing up to work on the HumaneGen Marketing Design with Nela, I was impressed by her onboarding process as well. Not only was it efficient, it was beautiful as well. She used a custom-designed Trello board to layout the whole design process for me and explain each step. The board also served as an efficient way for us to communicate and have all the history of our exchanges in one place. Nela didn’t copy that process from a pre-existing framework she downloaded from some well-meaning site. She designed it for her customers. Think about your onboarding process. Is it clear and efficient? Is it beautiful? Maybe even whimsical? How does it make your client feel? No matter how big or small the sale, really focus on the details and how this experience of doing business with you will make people feel. It may be just ten dollars for a book at the beginning, but this reader just might turn into your most loyal heartfelt promoter. Pay attention to the little things! Customer Service Another important phase after the sale is the customer service. As a reader of this book you get access to a whole collection of free resources (www.humane.marketing/book2). This is a way for you to deepen the learning, reflect on what you’ve read, and integrate it into your work. To me, that falls into the phase of customer service. If I have your best interest at heart, I want you to really use the knowledge of this book and not just read it and move on. Yes, I do have a full program available as well, and I’m hoping to work one-on-one with some of you, but you can totally do everything on your own with the resources I give you.

#vulnerabilityalert

When I created my first online course, The LinkedIn Profile Quick Fix, I hadn’t considered that I’d need to offer customer service for participants of the program. Given the duct tape system I used, there was no way for members to ask questions in an easy format like a forum for example. So I quickly found myself answering customer e-mails at all hours of the day. Not fun! Not fun for them, and not fun for me either! Think about your customer service. Is it efficient? Is it personal? How does it make your client feel? As service providers, we don’t have to deal with repairs. But we do have to address customer questions.

Also listen to my conversation with Stacy Sherman about the customer experience in episode 109

This excerpt is from Part 3: DOING, Chapter 10: After the Sale: Onboarding & Offboarding

If what you heard today resonates with you and made you curious about the book, I invite you to get your copy of the new Selling Like You're Human book at humane.marketing/book2. You can also download the whole 1st chapter for free to see if it resonates.

And I'm also planting a seed about my 'Marketing Like We're Human' program that I'll run in its live edition starting at the end of January 2022. This is where we take all these concepts from the two books as well as the 7Ps of Humane Marketing to a much much deeper level in an intimate group learning experience. Find out more at www.humane.marketing/program

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