Increased Process Lowers Client Anxiety

Without clients, you don't have a business, and here's my argument for why process will not only set you free, but process in your business will increase client success, increase client retention, and even put client referrals of new business to you through the roof. When you increase organizational process, you decrease client insecurity and doubt, and it's one of the fastest ways to grow and improve your results.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum Podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few, who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

Here's one of the biggest challenges with being an entrepreneur is that we naturally fight process because process makes us feel constrained. Doing the same thing over and over again the same way makes us feel like we aren't innovating, like we're not doing anything, like we're not moving things forward. In fact, when we think about sometimes creating process, it makes us feel like a lack of momentum. It makes us feel constraint. It makes us feel resistance. And when we talk about processes, entrepreneurs, I know, believe me, I've been talking about process with entrepreneurs for decades. It's one of the most difficult conversations we have because it's something that we don't naturally pursue.

In fact, let's be honest, entrepreneurs naturally try and stay out of process. We naturally want to do new things everyday. We naturally want to innovate. We want to change things. We want to improve things. We don't want to create a process to do the same thing the same way every time.

Well, in your business, if you want increased customer success, if you want your clients to do better with your products, if you have a service business, if you want your clients to be more satisfied with your service, if you have a retail products business, if you want your clients to appreciate the retail product more, if you have a coaching business or consulting business or an agency. If you want your clients to have a higher level of confidence in you, higher level of clarity as to what you're doing, and a higher level of commitment to your programs, then here's how you make all of that happen. You increase your organizational and delivery process. You create a tight organizational and delivery process.

And what will happen is the more clear your process is the tighter your delivery process is, the more predictable it is, the more the client knows what's going to happen, because they're told in advance. Then they experienced exactly what happened because you told them and then they got it, and then they see the results of what happened because you let them know what the outcome will be. The more that that equation happens in any delivery process, the more confident your clients become. The more that they will experience success with your program. Your retention numbers will go up because when you increase client confidence, that's where retention will go up and when you increase client success, you increase retention. You're going to get more referrals in your business. And here's what I mean by this.

You can go back and listen to my podcast called Build Deep Process to understand the high level of how to build processes, but I want to share with you just one quick anecdote about some clients that I have that have done this. In fact, I'm excited because I'm going to be interviewing Brad [Cobb 00:04:15] and Ryan Lee, who are the owners of the Cashflow Tactics Academy, and they have a business that is absolutely exploding. And a few months ago, we actually talked about how much their business was growing and they had to make a decision. Did they continue to pursue growth and numbers and sales with very challenging delivery processes that they had in place, or would they slow down growth and sales and adding clients to build processes around their delivery systems? And after a discussion, they decided to slow things down, build processes, and increase efficiencies.

Now, they couldn't have possibly predicted just how dramatic the shift would be from building process to where they were before. In fact, when we got on a call, and this is what we consider a building process, it's clearly documenting every step in the critical processes of your company. As the example for Brad and Ryan, it was their onboarding process of a new client. They're a coaching company, a group coaching company. When they got a new client, the client had to be onboarded, added to the systems. Everybody on their team had to understand who the client was. They had to make sure that the client went through the right processes. And when before we had talked about process, their onboarding process took about four hours and they got somewhat inconsistent results. But on their side, the labor was about four hours. Then on the client side, they were experiencing that same disorganization and long process and the results were inconsistent and they often ended up cleaning up afterwards.

So they went through the process of building process. They first documented the current process that they had, and they did that in a Lucidchart, I forgot the name of the product, but they did that in Lucidchart where you make simple flow charts that show step by step exactly what your process is. Now, here's what's interesting, just in the documentation of the process, you start seeing inefficiencies and missteps and opportunities to make things easier, cleaner, and clearer, and you start seeing where you can make things more efficient and more effective. Well, here's the punchline, the result of Brad and Ryan with their team going through their onboarding process by building out the process, by creating a flow chart, then a checklist, then a process document by letting their team have their input, by reviewing everything that they did for a client, here's what happened. They went from a four-hour onboarding process with inconsistent results, down to a 20-minute onboarding process that was easier for them, obviously, far easier for the client and got consistent results. And here's what's so interesting about this. When you make a dramatic change like that, where the client experience radically improves like it did in this case, where you start getting consistent results, there's this domino effect that you can't possibly see as an entrepreneur before you start building the process. Because that onboarding process actually improves the client's confidence at the beginning.

Their confidence goes up because it's easy, it's clear, they know that they're getting taken care of. People want to see a clear process in place and they don't want to think that there's any doubt as to what they should do next. They don't want to experience any doubt as to what they should do next. So Brad and Ryan put that process in place and it saved them a ton of time, so client confidence went up.

Second, the client's commitment to the product that they bought from Brad and Ryan goes through the roof. Because if you experience a delivery process that's sloppy, that takes a lot of time, that feels like there's missteps. If the person on the other side seems unsure or the process seems ambiguous, your insecurity in the money you've just spent goes up. Your commitment to the process that you're supposed to be in goes down, and you start thinking, where else are these people going to miss?

Now, the opposite of that is also true. We want to make sure that the client's commitment is as high as it possibly can be. Their confidence is off the charts. They're completely clear on the process it's coming in. And when Brad and Ryan created that, the domino effect is that client commitment goes up through the rest of the entire delivery process. If you're a coaching company, an agency, a medical practice of any kind, if you have information products, if you're affecting individuals in any way, and you're bringing them into your organization, and your processes are unclear. If your first appointment process is unclear, if your onboarding process is unclear, you're going to put your client's insecurities on high alert.

In fact, you know, Cadey, my wife, has had some severe challenges with digestive issues for the past couple of years. In fact, we've just gotten them under control. It's been a very frightening process. She's had to see a ton of different practitioners. And in that process, we actually got to watch how different doctor's offices did things. In fact, there's a doctor's office here in Austin, I'm not going to name the name because it doesn't matter, it's the example is more important, that there's a doctor's office that was highly recommended by several friends of ours. And it was a doctor that Cadey finally was convinced that she wanted to go see. So she actually went to the website and tried to apply to book an appointment several times, and the process from submitting her information to hearing from somebody back in the practice was so haphazard and so unclear and so broken that Cadey decided not to see the medical practitioner, even though they were highly recommended. Because she and I both know that if the onboarding process or the lead capture process and conversion process is messy, then there's a high likelihood the delivery process is messy and the doctor's office is unorganized. And as a patient, we're not going to feel confident, we're not going to feel clarity and we're not going to feel that commitment.

So, if you have a service business where you've been having delivery issues, I want you to ask yourself, is it a process issue? If you have a coaching company where your clients start to lose confidence or lose momentum in the process, I want you to ask yourself, do you have an issue with how they're being onboarded, delivered to, or brought through the program? Because here's what I want you to know about a customer delivery process, customer onboarding process, any interface you have with clients. The more clear the process is, the more predictable it is, the more commitment your team has to the same process where it's clear, effective, and it happens the same way every time, the more your client's confidence will go up, the less customer service issues you will have and the more referrals you will get as a business.

If you don't have process around the interfacing with a client that you do right now, around the delivery that you have with a client right now, this may be one of the biggest opportunities you have in your business. Build processes around customer delivery, and you will see everything in your business change.

Now, if you're ready to build process, not just around customer delivery but around the critical systems in your business, around strategic planning, communicating with your team in a way that everyone knows where you're going, and consistently building the infrastructure of people, process and projects around you so that your business can scale at the maximum rate, then reach out to us, because we're ready to help you. You don't have to do this all alone.

Go to billionairecode.com/apply. Let us show you how to grow your company exponentially without feeling like you have to do it all yourself. Let us show you how to communicate with your team in a way that everyone knows where you're going so they're out in front of you, helping you get there. And let us show you how to confidently hire new people, onboard them to your team, and have them be productive fast so that you grow at the rate you know you should be. Go to billionairecode.com/apply. We're looking forward to talking to you.