Automate your Intake Process

There's nothing more frustrating than investing time with a prospective client, only to then learn that they are not a good fit for your services. Maybe they don't have the necessary budget to hire you - maybe they aren't looking for the type of help you offer - there are many reasons someone might not be a good fit. Instead of having wasted both of your time, wouldn't it be better if you had a system to vet your prospects in advance?

My preferred method for this is to use a form to gather prospect information. There's no 'one-size-fits-all' template, but you can ask questions that suit your unique business needs. It's generally recommended that you have some questions that qualify the ability and willingness to invest in help. In addition, you will want to get a gauge of the size and expectations of the organization. Using a custom form is critical for delivering the specific information that you'll need.

Once the information is gathered, the next step is for a decision to be made. For many businesses, they have multiple offerings, so the decision isn't as simple as YES/NO. For more complex cases, you will want to create multiple automated workflows to forward your prospects down your path that best matches their needs, wants, and budget.

For example, GAP Consulting offers both development and coaching services. Development clients have larger budgets and they don't want to learn the ins and outs of Airtable - they just want our help getting their solution built. On the other hand, Coaching clients want to learn how to build and maintain their own Airtable systems - of course the investment for this is more time intensive, but less financially cumbersome. The information that we follow up with should be unique for these two types of clients.

In this week's video, I walk through how you can build a sample intake form. From there, we determine an outcome for each form request and we support those outcomes using automation.

If you're ready to save yourself hours by not talking to the wrong prospects, implement a similar system in your business following these easy steps!

This video was sponsored by Stacker - use discount code GAP15 to get 15% off a custom UI for your database!