All Aboard!

Client onboarding is the leading indicator of LTV

Author

Tim Kilroy
08 Oct • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

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In This Week's Edition

Client Onboarding

Since we are in the throes of biz dev season (see Agency Inner Circle #13 - It’s Almost Game Time), hopefully all of you are doing some client onboarding.

Fun Fact: Client satisfaction post onboarding is tightly correlated with client LTV & client renewal.

I want you all to pay plenty of attention to your client onboarding - which starts during the sales process. Head over to the home page of my site (https://timkilroy.com) and get a free copy of The Perfect Proposal from the popup -and you’ll see how to introduce timelines into the sales process.

If you’ve been lucky enough to win some new business, you have to first start with a really high-impact sales to delivery handoff meeting. This is where you take all of the things you’ve learned during the sales process and use it to create a mission plan for your delivery team.

Then you have to onboard the client. I’ve put together a pretty good (IMHO) early days Client Experience document.

Let me know if it is useful.

Red Yellow Green

Forecasting revenue future revenue is important.

Often, however, it is easy to get complacent and you don’t realize that some of your go-forward revenue is likely at risk. Especially during really busy times like Q4.

So, I always go through an exercise to scare the poop out of me, so I never got comfortable about the state of our agency revenue. 

Each month take a look at your existing clients, and mark them as green, yellow, or red according to your perception of their happiness and satisfaction.

  • Clients that are green are happy. Project out 100% of their revenue from the current month.

  • Clients that are yellow aren't unhappy, but things aren't going as smoothly as you would like them to be. Project out 50% of their current monthly  revenue. (This is scary stuff.)

  • Clients that are red are unhappy, so project out 10% of their revenue.

Client

Current Rev

RYG

Future Rev

Client 1

$5000

$500

Client 2

$4000

$4000

Client 3

$6000

$3000

Client 4

$2000

$1000

Total

$17,000

$8500

Now, bad things might not happen and your future revenue might be fine - but cutting your forecasted revenue by 50% because 2 clients are just “OK” and 1 client who may have had an underperforming month does two things:

  1. It lights a fire under your butt to get your pipeline filled!

  2. It lights a fire under your butt to insure that yellow and red clients get the attention they need!

Giving yourself a pessimistic shock can really reap some benefits.

LinkedIn Magic From Alex Boyd

Alex Boyd is the founder of RevenueZen (exit to Onfolio) and Aware - a nifty LinkedIn engagement & analytics tool. The dude is a LinkedIn treasure. He has gathered up his best LinkedIn tips in one post. Go read all of these. And he has a free class on social selling at Apollo Academy. Get smarter and more effective with your LinkedIn content.

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