When I was starting off coaching clients, nobody told me how I should specifically onboard a new client. All I knew I had to do is to change people. So, what happened was I would sign coaching clients up and one of the things that I did miss is to send people tax receipts and tax invoices. I would only write down what they paid me on a piece of paper. I got to the end of the year without any idea how much my coaching business had made. I checked my bank account and because I also spent so much of the money, I was still at zero. I also didn’t know what I’d been paid because I didn’t have an accounting system.
I think it’s very important because what happened back then was I received all this money, didn’t spend it at all, but then an accountant had to do all my taxes. And in the end, they were sorry to inform me that I was actually up for a $50,000 tax bill. I then received a letter from the Australian Taxation Office that said I owe them $50,000 due within I think it was like a month or two”.
That was kind of inconvenient for me. So, I’ve created an onboarding process which you can follow, so when you sign up a new coaching client, you won’t experience that pain I felt before.
1. Have a way to take payment. Many coaches miss this. You might need B-point which is linked to the Commonwealth Bank– a bank in Australia. You could use Stripe which is an international payment platform that allows you to take credit card and debit card details. It’s very effective. I believe it allows bank transfers as well. Also, there’s PayPal, although it has slightly higher service fee rates than Stripe. You’ve got Square which you could also use to take debit card and credit card payments. Or you could do a bank transfer as well.
You want to have your bank details handy on your phone or on your computer all the time. Wherever you go, you’ve got your bank details handy with you because you want to be able to receive money at any time. You also want to be able to have an easy-access on your phone or somewhere to take debit card and credit card details. You want to be able to accept money from the universe and the way you do that is to have lots of ways to receive money.
No matter how many people or coaches tell this, they still somehow miss it unconsciously and it’s the number one thing to do. When you’re on a sales call, always have those payment gateways open and ready to go.
2. Have them sign an agreement. We use Adobe e-signature. I really love it. I think it’s great. If you wanted help for what you could have in an agreement, you could go to my website lukehawkins.com. We have some terms and conditions there. You could probably model some things off that if you wanted to.
The good thing about Adobe e-signature is you can send it through an email and your client can sign it right on the call. Remember that they’re a projection of you, so if you feel funny about it, your clients are gonna feel funny about it, too. So, you have to tell them firmly that it’s part of the process.
If you buy a home, you’ve got to sign agreements and it’s the same thing if they buy a coaching program. This is also to protect you because you’re gonna make investments of your time and energy and probably even money to serve them. That’s why you need to have them sign it on the call and read it through with them.
3. Celebrate them. You can ask your client if it is okay with them if you celebrate them on social media. If so, then you can celebrate them on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, or on your Facebook and Instagram stories. You want to celebrate them everywhere because momentum builds momentum. And if other people see you all excited and happy, they will be like “Wow, that must be good”.
If you can tag them on your stories or tag them in a post, that’s even better. It goes to their social media and could get clients from it based on you signing them up– which is very helpful.
There were times that I even dressed up something funny, something crazy, or I would dress up as a whoopee cushion or as Santa Claus saying Christmas has come early just to get more people into my course. Celebrate them in any way you can.
4. Send them a confirmation email. That confirmation email should have what they bought, what’s in the program that they bought, how it’s gonna work, and how the support works. You need to make sure you put the boundaries around what your communication methods are– maybe it’s by text, or maybe it’s by Facebook Messenger etc. Just put boundaries on how they can communicate to you, how often, what time they can contact you and the time that’s going to take you to respond.
5. Store them as a client in a Customer Relationship Manager. We use ActiveCampaign and we also have Salesforce. We use ActiveCampaign and I actually find it pretty good. You can also use Excel sheets where you can just put all your clients in there, the date that they signed up and the date that they finish, how much they paid, the total amount that is due if they haven’t paid at all yet. That way, you’ve got it all in one place. You don’t want to use paper.
6. Send them a tax invoice. We use Xero as it’s quite simple. You could use QuickBooks or other accounting software out there. Just make sure you send them a tax invoice that shows what they’ve paid. If they’ve got money outstanding, you can have that in the tax invoice too and say when that payment is due. If you do that, you have all your accounting in place.
You could do that step or if you like, you could get a bookkeeper to do it for $20-$50 an hour. You can probably find people overseas for cheaper than that.
I recommend you to send them a tax invoice so you’ve got all your tax up to date. If possible, send it straight away after the sales or you could do them all at the end of the week, or get someone to do them for you all at the end of the week.
7. Give them some value to start. I think this is really good because it helps with the sales as well. You could say I want you to start doing these affirmations or I want you to start this gratitude journal etc.
I always like to give my clients something to start with so they can go out and start getting results straight away and changing the way they feel. It could be doing rituals in the morning, meditation, or jumping up and down or any of those things.
Those are the seven steps that I would recommend you to follow. I would love to see what results you’ve got from this.
