Your Website Has “Departments”?

Ready to kick off a new week? Happy Monday. 😇

And yes… the newsletter has a few little visual changes to it today. You know me… always tweakin. 🤪 Made a few tweaks to the website, too. Might be a few more, too.

In this issue, let’s talk about organizational structure… and how that divides up the things you should be paying attention to when it comes to your website.

Plus, I want to talk about the “behind the scenes” mechanics of setting up a call scheduler on your site.

So, let’s get into it….

The “Departments” of Your Website

When you think of organizations, you kind of know that they’re often broken up into different departments.

Things like Administrative, HR, Accounting, Operations, Marketing, etc.

We know this…. either by hearing about it or working in such a place. Good chance that many of you reading this hold a position in a company where you work in one of these departments.

Well, with the right structure, these departments typically associated with larger organizations can apply to small businesses, too. Even “one man shows”. And yes, even translates into how our websites function.

There are 7 major departments that I usually pay attention to. They are:

• Communications. Establishing the lines of communication, hiring people, general admin.
• Sales. Anything that involves marketing and conversion to bring on new customers.
• Accounting. Financial stuff, record keeping, etc.
• Production & Delivery. Delivery of the core products/services that actually generate income.
• Quality. Testing, quality control, ensuring things work and correcting as needed.
• Public. Making the business known and look good to the outside world.
• Executive. Executive planning and strategy for the entire thing.

Now, these are all separate things. And you need them all.

I was talking to a client just the other day and he was putting so much thought and effort into how his site is structured for people who have already purchased that he was almost blurring the line with how he was going to attract new people to begin with. They are two separate things… and every other department is also separate. They work tightly together, but they are very different functions and each one needs to be paid attention to as it’s own thing.

So, let me touch on each one….

Communications.

Is it easy for people to contact you on your website? Well structured email addresses? Do you process and reply to your messages daily? And don’t forget admin. Do you keep records? Track statistics? Is your site set up in such a way as to enable and/or help automate effective communications?

Sales.

Do you engage in direct marketing specifically to enroll new customers and make sales? Do you maintain your email list well? Do you spend time creating marketing materials, landing pages that convert, new lead magnets? Do you track conversions and intentionally put work into increasing it?

Accounting.

Is your site a greased machine when it comes to ability to collect money? Do you track your income and expenses? Are you diligent in maintaining good records, securing passwords, securing license codes, files, etc? See, this one isn’t just about money.

Production & Delivery.

This is the meat and potatoes right here. This is actually delivering quality products/services and delivering on the offers you make. This includes producing member material (if you run a membership site), doing client services, etc. This even includes ensuring your site is running smoothly…. since your site is likely a major medium of delivery.

Quality.

Do you regularly seek feedback from your customers and find out how things can be improved? Do you collect testimonials and have a process for that? Do you acknowledge students of your membership site for actually completing things?

Public.

This is all about spreading the word to the world. So, do you regularly product new content and publish it? Are you creating videos for Youtube? Posting social media stuff? Do you maintain an affiliate program so they can be ambassadors for you? Do you ensure that you publish testimonials to make your good work known?

Executive.

This is the “big picture” stuff. This is where you, as the founder, sit down and create strategic planning for how to grow the business. To figure out what direction to go, what things to do… and sometimes which things to stop doing because they’re not in alignment with your goals.

….

Your small business and/or your website is not just…. a thing. It isn’t just a blob of pages. It is a tool which should be strategically built in order to help foster an activity. And to help foster the 7 departments above.

This not only helps put some order into what we’re building and where we focus, but it also helps us focus on exactly the functionality of your website that needs to be worked on.

When you start leaving things out or neglecting these 7 different functions, that’s when you find a business which has a really hard time growing.

This Week In Concierge

Getting a lot of work done for clients in the last week. Some of the things that was done include:

• Re-engineered a client’s sales funnels in order to remove Deadline Funnel (which is super expensive) and replace with Kadence timers.
• Devised a plan of action (with 2 different clients, actually) to restructure their sites to better fit their vision and strategy
• Dug out a client’s email from a duct-taped mess of crapola to a nice, clean system powered by FastMail.
• Putting basic membership mechanics into a client’s site who is looking to have a free membership to access site features
• Re-worked a bunch of pages to clean them up, make them look better and ensure they work properly on mobile
• Did an Implementation Session with a client and we’re basically building his site in real-time

Also, a few quick things clients may want to know….

• For clients running Elementor and BuddyBoss, it looks like the weird conflict has been resolved. Only a few of you still running this combination, but not seeing any issues any longer.
• The WooCommerce Stipe plugin was updated last week and quickly proceeded to break the credit card checkout in carts. It is the 9.1.0 version of the WooCommerce Stipe Gateway plugin. A quick update to 9.1.1 fixes the issue.
• WooCommerce Subscriptions was updated again to 7.1. For all clients running this, keep in mind that we need to do a manual upgrade. It isn’t automatic. If your’s is running behind, feel free to bug me. 😇

And one more thing….

I have just added YITH WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips Premium to the Concierge Toolkit. This plugin enables the easy creation (and customization) of invoices for WooCommerce orders and enables your customers to easily get their invoices from their account. It works nicely and I am using it, too. If you have a need for this on your site, get in touch.

WordPress Quick Bits

Matt Pushes Back. Mullenweg seems to be continuing his public tirade and passive aggressive antics. When Joost deValk posted about a need for a new status quo, Matt made it pretty clear he’s not interested. Matt also announced that Automattic will be cutting back on it’s work on core contributions in order to match that of WPEngine. Honestly, from a business perspective, that probably makes sense. It also comes off as the antics of a man child. 🤪 I dunno… I’m getting a little tired of this whole thing, but it seems clear to me that Matt’s ship has sailed here and it is just a matter of when and how he steps back from this whole thing.

New Events Plugin Tease. The team behind the Newsletter Glue plugin is teasing (on X) a new events plugin called EventKoi. It’ll be interesting to see how this fills any gaps with popular options like Events Calendar.

Elementor Hello Biz Theme. For users of Elementor, the Hello theme has long been a great starter theme which allows you to build out your entire theme with the Elementor page builder. Well, they now have a “Biz” version of Hello. This business version is also free, but has a few differences from the regular Hello theme such as some native widgets for Form Lite, hero, zigzag, calls to action, etc. These widgets just seem like little shortcuts to popular business site features. Check out Hello Biz here.

WooCommerce Spies On You? A post on X shows that WooCommerce collects information about your site. You can disable it, but it is enabled by default. When I install Woo for clients, I always turn it off. It would be easy to have a “freak out” about this, but the truth is that this is nothing new. And Woo isn’t alone, either. Other shopping carts and plugins also log usage. When you connect to Stripe using Stripe Connect, there’s data being shared. The only way not to have any data shared is not to make any sales at all, frankly.

WordPress 2024 Review. Themeisle published a nice 2024 recap post of the world of WordPress. As it says, a lot more happened last year than just #wpdrama. 😜

Phase 3 of Data Liberation. In a nod to digital sovereignty (which is important to me), I appreciate that WordPress has an ongoing data liberation project. And they’ve just started Phase 3 of the project. The idea behind it is that your data is your’s and you should be able to move it anywhere you want, even out of closed platforms.

The Mechanics Of Offering Calls On Your Website

A lot of people like to put schedulers on their website so people can book calls. There are lots of reasons you may have this functionality on your site, such as:

• Calls for potential clients (such as my Roadmap calls)
• Paid consultations (such as my strategy calls and implementation sessions)
• Onboarding calls for new clients

Regardless of the reason, it is common to do. And there are a ton of different tools to do it. Plus, I think there’s some backend functionality that some people don’t often think about.

First off, you likely know I’m a massive fan of the “Fluent” tools. This means…. FluentCRM, Fluent Forms and FluentBooking.

FluentBooking is at the core of the booking process here. It looks and works pretty much just like Calendly. It integrates with your site directly, meaning we can put them straight into FluentCRM as a lead the moment they book. You’ll also have their appointment history right inside their CRM profile.

If you want to have the booking process as part of a form, you can do that, too. For instance, perhaps you want to collect some information by form and then, on the final step of that form, have them book a call. With Fluent Forms and Fluent Booking, you can do that.

Anyway…

You want to think about the entire process – both during booking as well as after. The combo of FluentCRM and FluentBooking enable this quite nicely. For instance…

• When people book, you can tag them in their CRM profile. Then, use that tag to trigger automations and send them unique emails.
• Ensure reminders go out before the scheduled call. FluentBooking does this part automatically.
• Upon call completion, trigger an automation which automatically asks them for feedback and/or a testimonial. Or…
• Let’s say you just finished a sales call with a new lead. Let’s say you have a few different options for them, but you want that automatic followup to go out via email right away. So, you set up those automations in FluentCRM. When the call is done, you add a specific trigger tag to their profile based on the offer which is most appropriate to them. That trigger than sets off an automation where they’ll get emails and followups to get them to follow through.
• If a call is missed, another automation gets triggered that prompts them to reschedule or whatever you feel is appropriate.

The possibilities here are kind of endless and up to whatever would best further your specific goals and processes. But, one big theme here is…

You keep the process “in house” inside your website – on WordPress. This means you don’t have the hassle of embedding an external service on your website or perhaps needing to pay for it. You don’t need to worry about integrations with your email list provider. Sadly, a lot of people don’t even have their scheduler integrated with their email list because the scheduler they use just didn’t even think of it.

Oh… and if you want to directly sell consultations, that’s easy as well. FluentBooking can sell those calls directly, or you could do it the way I would prefer and that’s to use the built-in integration with WooCommerce. So, they book their call and it remains pending until they actually pay for it.

If you need any help setting this up on your website, just get in touch.

But, keep in mind… this isn’t just about installing a plugin. This is also about thinking through the automations that go with it…. so that those calls actually serve their function and the proper followups go out afterward.