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
- Collect payment
- Activate products
- Set up recurring invoices
- Order, invoice, and activate (optional workflow)
- Introduce your customers to Business App
- Onboard your customers into their products and services
- Track and follow up
Collect payment
If you have not set up Vendasta Payments to be able to collect payments within the platform, check out Getting Started: Collect payments in-platform.
To start, you will need to collect the initial payment for services. To do so, you will create and send an invoice to your new customer.
- Go to Partner Center > Billing > Invoices
- Click Create Invoice
- Select an account to which you will send the invoice
- Select a user to whom the invoice will be sent (you can add users if there isn't one on the account yet)
- Select a due date
- Add items or packages
- Add taxes
- Add a memo line (optional)
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Select collection type
- You can email the invoice which will give your customer the opportunity to enter their credit card for the payment
- If they already have a credit card on file (or they have given you their credit card number) select Charge a payment method on file, then click + Add or select existing payment method
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Click Send invoice.
- You will be shown a preview of the invoice. At this time, you can add additional email addresses to send the invoice to.
- When ready, click Send.
Activate products
Before activating products, make sure that you have clicked Start Selling on the product in Marketplace > Discover Products. You can learn more about selling products and setting up your store in our Build Your Store: Quick Reference Guide.
- Go to Partner Center > Businesses > Accounts
- Click into the account for which you want to activate products.
- Click Activate Products.
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Select the products, packages, and add-ons you want to activate.
- Certain products and add-ons allow you to purchase multiple quantities. This is represented to the right of the product beneath the “Quantity” heading.
- Some products may be dependant on other products to be active. If this is the case, a pop-up will appear after selecting a product with a dependency and ask you to add all of the dependent products
- Click Proceed to Next Step.
- Confirm the order looks correct. If so, check the confirmation box and click Purchase.
Set up recurring invoices
Once you have received the first payment from your customer and activated their products, you are ready to configure recurring invoices. It’s important to compete this step after the initial invoice, as your first invoice will ensure that any one-time charges are collected and you will be sure to have your customer’s credit card information saved by Stripe for ease of recurring billing. With the products activated, you want to ensure that you collect payment before the renewals of your customer’s products and services.
- Go to Partner Center > Businesses > Accounts > [[select the account to which you want to send a recurring invoice]]
- Click New > Recurring Invoice
- Select a recipient
- Configure the invoice following the step in the collect payments section above.
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Set your recurring schedule
- "Send next invoice on" will be the first date that the customer will see this recurring invoice
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"How often" can be configured as Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, or Custom recurrence
- Choose a date of the month that the invoice is sent (if applicable)
- Under "How many" you can choose to have this invoice recur indefinitely or select and end date.
- Choose your preferred collection method, the same as the collection types for an individual invoice.
- Make sure to set the slider to Active
- Click Save
If you chose the current date as the "send next invoice on" date when saving, then it will immediately create the invoice and will email the recipient or collect payment depending on your collection method chosen.
Order, invoice, and activate (optional workflow)
To learn more about how to use Sales & Success Center, check out Getting Started: Using Sales & Success Center.
Orders can be launched from Sales & Success Center through opportunities, proposals, or by creating an order directly.
From an opportunity: when a salesperson marks an opportunity as closed (won), it will allow them to create an order.
From a proposal: adding products or packages to a pricing table will create an order in a draft state.
Creating an order directly
1. Go to Sales & Success Center > Orders
2. Click Create order in the top right corner
3. Select an account
OR
1. Go to Sales & Success Center > Accounts > Select an account
2. Click Actions in the top right corner
3. Click Create order
Then...
4. Select a contract start date and duration
5. Click + Add items
a. Add packages and products
b. Update retail prices and payment frequency if different from your preset retail.
c. Add attachments (optional)
d. Add Administrator notes, Customer notes, or tags (optional)
6. Click Continue
7. Complete any order form fields that need to be filled out
Hint: if you don’t have all of the details at this time, you can click Save as draft and come back to the order later before activating
8. Click Submit order
a. Click the down arrow next to Submit order to have the option to submit for customer approval first, if you weren’t using a proposal to get approval
Once the order has been submitted from Sales & Success Center, it will need to be processed by the Partner Center Admin.
1. Go to Partner Center > Sales > Orders
2. Click the ORD order number of the order that was submitted for approval
With an order created, you can easily generate an invoice from the order.
3. Click Actions in the top right corner
4. Click Create Invoice
a. An invoice will be created from the contents of the order
b. Make any adjustments necessary and follow the instructions for setting up an invoice from the collect payment section above
5. Send invoice and receive payment
Once you have received payment, you can approve and activate the products from the order as well.
6. In the order, click Approve
7. On the next popup, click Approve & Continue
8. On the blue banner at the bottom of the screen, you will be presented with check boxes, some of which will need to be checked off in order to proceed
9. Click Activate on contract start or Activate now, depending on desired activation date.
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 > Businesses > 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 > Businesses > 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.