How to Create Perfect Client Contracts Using Squarespace Forms

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Enhancing the way your clients interact with your business lets you create much better, deeper, more valuable customer relationships. In an increasingly competitive landscape, building trust with your clients is vital to your success and longevity. Every touchpoint you have with your client is an opportunity to understand them better, strengthen that trust, and ultimately leave them delighted.

That starts the very first time a client contacts you, and continues through onboarding, engaging you for work, communications, scoping, delivery, and more. It sounds like a lot of effort, but a Squarespace website makes the whole process easier.

Squarespace has an easy-to-use form builder to let you gather important information from your client. You can combine Squarespace forms with built in Google Docs and G Suite (formerly Google Apps) integration to make creating important documents and managing customer relationships a breeze.

The Importance of Presenting a Professional Image to Your Clients

Clients and customers expect to be treated with respect, courtesy, and professionalism. That includes providing documentation on what you’re going to do for them. Clear, concise documents help to:

• Remove confusion and ambiguity.
• Define the scope of what you’re going to do—including time, budget, and quality.
• State exactly how you’re going to work and what you’re going to work on.
• Ensure everyone is working to a common understanding.

This can help with all types of documents including:

• Contracts—defining the terms and conditions of how you and the client are working together.
• Proposals—an offer to provide work explaining what you’re going to do, how much it will cost the client, when they can expect delivery, and various other areas.
• Statements of Work (SoW)—Similar to a proposal, a formal document that you share with a client once they have engaged you.
• Project details and documents—specifications, requirements, and various other factors of a project you’re building for the client.
• Briefs—a brief for various aspects of how you and the client will approach work. These can be very useful for freelancers, especially designers, writers, and other creatives.

The Squarespace form builder can help you with all of these areas.

How Collecting Information via a Squarespace Form Helps You and Your Clients

You might wonder why you would build a form to collect information from a client rather than having a conversation over the phone, or discussing things via email, Skype or Slack. It’s important to note that the form isn’t intended to replace those other communications, but using Squarespace’s form builder has several big advantages.

You can ask all the right questions

You can gather together all the questions you need and present them to the client in a clear and consistent way. You don’t need to remember to ask specific questions through other communications as everything will be available through the Squarespace form.

You will get consistent, reliable, effective answers

If you ask questions in the right way you can get high-quality, consistent information. This makes putting together your contract, proposal, SoW or other document much easier. It also makes it easier to scope potential work and provide value pricing. It will reduce any ambiguity and confusion with your client.

It guides and helps the client in thinking about their needs

Asking the right questions will help to focus the mind of your client. They can clarify exactly what is is they need when they are answering the questions. An online form also lets the client answer in their own time, so they can give the answers the right amount of focus.

It ensures you’re capturing the right information at the right level

In two-way conversations it can be difficult to stay on track when it comes to requirements gathering. An online form removes that issue and lets you capture exactly the right information at exactly the right level.

It reduces friction for the client

A good online form, and the documents you can create from the answers, will impress your client. You can produce high-quality artifacts, which reduces friction, builds trust, and gets your working relationship off to a good start.

How to Gather the Information You need to Create an Effective Document

Before you start using the form builder on your Squarespace website, it’s important to spend some time planning out your form. That will make building the form itself much easier.

Step 1. Establish the type of document you want to create

You’re going to ask different questions for different types of document—a contract will have distinct requirements separate from those for a proposal or project brief. Start by understanding exactly what type of document you’re going to be gathering information for.

Step 2. Create a version of the document without any client information

Next you’re going to write a version of the document without client information in it. This would be the standard text that goes into all documents of this type, with placeholders for areas where you would enter client-, project-, and work-specific information. This will let you understand exactly what information you need from clients to complete the document.

Step 3. Understand exactly what information you need to gather and write questions

Now you have a basic document, go through each placeholder and think about the client information you need to gather to complete each one. When you know what information you need you can then write questions to gather that data. For example, if you have a final completion date in the document, you can ask the question, "When do you need this work completed by?"

Match every placeholder and area where you need client information back to a specific question.

Step 4. Test the document

Now you have your placeholders and the client questions for each one, run through the questions to make sure they can be answered in a suitable way. You should be able to integrate client answers into the document without too much manual effort or guesswork. If you can’t do that, tweak the questions so they guide the client to provide you with specific, useful information.

Building Your Form in Squarespace

Your preparation combined with Squarespace’s intuitive design will make building the form quick and easy. Here’s how to do that.

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by Paul Maplesden via SitePoint