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| ISSUE №176 · CLIENT ONBOARDING | CLIENT MANAGEMENT |
You Came to an Agreement…
So you had a great discovery call. Then you had an amazing alignment call. Once everything was mutually agreed to and there were no surprises left, you presented a proposal, and then your prospect became a client.
That’s really freaking fun…It never mattered if I made the sale or not, I was always really excited when a new client started. It was always like an adventure.
But The Kickoff Call Is Where Your Engagement Trajectory Gets It’s Initial Slope.
So many agency founders who are running sales don't do a great job of giving their delivery teams all the information needed in order for your new client to feel like the sales process and the service process are part of a contiguous engagement.
Back when I was at a large independent agency that starts with a “T” (and ends with “inuiti”), we did a study of client longevity versus their post-onboarding Net Promoter Score (that a link to a primer on NPS put together by Qualitrics - a little nerdy, but whatevs). The tale of the tape (Scored 1 (bad) to 10 (OMG, I’ve got to call my Mom and talk to her about how awesome it is!) was this:
Score <5: In the world of NPS, this is the equivalent of “I HATE YOU”. Clients who gave this grade stayed less than 50% of the median client tenure. (Plain English: They were usually gone fast.)
Score >5 but <7: This is still a pretty shitty score. But those clients stayed about 80% of the median client tenure.
Scored >7 but <8: This is a solid score - these folks stayed a touch more than the media client tenure.
Scored >8: These clients stayed about double the length of the median client tenure.
So Why Is The Onboarding Process So Important?
Well, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that I’ve got this silly idea that the sales process ought to be about creating trust. (In fact, I based the entirety of my WTF Sales Method & SalesOS on this idea.) Immediately before the client signs the contract, they are full of enthusiasm and excitement. Their Lifetime Value is at its highest potential!
But often, there is a lull between signing a contract and the full onboarding engagement. That's when buyer's remorse can set in & your brand new client might be wondering if they have made a mistake.
Based on the data, a fantastic onboarding experience is pretty determinative with regard to increase the trust and openness of your engagement or diminish the trust and openness of your engagement.
ONBOARDING SETS THE RELATIONSHIP TRAJECTORY.
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So, How Do You Make a Great Onboarding Experience?
Listen, this is hard stuff. I’ve been in the agency game for 25 years, and I think only once or twice in all of those years did I ever think, "Wow, that was a great onboarding experience for my clients."
And in my time as an agency search consultant and C-level marketer, I can only say that one time did I have an experience that I would call excellent. (That was lead by Matthew Hunt - now the CEO of Demandii - while he was a partner in another agency… BTW, if you are looking for founder-led content help, Matt and his team at Demandii are amazing.)
But the secret to great onboarding is really simple. There’s only two things that you need to remember:
All of the Context That Came Before The Conversation You Are Having With The Client.
Time Is Ticking & Every Day That Your Client Isn’t Seeing A Benefit From Your Engagement Is A Withdrawal From The “We Love Our Agency” Bank Account
Let’s Get Into It - Context
This idea is so important that when I off-handedly shared my Sales to Delivery Handoff Playbook with my friends at CopperCRM they made it one of their permanent resources - I was kind of flattered…
There’s a couple of key steps here:
The sales team has to gather EVERY piece of correspondence: every interaction, every sales call, every presentation, and every note they ever took, along with every thought they ever had about this prospect and now client. Make a story out of it. Somebody else needs to be able to follow the narrative and know what's been promised, but more importantly, what's really vital for the client.
The issues, concerns, opportunities, and the strategic goals of the client have to be illuminated, enumerated, and made crystal clear to the delivery team because those issues and those opportunities are the things that the delivery team will be held accountable to…
The delivery team should have enough information to confidently lead the kickoff meeting…if your delivery team ever utters the words. “Uh, so, tell me about your business…”, I can almost guarantee that the client is not going to stick around very long.
This is a cross-functional responsibility. Every step along the way from sales presentation proposal, contract negotiations, invoicing discussions, and strategy needs to be shared with everybody who's going to be touching this client. Continuity is so crucial here because no one wants to feel like they have to tell their story again. That just wastes your client's time, and it makes your team look way less competent. It's your job as the agency leader to demand that this process be cross-functional, cross-communicative, and full of authority around what the client needs.
[FYI - I’m in the midst of putting together a specific workflow/set of AI skills that you can use to make an onboarding dossier…it will be available in the coming weeks.]
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The Ticking Timebomb
I've worked with a lot of SaaS companies in my career, and the very best ones were always obsessed with the idea of “time to usefulness”. That’s a definition of how long it takes the software to generate positive impact on the client…
Way back when, it wasn't unusual for the “time to usefulness” to be months or quarters. Today, it's measured in hours, days, or fractions of a week.
The agency equivalent isn't time to usefulness, but rather “time to noticeable change”. It doesn't matter if you are a creative agency, a web dev agency, or a performance marketer. As soon as the contract gets executed, your client wants to see what they are going to get in return for their money and effort.
This is hard, especially if you work in an agency where the results are time delayed, like creative, content or SEO or web development…those things all take time.
The way to navigate this fallow period Isn't by having useless update meetings where you say, "We've done this thing, and we are waiting for the results to be measurable."
You want to be leading the client with all sorts of supports, like:
Timeline: A clear map of time-driven tasks.
Ownership & Impact: For each one of these tasks, we want to have a clear owner who is named at both the agency and the client, and we need to have a clear illumination of what happens if the expected timeline is not kept.
Deeper Understanding: In many cases, the sales team does not get access to the people who have the most information inside the client. You want part of your onboarding is to be an exercise in developing more connections across more people at your client. You want to have input from everybody on the client side that touches on things that you are working on.
Updates: As you start to build that deeper understanding and get more varied input, things are going to change. It’s all on the agency to document those changes or those modified expectations and regularly rework the timeline.
Setting The Roadmap: Even during the onboarding process, you are going to want to extend a roadmap out to the end of the contracted engagement. You want to do this so that your client can see the complexity, the work, and the variables that you are managing, and you want to have a clear slot on a roadmap to say, "We've done this."
Establishing Clarity Over Time: Once an engagement is up and running, the clarity from the kickoff meeting starts to fade. The original strategic goals get fuzzy, the timelines get squishy, and the roadmap becomes faded. Sometime during every engagement, someone on the client side is going to say, "Have you done this?” or “I thought you guys were in charge of that." You need to set a standard of timelines, ownership, roadmap milestones and changes (based on new data) being regularly updated and shared with both the delivery team and the client team.
This Is All Especially Important If You’ve Done Opportunity Anchoring
In Opportunity Anchoring - AIC #174, we introduced the concept of a shorter strategic engagement so that you can set the stage for a larger, longer, more well-informed engagement. Ideally, this is a one- to three-month kind of engagement where there is a discrete outcome.
As that engagement starts to wind down. It's triggering a brand new sales process - even though the relationship isn't starting from the beginning. You want this new sales process to be really simple and silky smooth. But if you haven't really focused on the six pieces of time to result, you aren't really going to have a frictionless opportunity.
any additional sales opportunities or upsells are going to be colored by their previous onboarding and client management experience. You don't want to truncate the relationship because you didn't do a kick-ass job on getting the most important strategic goals from the sales team to the delivery team. That’s just an inexcusable obstacle that you give yourself.
How Can I Help?
This is hard stuff. The transition between sales and delivery, and delivery to time to results are these potentially canyon-like gaps in which your agency or your client can fall into the “trough of despair” and not be able to climb out.
Let me know if a playbook, or a training, or maybe even some rudimentary Claude skills would help. — just respond to this email.
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