The Agency Growth Blog - For Owners Who Want Growth

You finally landed that new client. That in and of itself was a huge accomplishment but now the hard work is starting. How do you make sure your new client gets an amazing experience from the very minute they sign until they become a new advocate for you, your team and your agency?

Isn’t that the point? Why onboard a new client if they’re not going to help you tell your story? Why spend so much time and so much energy trying to get your new client leads and new customers if they’re not going to be an advocate for your agency?

One of the big secrets to success is onboarding new clients. While they did select you, in some cases, your new client is still a little anxious. There may be people inside your new client’s company who are just waiting for you to fail so they can say, “I knew it would never work.”

You have to earn their trust quickly, you have to deliver quickly and you have to show them you know what you’re doing—especially when lead generation might be a few months away.

Here’s how to consider reworking your entire onboarding process.

Picking The Right Clients As Part Of Your Sales Process

I can’t emphasize this enough. All prospects and clients are not created equally, and your job is to make sure only the best potential clients get through your sales process. This is hard because like dating, your prospects are on their best behavior.

The key to solid onboarding is working with people who respect you, your team and your process. After all, you’ve been successful with other clients and this new client has never worked with an agency, never started an inbound program, never used marketing automation or a CRM before and they’ve agreed to follow your lead. Assuming you’ve picked the right clients, now you need to execute. This is one of the keys to good onboarding.

Setting Expectations – No Matter What The Situation

Prospects and clients are going to ask for a lot. Some are going to do it to push you, others are going to do it because they heard you say you could do it. I chose the word “heard” purposefully. You might have said one thing, but in a lot of cases what your clients hear is something different. Make sure you're aware of these nuances in your communication. You say, “You’ll get leads quickly.” They heard, “We’ll get leads immediately.” It’s tricky.

Be very clear on what they should expect. When exactly should they expect to see leads? How many? What has to happen in advance of those results? What are their responsibilities in producing those leads? The marketing you’re doing for your clients is complicated and in most cases your clients have very few pieces in place when you arrive. Taking them from 0 to 60 (in terms of lead generation) always takes months, not days or even weeks. The more honest you are with your prospect the more successful your onboarding.

Here’s the most significant challenge. You are competing with other agencies. Some of them are less experienced than you and some are making whatever promises they need to make to attempt to win the new client. This is confusing to your prospects and puts pressure on you to over promise. Don’t do it. I would rather lose the business and be honest with our prospects than tell them what they want to hear to win the business. That’s not winning. In a matter of months, your new client will be unhappy, fire you and tell everyone along the way. It’s hard getting results for your clients, so don’t make it harder.

Building A Step By Step Process

On to the more positive. Want to provide your clients with an amazing experience? Build it out in advance and make sure your team is constantly improving the onboarding process. Apply the same experience mapping skills you’ve been applying to your sales process. How do you quickly introduce your new client to your team? How do you educate them on anything they need to learn? How do you get the information you need from them without being invasive and how do you set the expectations for the rest of the engagement?

Playbooks, processes, methodology and systems all designed to make your onboarding experience replicable, scalable and repeatable. All your communication is standard, templated and mapped out. All your meetings are planned in advance, in sequence, and your team is trained on how to execute your onboarding plans.

This includes adding the little wows inside that process. This is especially important when it comes to getting nervous new clients to trust you, getting them to settle down and let you and your team do your best work, and having them focus on those tactics that are going to generate results.

Speed Kills

Your new client just made their first payment. You get paid upfront, right? They made their first payment and they want to see action as a result and they want to see you moving to generate leads, sales opportunities and new customers. The big challenge in doing inbound right takes time. You have to plan for their new website, their rankings on the search engines, new content is needed, new nurturing, maybe a new sales process and you need to install technology. How do you do that quickly?

Typically, strategy and planning can take 60 days or even longer. If you want to impress your clients and get them onboarded quickly, do what we’ve done and look to condense those 2 months into much shorter time frames. We’ve been onboarding clients in 2 days instead of two months and it has changed almost everything for us. Clients are ecstatic about it. We’ve delivered search, content, web design and even branding work in days, instead of months.

Yes, it requires an upgraded investment. Yes, it requires them to come to our office. Yes, it requires them to focus on marketing and sales for two to three days with us but the results are remarkable and the clients are thrilled—so thrilled they are happy to give us reviews, references and referrals. This is the key to solid and successful onboarding.

Stay Close To The CEO

Finally, navigating the client organization can be challenging. The bigger the organization the tougher the navigation. It’s not uncommon for the CEO to be involved in the agency selection process but then leave the execution to the marketing, sales or operations folks. Sometimes this is good, other times not so good. The key in our playbook is to stay close to the CEO, no matter what.

Include them in communication, make sure they’re part of your regular check-in process and make sure they are aware of your results, challenges and business outcomes. This ensures that the ultimate decision maker is aware and clear on exactly what your progress is at all times. If you’re working with a bigger organization and the CEO is NOT involved, make sure you apply the same techniques to the highest level executive possible.

You want an honest, no-fluff relationship with your senior executive so that when you need help, support or need their input you have the channel to have that conversation, share your feedback and leverage that relationship to keep making progress for your client company.

Client engagements are complicated. You have people, personalities, agendas, and the more people the more complicated. The best way to mitigate the risks associated with the complexity is with solid onboarding processes. The better you are at onboarding your client the faster you’ll gain their trust and the faster you’ll be able to produce results. Make sure they know that your goal is aligned with theirs.

I’m going to be at Partner Day at HubSpot on Thursday and Friday. If you’re there and you want to sit down and talk about your agency with me, just drop me an email by clicking here.

Interested in getting in our new Agency Cohort launching in June, there are still seats available. Click here to apply for acceptance into the Cohort.

Start Today Tip – You probably already know if your onboarding is fair, good or excellent. If you want to check for sure, ask a few of your newer clients. How did we do onboarding you? Did you get comfortable with the team quickly? Did we dive value early in the engagement? Was there enough interaction with me? Was there something you expected that you didn’t get? How could we have improved? If you have the feedback you need, then start your redesign exercise. Where can you improve the communication? How can you better set expectations? What can you add in that makes the client team say, “Wow”? Include the team who has the responsibility for delivery and you might pick up a couple of ideas they have that you might have missed. Do this every couple of months and you’ll have your new clients saying, “We want to give you a 5 star review.  Where would you like it?”

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