Clients are our bread and butter. Without them, we wouldn’t even have a business. So it’s crucial that we create a positive impression from the start, and continue to make their lives easier as they work with us. This process starts with a great client onboarding workflow. Whether you are a coach or a service provider, having a professional workflow for onboarding new clients is beneficial by saving you tons of time and providing your client with a great first impression. In this post, we’ll talk about some ways you can improve your onboarding process using HoneyBook.
1) Make Saying ‘YES’ Easy
After a new client accepts a proposal and says ‘yes, what are the typical next steps for each client? This is the process that we want to map out and start a new HoneyBook workflow for. No more manually sending contracts, invoices, or welcome emails.
HoneyBook workflows are powerful, but you need to know the steps involved to create a workflow that actually works for you and your business. Everything is on-brand as well which provides your clients with a high-touch experience letting your clients know you are professional and care about your business and the level of service you provide.
2) Send a New Client Welcome Kit
Do you currently send a new client welcome kit? You can create a client welcome kit in Canva, save it as a PDF, and send it automatically in your welcome email inside your HoneyBook workflow. They can make a real difference in that client onboarding experience and put out a professional image right from the start.
What should a client welcome kit include?
- A welcome page expressing how excited you are to get started
- An overview of the client’s next steps
- Do they need to book a call? Do they need to provide information? Make it easy for them and include that info in the welcome kit PDF
- Payment details and terms
- Communication methods, turnaround times, and any other important information from your contract or agreement

3) Get What Information You Need
A critical step in the client onboarding process that will make your life a lot easier is to ensure you have a process set up for getting what you need from the client. Think about everything you could need for each project type or service you offer, such as:
- Information about their ideal audience, goals, expectations
- Their login information and details
- Their branding information – fonts, color hex codes, images
- Copy or Content (ex: for website designers)
Once you have that mapped out, you can create a streamlined process for getting this information from your new client using HoneyBook workflows (and forms!).
For our agency, we’ve actually created multiple forms within our business: inquiry, onboarding which asks general questions about their business, one for web design, one for a VIP day, another with launch information if we are doing a launch-specific project, and so on. It’s so convenient to have everything accessible by client.
4) Set up Meetings /Communication with Your New Client
If meetings or support are included in your package, we don’t want to leave those reminders as manual tasks. Automate them! You can easily set it up in your HoneyBook workflow to send an email every 30 days (for example) to remind your coaching clients to book their calls for the next month.
That’s the beauty of automation and processes; we can customize everything to fit your business. HoneyBook does have an integrated call scheduler, but I’ve also used Acuity and Book Like a Boss. You can also integrate tools like Zoom or Google Meet for managing your client communication as well. For a list of some of my favorite must-have tools for starting and scaling your business with ease, I’ve listed them here.
5) The Biggest Tip in Creating Your Client Onboarding Workflow: Map Out Your Process
The first step in creating your client onboarding workflow will always be mapping out your onboarding process. I find it easiest to draw this out on paper. Think about each step in detail for your business: do you send a welcome email? Is there an onboarding questionnaire that needs to be filled out? How many days would they need to fill that out? Will you send a reminder? Do you have a kickoff call where you review the questionnaire in more detail? Do you send a new client welcome gift? Is this only for certain package price points? How are invoice reminders set up? Don’t skip any steps in this process, because you can make this as high touch as you like. Once you set it up as an automated workflow, it’s ready to go and will give your clients an experience they won’t forget!
If you want help creating a streamlined onboarding process for your clients, book a discovery call right here so we can chat.in