Welcome to Take Control with Nicole. As business owners, we experience firsthand the fine line between our personal and business lives. During our conversations, we will look at simple hints and tips to create time, reduce overwhelm, and help you to navigate through your journey to where you want to be. If you’re looking for smarter ways to work, and create space and time freedom in your day, then you’re in the right place. All right, let’s go.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to take control with Nicole. Have you heard of Zapier, Intromat, all of those things floating around the world before? They are connectors. We can zap this here, zap that there. So you know, when you’re working in the big corporate organisations, and they have custom built solutions, inside those databases and those software’s are a lot of different logics created that says when this happens, they go and do this. That is what these connectors software’s do for us in the small business world, we don’t have right now the budgets to really custom design and develop a solution that’s suitable specifically for our requirements. However, what we can use is these connector software’s that are out in the world that can help to streamline and ease and remove some of those manual elements in our processes to make that nice and simple and at a click of a button, off it goes and triggers all these fabulous set-up systems that are, or set-up elements of what you are doing in that process.

So an example that I can provide you of what these connectors could do is within our onboarding process. So when we have a new prospect or lead coming into our world, we may have a system, a CRM, like Dubsado, or HubSpot, or something along those lines that capture that initial conversations, or you could be using clickup. In this example, let’s talk about our onboarding system that’s going to be managed through clickup and with our other applications around. So let’s say our tech stack for this example is, we have clickup, we have Calendly, we have Google workspace, and then that’s where we are going to create all of the magic that’s happening.

So from our initial start, we have our intro call. So on our website, you have a, either a form or a calendar link to your calendar booking system. And they go ahead and introduce themselves via that particular access to you. So we’ve got this intro call, that data could stay in your calendar, if you’re you know, not capturing it anywhere else, if it’s not going into a system like dubsado, etc. You don’t really capture that anywhere, you may have a spreadsheet, you may have, you know, something down. So what we’ve built in click up, it’s a CRM for you. And so what we’re going to do, instead of manually adding that in there, we’re going to create a connector. Looking at when our calendar has received a meeting requests for a particular meeting type, we’re now going to pop that over into your prospects list within clickup. Click of a button, you’ve done nothing, it appears in there, we’ve got some automations native to click up as well that set the due date to the time of the call, it’s going to notify you because you’ve been set as the assignee. And also, you’ll get a little either email notification or a message from clickup in your notifications going, Hey, whoo, new prospect call coming in hot right now.

Fabulous, go ahead, you’ve had your call, you’re then going to proceed to proposal stage. So with that, you’re going to collect some information, we’re going to create our proposal. If you are using a software like I’ve spoken about outside in dubsado, or anything like that a proposal system, you’ll be going over there now to populate that information. Again, if you’ve already collected the some of those details at this stage point, we can create a zap that will add a tag or based on a trigger of a status change will go and send that information over to where it needs to go and start that process for you. Once we’ve had our agreement signed, and everything’s hunky dory we’re moving to that next stage, then we can have another notification that comes back in and triggers the next action. One of my favourite connectors that I have is when we’re at this stage of invoicing instead of having to go and manually create a customer in Xero I add a tag in my clickup it populates all of that information over into Xero and off I go in Xero as well. I’ve already set up the types of services I offer with the price points that I offer. And all of that is just again click of a button off it goes happy, happy Days.

Then we’re at onboarding. So we’ve paid our invoice, we’re ready to start working with our client. There could be a few steps that you need to do. In clickup, we want to create the client folder. This is already a template you’ve built to make sure that every client journey has that same customer experience, that same enjoyment from both internal in your business and from the outside client working with you as well. We need to set them up in Google workspace we want them to have we’re going to be collecting some some assets or some information, we want to store a signed copy of their agreement or any things like that, that we’re collecting. So we need a home for that. So we want to create a Google folder. In that folder, you might have subfolders. And you might also have documents that you want to live in there as well. So we want to be able to do all of that nice and easily. And then we also want to make sure that we’ve got our communication happening at all times with our clients. So for instance, if we’re collecting information from them at that initial stage, let them know that they filled that form out what the next steps are. So when my new clients come on board, we have an automation and clickup, they complete their onboarding form as part of my onboarding process. And they immediately get a response back that says, hey, thanks so much, this is what you can expect to happen. Next, you get an agreement, you get the invoice, and then we’re going to start to set you up so that we can actually work together beautifully and efficiently. So there’s lots of moving pieces, right. But if we can automate some of this, so if I come back now to we’re onboarding. So in, clickup, we’ve got our prospects list, we’ve got our clients list. So our prospect is now a client. So we update that status. Mine is woohoo, new client, all my clients that work with me get that fabulous, exciting status, that automatically moves our prospect across to the clients list, adds it to the status of onboarding, and then automatically we get triggers that are going through Zapier that connect in and create the template folder in clickup, I don’t use Google workspace that some of my clients do. And so one of the beautiful zaps we created was create a new folder based on the template based on the service type that they’re getting. Also, create a folder with three subfolders in a particular folder based on the service that they’re providing, or they’re working with us on. In that particular space and add these things in there. Also pop the details over to zero, because I’m ready to get that happening and going as well. So at one click of a button and clickup, we’ve now started our onboarding process. So it’s seamless, it’s really enjoyable and easy from my side, because you just click a button and off it pops. But from a client’s point of view, as well, it’s really quick and easy and simple. And you know, when they come to work with us, there’s no ah forgotten to do this, or I’ve forgotten to do that. That’s already done.

Just interrupting this episode for one little message. If you have been listening and love what you hear and want to come in connect, we have a Take Control with Nicole Facebook community, right over there on Facebook that I would love to invite you to come and join us. We are a supportive community, we are looking to really take action in our businesses and change the way or evolve the way we’re working right now. So I invite you to come on over and join our community and connect with us all. Community is the essence of everything in business, being able to really build those relationships that you can nurture, and grow and support and celebrate each other oh how fabulous, I hope to see you over there, pop on over to Facebook, Take Control with Nicole, see you soon.

So if you have processes in your business, right now, onboarding is just one example. You can use these systems, these connectors to really enhance your personal user experience. And really streamline those processes. remove some of that manual stuff that we don’t want to, we don’t need to be doing, clicking all the buttons, creating new folders. Use those templates that we’re building in clickup to or your or your tool of choice, whatever that might be. Let’s get some automations happening. Remove the manual, make it nice and easy. So guess what? You now have the space to be able to playing over in another area and really enjoy doing the area and the actions that you want to be doing. Also, if you have a team, you’ve on boarded a team member, you can confidently say that when they click the button, the experience is going to be exactly the same, because when we look at bringing automations in play, or really streamlining your processes, things are going to go based on the logic. This is the trigger. This is the action or actions. It’s going to be repeated each and every time. The different denominators will be the folders would be called different because that is what your trigger point and your actions are actually saying. Let me know, do you use Zapier and Integromat at the moment or similar? Pop a story or send me a DM over on Instagram @theartisanssolutions I look forward to hearing from you. And whatever you’re up to for the rest of the day, I hope you have a wonderful day creating space and time freedom bye now.

Well, there we go. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been such a pleasure having you on board. Have we connected on socials yet? If not, please come on over say hi, I’m on all the platforms @theartisanssolutions. So I’d really look forward to seeing you over there. And if you enjoy today’s episode, don’t forget to tag me and I’d love it if you could leave a review and of course share this with others so others can come and join us next time. All right, then everyone have a fabulous rest of the week. And until next time, see you then