It’s called the ‘Proposal State Changed’ trigger. This trigger means you can kick-off workflows from the moment you draft a new proposal, right through to completing your contract. All these workflows are driven by your engagement letter, which is the source of truth for every accountant-client relationship (and bookkeeper-client relationship!).

But what does ‘Source of Truth’ even mean?

Source of Truth

As a Xero user, you’ve already put data, data integrity, and data flow at the centre of your practice. By its very nature, Xero becomes a source of truth for your clients’ financial data, and your own. Xero’s well-established app ecosystem presents the opportunity to easily connect to over 800 apps. Lucky for you, these apps mean you can draw from, or contribute to, the same source of truth!

As Xero’s 2018 Small Business Insights report indicates, “there is a strong relationship between connected app use and better business performance”. A strong hypothesis for this finding is the aforementioned data integrity and data flow. You can make better decisions faster, because you can access the data where you need it, faster.

Since you’ve already taken care of the financial source of truth, now’s the time to see how you connect your entire workflow into one source of truth.

Your engagement letter is an incredible Source of Truth

Practice Ignition allows you to establish and connect the source of truth regarding the services that you and your clients have agreed upon – the engagement letter.

If you think about it, your engagement letter answers the following key questions about your relationship with your client:

1. What services are we providing?
2. Who are we providing these services for?
3. When (or how frequently) are we providing said services?
4. How much are charging for our services?
5. When (or how frequently) are we collecting payment for delivering services?
6. What limitations (aka scope and terms) have we put on our services?

With these questions answered, your source of client truth can do some powerful things.

Practice Ignition takes your quote (aka proposal) and your terms (aka your engagement letter) and turns them into a digital and connected workflow.

The real automation power comes from the components that make up a proposal:

• Your clients’ information populates the online engagement letter automatically. Once accepted, your clients are created (or matched, if they already exist) in your integrated systems.
• You select one (or more) services from your library, which then turns into line items on your Xero invoices, and jobs and tasks in Xero Practice Manager.
• You can even track the status of your proposal as it progresses from a new draft, right through to completion.

PI + Zapier

Zapier allows you to maintain data integrity and ensure optimal data flow, all without the help of a developer. Practice Ignition’s partnership started back in early 2018, with two triggers that kicked off onboarding workflows in over 1500+ cloud apps as soon as a proposal was accepted by your client, or for more granular workflows, a trigger 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.

When your proposal is accepted you can create client folders and sub-folders in Google Drive or ShareFile. You can Enrol your client into an onboarding email campaign in Mailchimp. You can even create a new client account in Receipt Bank!

In fact, Practice Ignition’s Zapier integration is so powerful that Kim Hornsby from Singletrack Bookkeeping in Colorado, has created a single customer onboarding zap that has more than 50 steps, including all of the examples above. As a result, Kim reports saving 5 hours per new client. At 5-10 new clients a month, her practice is growing 30% YoY.

The new PI + Zapier Trigger

The feedback provided by the hundreds of practices using PI and Zapier together, told us there were many more opportunities to automate work beyond new client onboarding. So, we created the “Proposal State Changed Trigger”.

Just as the name implies, any time a proposal changes status in PI, you can trigger a workflow in your other apps. Let’s look at some ways you can automate these moments in your clients’ journey.

You have a brand new lead

With the new trigger, whenever a brand new proposal is created, you can get automate the next steps in your sales workflow:

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

Your proposal is ready for review

If you’d like a peer, partner, or manager to review the proposal gets sent to the client, as soon as a proposal moves from draft to “In Review” you can automatically notify the partner or manager with a direct link to the proposal.

Your proposal is ready to send!

You’ve drafted (or reviewed your PI proposal, and you’re happy with it. It’s time to send it to the prospect. Do you want to guarantee that your clients see your proposal immediately? Given that text messages have a 98% open rate, why not send your proposal via text? You can do that with Zapier! See fig. 3.

Congratulations! You have a new client.

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 Practice Ignition is an automation powerhouse!

Actually…maybe you don’t have a new client after all

If your client declines your services, In Practice Ignition you can mark your proposal as Lost. This way you keep a record of what you quoted.

Now, let’s take this even further. When you mark a proposal as lost, you can let Zapier do the heavy lifting to update your CRM deal as lost. You can even subscribe them to a “reheat” campaign to keep you and your services top of mind for them in the future. Perhaps you want to send them a Typeform survey to learn more about their experience what you could do better. See fig. 4.

You’ve completed the work

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

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.

Summing up

As you can see, when you look for the sources of truth in your practice, you can achieve unbelievable efficiencies.

If you’d like help with automation or talk about ideas for how to streamline your workflow please email us at success@practiceignition.com

‍