The transition from pre-sale to post-sale is critical for the customer experience. Addressing this transition instills your customer with confidence. combats buyer’s remorse, and sets them up for a successful and fruitful relationship with your agency. This guide will help you go through the necessary steps in the platform to ensure everything runs smoothly, but remember to continually work with your customer to address questions and ensure their experience is the best it can be!
Getting Started Checklist
Prerequisites
Before ordering products for your new customer, you will want to double-check three prerequisites:
- You are ready to collect payment via Vendasta Payments.
- Check out this guide to set up Vendasta Payments: Getting Started: Collect payments in-platform
- You are using Subscriptions to collect recurrent payments.
- Learn how to set up and use Subscriptions here: Subscription Billing
- You have selected that you want to Start Selling on the products you plan to order.
- You can learn more about selling products and setting up your store in our Build Your Store: Quick Reference Guide.
Order products and collect payment
- Go to Partner Center > Accounts > Accounts.
- Click the account that you want to place an order for.
- Click Order products.
- Select the products and/or packages that you want to order.
- Complete any order information required.
- If you are using Vendasta Payments and collecting payment, then you can bill your customer at this time.
- Update the retail prices as needed.
- Under Collect payment, choose to "Send order for customer review & collect payment online."
- Select a user to bill
- Add an expiry date of terms, if necessary
- Select a product activation date.
- Note that if using the payment collection methods in Step 6, then the products will only activate on/after that date if the payment has been collected.
- Check and update the wholesale billing info if necessary (this is your payment to Vendasta).
- Click Send Order.
Introduce your customers to Business App
Business App is your customers' place to keep up to date on their digital services, communicate, and find in-depth information for how their business is performing online. To get started, your customers will need to be added as Business App users, get oriented, and set up connections.
Add users to accounts
In order to allow your customers to access their products inside of Business App, they will need to be added as users.
- Go to Partner Center > Accounts > Manage Accounts > Click the Account to which you want to add a user
- Scroll down to Users and click Add Users
- Click the checkbox for an existing user then click Add user
OR
Click Create user if the user does not exist - Fill in the user details
- Click Create user
Welcome your customer with a video
Business App has a built-in video that helps your customers to become acquainted with it. This video can be removed or changed.
- Go to Parter Center > Accounts > Manage Business App
- Click Customize Business App
- Go to Pages > Get started
- To remove the onboarding video, uncheck the onboarding video box
- To customize it, add a URL for a YouTube video link
You can create your own video that showcases the specifics of how you have customized your Business App, showcase your brand, and highlight anything unique about the working relationship your customers will have with your business.
If you wish to showcase a slightly more technical onboarding video, you can use this unbranded video. It can be downloaded from Loom or through this link. If you would like to create your own video, a pdf of the script is available here.
Onboard your customers into their products and services
Any customer onboarding should cover three main elements: orientation, connections, and expectations. Helping your customers understand the most important things they will need to access in Business App will help them to adopt it faster (a welcome video, like in the section above, can help with this). Setting up connections will allow them to use products and see value out of the reporting. Setting and aligning expectations will ensure that your customers are not upset or confused when they receive their deliverables.
Meet with your customer
Set up a meeting to make sure your customer understands what to expect out of their services and help them to understand how to use their products if they will be taking a do-it-yourself approach. If your organization is transitioning from a salesperson to an account manager this step will be critical to make sure the account manager is aligned with the customer’s business goals.
Many of the services from Vendasta’s Marketing Services team come with a pre-launch call where our team helps to set up the appropriate connections in Business App and set expectations. Check out this example call to learn more (and consider adapt the process for your own services).
Set up connections in Business App
The connection process varies between each type of connection you want to make, but the process generally follows these basics for each one:
- Go to Business App > Settings > Connections
- Click the + to the right of the app name you want to connect
- Sign in with your credentials to the app (eg. Google, Facebook, etc)
- Within the app, grant permission/access for the account(s)/page(s) that will need to be connected
- Back in Business App, click Select on the account/page that will be connected
The unbranded video in the section above includes a brief guide on connections for your customers, but you can learn more with this partner-facing video and this article.
Set expectations for deliverables
Your customers will need to understand when they can expect their deliverables and what to expect out of them. They will also need to understand what they need to provide to ensure success for the products and services they have purchased. Often, this means access to the right accounts or details about their business in order to create relevant content. For example, while a website can be built and ready to go live in as little as ten business days, if the customer has not provided basic information like their logo or their product details for ecommerce, then it will be impossible to deliver something they will be truly satisfied with.
When selling Vendasta’s Marketing Services, you can find unbranded expectation brochures that can help you and your customers understand timelines for delivery and more. To learn more about Marketing Services expectations, check out Marketing Services: Expectations by Service and Getting Started: Using Marketing Services.
Track and follow up
Your customer will want to see the return on their investment and ensure that they are achieving the goals and quick wins that your salesperson surfaced while they were first meeting with the customer. Project tracking and data revealed by the Executive Report are key to ensuring that your customer sees the value in their purchase.
Your customers can track projects by going to Business App > Projects and clicking into the different projects that are being fulfilled. The information in these projects is shared from Task Manager, and so you can highlight the work that your team is fulfilling to your customers, and work from Vendasta's Marketing Services team will also populate there.
The Executive Report is generated on a weekly and monthly basis. It populates with information based on the connections in Business App and the products that are active. By comparing reports, you and your customer can how their online presence is improving and what areas to focus on next.
Be proactive and set up a meeting with your customer to review their Executive Report at the one-month mark to compare performance and discuss next steps for continued improvement.