The client journey is the client experience – the biggest and most important thing you’re selling. This journey encompasses the awareness and contact phases, their initial consultations, and their ongoing journey as a paying client.

As important as the creation of systems for this journey, is the tracking of this journey.

By tracking their lifecycle as a client you’re able to ensure they’re progressing through each stage of their journey as your systems require, that you’re fulfilling the priority of each stage, and that you’re delivering to them the experiences that each stage requires.

With Range of Motion Business Mentoring clients, we place a high degree of importance on this client tracking.

The purpose of this part of the series is not to cover what comprises each step of the journey, that has been covered in earlier parts, but instead, to explore how to track the progress of your client.

There are numerous CRM (customer relationship manager) softwares available, with varying degrees of automation. The system we’ll suggest here is just one example of how this process can be tracked.

The journey begins with an initial contact, and an immediate (or ASAP) reply from your business. This needs to trigger a series of events that comprise your client journey system.

Firstly, you need to enter your clients in to a task manager (I use and recommend Todoist). Within this task manager you should have the facility to import a pre-created list of tasks that will be scheduled for various times in the future. This one-time action will now schedule items on your ‘to do list’ and will give you future reminders of tasks that need completing in the lifecycle of that client. You can see an example of the client workflow used at Range of Motion below:

You can see that there are 10 items to be completed over the coming 12 months – that’s 10 times when we update our client status. You’ll also notice that there are reminders to update client progress, and also reminders to contact the client for periodic ‘touch bases’ to see how their experience is going with Range of Motion. We don’t schedule these emails, but send them as required (to ensure they’re genuine). To update the client progress, the coach of that client is contacted for a progress report on how the client is progressing.

This process is now scheduled.

What we need next is a way to record the client status.

Enter your new lead into whatever database you use to track clients. At Range of Motion, we make use of a simple Google spreadsheet, with the first four columns set up as follows (note that these columns are unique to Range of Motion’s systems, so will be different for every business):
Column A: Client name.
Column B: Date of lead.
Column C: How did you hear about us?
Column D: Source of lead.

After these four columns we can begin to accumulate some data that will help us learn about our client journey and ways we can improve the value we’re providing. You’ll notice many of these columns now correspond to the items in the task manager workflow. This is because the task manager workflow schedules reminders to update the spreadsheet. It’s important that as the client reaches each step in their journey, you place the number ‘1’ in the cell to indicate that step has been reached. The reason for this will become clear shortly.
Column E: Client contacted.
Column F: Client meeting booked.
Column G: Client meeting had.
Column H: Referred to coach.
Column I: Name of coach.
Column J: Coach complimentary session done.
Column K: First paid session.
Column L: One month post- lead.
Column M: Two months post- lead.
Column N: Three months post- lead.
Column O: Six months post- lead.
Column P: 12 months post- lead.

You’ll see we track and update progress right up to 12 months. We don’t consider the lead a long-term client until this point. This ensures we remain vigilant with client care for the long term, and for the entire lifecycle of the client.

To clarify, when the task manager ‘reminds’ you to complete a certain task, you complete that task (either contacting the coach for a progress update or contacting the client to check on their experience with the business) then go to the spreadsheet and put a ‘1’ in the column to signify it’s been completed. A ‘1’ in the column measures the client’s progress through the system.

Once a client has become a paid client (i.e. they reach that level of the client journey), that row will be highlighted green. If the client leaves the journey, the column will be highlighted red.

There are two further columns for departed clients:
Column P: Reason for discontinue.
Column Q: When left journey.

These final two columns give valuable data about reasons for client departure, which is a key element of the client departure process.

There is one final integral part of tracking the client journey.

At the bottom of each column on the spreadsheet are totals for each column. This is why we put the number ‘1’ in the cells as a client reaches that stage of the journey. Using this we can see how many new leads have been contacted (which should always be 100%), how many have had a meeting booked, how many have had the meeting, how many have been referred to a coach, how many have done a complimentary session, how many have done a paid session, and how many have done one, two, three, six and 12 months with the business. Not only should the spreadsheet record the numbers, but the percentages of drop off from each stage. For example, it will tell us how many clients exited the journey between client contact and client meeting, complimentary session and first paid session, how many dropped off between one and two months etc. We can also work out what percentage of the total leads are still with the business at any point of the journey.

This information becomes absolutely invaluable because it gives the most accurate data possible about the most ‘leaky’ parts of your sales funnel. The areas with the biggest drop-offs are the areas that need the most work. If there’s a big drop off between client contact and client meeting, you need to work on your contact systems. If there’s a big drop off between complimentary session and paid session, you need to fix the complimentary session structure and delivery. If you’re losing clients between one and two months, your initial sessions need work.

Tracking your client journey is an integral part of your business systems. It increases the value you’re bringing to your clients, and acts as a vital tool in improving your overall operations.