Automate every stage of your customer journey with the new Ignition Zapier trigger

Successfully onboarding a customer into a professional services business is hard. Do it right, and you have a customer for life. Do it poorly, and you set the tone for a disjointed relationship, built on a rocky foundation.

Once your client is onboard there are many more milestones in the customer journey that you need to navigate successfully.

If you’re already using Ignition, you’ve got a platform that supports your relationship building with beautiful touch points. Onboarding, proposals, payment collection, invoicing, and workflow automation is all taken care of.

Yet, Ignition doesn’t do everything. If it did, the rest of the B2B software world would’ve packed up and gone home by now! So you’ve established a core tech-stack to facilitate your client relationships and service delivery, just like Kim Hornsby of SingleTrack Bookkeeping, who uses 7 key apps in her onboarding process resulting in an incredible ROI and a Year-over-Year growth rate of 30%.

That’s why Ignition decided to partner with Zapier, an amazing platform that moves info between Ignition and your other web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work. Where Ignition stops, another app can pick it up, all powered by Zapier.

Ignition’s partnership started back in early 2018, with two triggers that kicked off onboarding workflows as soon as a proposal was accepted by your client, or based on the services included in your proposal. You’ve also been able to add a new client to your PI account as an action step.

Hundreds of PI users have automated onboarding workflows using the aforementioned triggers and actions. As a result of their feedback, we’ve now significantly expanded the automation opportunities with our brand new Zapier trigger: Proposal State Changed.

Just as the name implies, any time a proposal changes status in PI, you can trigger a workflow in your other apps. For example, you move a proposal from Draft to In Review – you can automatically notify a colleague that the proposal is ready. A proposal gets marked as complete – send a thank you gift automatically (yes, you can do that).

Before you get started, ask yourself “What’s my process? What is it that I’m trying to automate?” Then consider:

1. What are the inputs, processes or conditions, and outputs that I need?
2. What apps can I use to do this?

To help inspire you, let’s look at just some of the opportunities to automate as a proposal goes through its journey in Ignition.

You’re regularly receiving new leads. Congratulations! Your marketing is working. Early on in your business lifecycle, you definitely want to talk to everyone so that you can start to understand what an ideal client looks like.

As you grow, you’ll start to face a problem with your inbound marketing. Not everyone will fit your ideal client model. So you need ways to weed out the “tyre kickers” from the truly valuable prospects.

Enter the Ignition Web Connector. By putting your PI services on your website, you can quickly identify those prospects that are truly interested, because they’re already satisfied with your pricing model.

With the new Zapier Proposal State Changed trigger, whenever a brand new proposal is created, you can get trigger off the next steps in your sales workflow.

Automated via Ignition web connector:

• Send them a prospect survey in Typeform as well as a Calendly link to book in a meeting

Automated via Zapier:

• Get a notification in Slack so you can reach out immediately
• Add the prospect into a “lead nurture” audience in Mailchimp
• Create the contact in PipeDrive CRM and add the deal into your sales pipeline.

Here is a diagram showing how this automation works:

Note that you don’t need to use the web connector to automate these steps! You can configure your Zap so that your next action occurs any time you create a brand new proposal. You can also use any other apps in place of our suggested apps above.

If you would like to build this Zap, please follow the instructions in this article. ⚡

You’ve met with your new prospect, you’re confident that they’ll be an ideal fit for your business, and you’ve uncovered their biggest pain points. Now it’s time to give them the solution!

In Ignition, you’ve quickly created the first draft of your proposal, but you’d like a peer, partner, or manager to review it before the proposal gets sent to the client.

In mid-to-large sized firms, a proposal review process is a critical part of the sales workflow to ensure scope consistency, quality control and appropriate pricing. Smaller practices would benefit from this process too; A smaller practice that adopts a proposal review process means everyone can qualify prospects and prepare proposals, saving the owner/partner hours!

With the new Zapier Proposal State Changed trigger, as soon as a proposal moves from draft to “In Review” you can email the partner or manager with a direct link to the proposal.

In mid-to-large sized firms, a proposal review process is a critical part of the sales workflow to ensure scope consistency, quality control and appropriate pricing. Smaller practices would benefit from this process too. A smaller practice that adopts a proposal review process means everyone can qualify prospects and prepare proposals, saving the owner/partner hours!

With the new Zapier Proposal State Changed trigger, as soon as a proposal moves from draft to “In Review” you can email the partner or manager with a direct link to the proposal.

If you would like to build this Zap, please follow the instructions in this article. ⚡

You’ve drafted (or reviewed) your proposal, and you’re happy with it. It’s time to send it to the prospect. Of course, Ignition allows you to send the proposal directly via email, but did you know you have complete control over how you deliver the proposal to a client?

If you’d prefer to send it a different way, instead of choosing “send to client”, you’ll choose “move to awaiting acceptance” under the proposal actions menu.

When you do that, a brand new link to the online proposal is generated :

With Zapier, you can now use that link anyway you like. Here’s some ideas:

Send a text
Do you want to guarantee that your clients see your proposal? Given that text messages have a 98% open rate, why not send your proposal via text? In our example, we use Twilio, but there are lots of options for SMS platforms that connect to Zapier. See the options here.

If you would like to build this Zap, please follow the instructions in this article. ⚡

Get Fancy

Perhaps you want to embed your proposal into a fancy email template in Mailchimp. Give them a true wow-factor experience and embed a welcome video in there too.

Get Personal

Perhaps you want to walk them through the proposal personally. Automatically send your client a calendar invite and include the proposal in the description, so they can come prepared with questions.

Once your proposal is in “Awaiting Acceptance”, you can continue to automate your workflow across your other apps too:

• Update your CRM pipeline again
• Set a 30 day reminder to check if the proposal was accepted, and if not, mark it as lost.
• Unsubscribe the prospect from your qualifying/lead nurturing email campaign and move them to a “we want your business” campaign :)

There’s nothing like winning a new client. You should celebrate it. From notifying the team in Slack (Growthwise in Australia automatically plays Celebrate by Kylie Minogue when a PI Proposal is accepted!) to kicking off your onboarding workflow and tasks, having a proposal accepted in Ignition is an automation powerhouse!

Fortunately, you’ve been able to do this ever since we integrated with Zapier, so for inspiration, have a look at our blog articles or for an amazing accountant workflow, check out Brian from Blueprint Accounting and his 30+ step onboarding Zap!

Not everyone will become a client. And that’s ok. What’s important is having a simple way to track it when a prospect declines your services. It’s also advisable to attempt to learn from it. What could you do differently to win their business (or prospects like them?).

In Ignition, you can mark your proposal as Lost. This way you keep a record of your quote, which you can review in the future to see where you potentially went wrong. It will even inform your sales pipeline on your PI dashboard. Better still, if they come back to you, you have a history of their original quote.

Now, let's take this even further! When you mark a proposal as lost, you can let Zapier do the heavy lifting. Here’s some great ideas to implement when you lose a prospect in your business.

• Mark your CRM deal as closed-lost.
• Provided they give you permission, you can subscribe them to a “reheat” campaign, to keep you top of mind and see if you’ll be a better fit for them in the future (hint: tag them in PI as “email-marketing-approved” and Zapier filters can ensure it subscribes only the prospects that approved).
• Send them a Typeform or Google Forms survey to learn more about their experience with you and what you could do better.

If you’d like to see an example workflow for a lost client using Gmail, Pipedrive, and Mailchimp, you can check out this article⚡

Just because the engagement is done, doesn’t mean your job is done. If you are truly providing great customer experience, it’s time to thank your client, ask for more business, and find out how you did. Here’s some automation steps to do all of that instantly:

• Send an NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey to the client via Delighted
• Send a thank you note or gift from Printfection to thank them for your business.
• Send your client an email asking for a referral (here’s our recommended best practices for asking for referrals)

Doing this is a fantastic way to end an engagement (or at least, celebrate a milestone in their journey with you) and win more business.

If you’d like to see an example workflow for a completed proposal using thanks.io and Delighted, you can check out this article⚡

Many of the administrative tasks you are currently performing can be automated via software, to save you time and allow you to focus on more important tasks to run and grow your business.

If you’d like to get some help with automation or talk about ideas for how to streamline your workflow please reach out to your Account Manager, or email us at success@ignitionapp.com