When you’re an entrepreneur or freelancer, you want (and need!) your clients to be wowed by your professionalism and innovation. You want them to love what you do and come back for more!

So how do you leave them raving about how awesome you are?

It’s actually not as hard as you think. First, you want to provide them with easy access to their project details. Make it easy for them to give you the information you need to start the project. Best of all, give them a streamlined experience that makes them say, “That was SO easy!”

Here are 5 awesome, easy ways to wow your clients (especially if you use Dubsado):

1 | Offer a client portal

A client portal gives you and your client a central location to view all of your project details. It will show email threads, proposals, contracts, invoices, and more. This means that rather than emailing you every time they need to refer back to project documents (because always seem to have deleted them, haven’t they?), your clients will be able to go back to their personal portal and find everything they need.

If you use something like Dubsado, you can even create a universal portal page on your website so that your clients never have to look for an individual URL. Pretty spiffy, huh?

2 | Use straightforward questionnaires

Questionnaires can be a LIFESAVER. Not only do they save you mountains of back-and-forth emails to answer simple questions, they also can be used for a variety of other purposes. Need to display a visual project process tracker? Upload a questionnaire to the client portal so you can check off project milestones. (Meaning fewer ‘where are we in the project?’ emails to deal with!)

When you use questionnaires in Dubsado, you can even include file upload fields. This makes it SO much easier to collect necessary assets from a client – no more chasing down each individual file!

3 | Create task boards for both you and the client

If you’re using Trello or Asana, you know how powerful this can be. Task boards allow you to see what you’ve finished and what still needs to be done within a project. They can also give your client a glimpse into what you’re doing so they can track along with your progress.

Using a program like Dubsado, you can create template task boards and copy them to new projects. This saves you time when setting up new projects, which is always a great bonus for an entrepreneur who wears too many hats!

4 | Make your proposals, contracts, and invoices a simple process

Everyone wants to just get the legal stuff out of the way, right? Make it easy for your client to fly through this part of the project.

The logical progression for the legal side of a project is proposal → contract → invoice/down payment, right? Once someone has decided to hire you for a project, they’re often eager to start ASAP. Rather than give them more time to reconsider their decision, make the legal stuff flow. Set up the proposal to automatically generate the contract, which in turn should automatically create an invoice and/or down payment.

If you’re using Dubsado or a similar program, you can set it up to do just that. No more creating all of these documents manually; the system can do it all for you! You’ll get paid faster and make it that much easier for your clients to hire you and get their project in gear.

5 | The best way to WOW your clients: Workflows

Oh my gosh, I could go on forever about workflows! They’re the key to automating your business and projects. Workflows can take all sorts of emails off your plate and the smooth flow of your system will make you look crazy professional on your client’s side, too.

Let’s take a look at what a workflow can do for you. Say you’re a web designer. Here’s what your initial workflow might look like in Dubsado:

• Prospect fills out a lead capture form embedded on your website →
• Dubsado sends them a welcome email, letting them know you’ll be in contact soon and asking them to fill out a quick form with more info →
• When they fill out that form, you receive a notification to review it and send the appropriate proposal →
• After you add the proposal to the lead, Dubsado sends it to them →
• Once they accept the proposal, Dubsado automatically prompts them to sign the contract and pay the requisite down payment

This isn’t a complete start-to-finish workflow, but it gives you an idea of what a workflow can do. If you have customized service packages, you can accommodate that into workflows. It means that they won’t be 100% automated, but they will be systemized and still save you more time than you may think.

If you want to streamline your business, grab the Dubsado Checklist below! It will show you what you can do with Dubsado so you can save time and sanity in your business. You can even get the Dubsado Workflow Worksheet afterward so you can get your workflows set up and running smoothly. What are you waiting for?

Got your own tips for wowing your clients? Have a burning workflow question you need answered? Post in the comments!