How to onboard new agency clients

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Hello and welcome to today’s webinar. I’m Chip Griffin. I’m the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance. I’m happy that you’re able to join me today. We’ll be talking about how to onboard new clients, something that I get asked a lot about by my own clients in the work that I do. And so we’re going to walk through what I think are some of the best practices in that regard and how you can use the onboarding process to, both improve client retention as well as create new revenue opportunities with those clients right from the start. So before we go ahead and get started with, the details of today’s session, let’s jump into some housekeeping items. And so the first thing that I would remind you all is that you can use the Q and A function right below you on the screen.

If you have questions during it, I will try to answer as many of those as I can. At the end of the presentation, you will be receiving a copy of the deck and the replay will be made available on the SAGA website. So you will have access to this after today’s live session. If you would like to tweet about it, feel free to use the hashtag agency leadership.

That’s a good way for others to track what’s being said. If you have questions for me, you can always email me directly at chip@sagaimpact.com. And you can visit the website at sagaimpact.com as well for lots of additional resources on client onboarding, as well as other things. A few other, upcoming webinars that you might want to be aware of.

Of course, last week we’ve, we covered client retention. That’s closely tied to what we’re talking about today. So I would encourage you to go back and watch that one if you haven’t seen it already. But looking ahead to the future, we’ve got a couple on using video and podcasting to grow your agency.

So those should be good webinars for those of you who are interested in using some different content marketing techniques to build your agency’s revenue. Thank you. We’ve got some, webinars on hiring. I’ve got a webinar on, M& A basics. So if you’re thinking of buying another agency or selling your own, some of the things that you’ll want to be thinking about, and some common misconceptions along the way as well.

And finally, there’ll be one on project budgeting, which is a very popular topic. It will be something that builds on the workbook and template that are already available in the resource library on the SAGA. website. So that covers, sort of the housekeeping things. And now we can dive into today’s content.

And so the things we’re going to be talking about today are all about the onboarding process, why you need to have one and have an actual process and not simply dive right in, how this can help you, over the whole course of the relationship with the client. If you do it effectively, what are the pitfalls?

If you don’t do it, right, how can you make mistakes along the way and how can you head those off by building a proper process? How does it drive profitability as well as the results for the clients? And finally, really just taking a look at some of the, the critical steps along the way that you want to be making sure that you take.

And so we’ll walk through those in a fair bit of detail over the course of the next 45 minutes or so. So we’ll, we’ll start by addressing that question. Why not just jump in? And I know a lot of you, as soon as you, you get that client, they say yes, you just want to dive right in and start doing work for them.

It’s the exciting part, right? You’ve got the close, you’ve, you’ve put up on your scoreboard, whether it’s just in your head or you’ve got an actual scoreboard in your, in your pocket. CRM or on a whiteboard in your office or wherever you may have it that you know, you’ve got this client and you just, you want to get going.

And many of you will even start going before you have a signed contract. And we’ll talk in a minute about why that’s a mistake and why you need to make sure that you don’t do that. But overall, you want to make sure that you don’t set sail without a plan. You don’t want to just hop in and say, Oh, let’s see where the winds take us, because that’s how you get off on the wrong foot with a client.

And we all hear about how accidents, car accidents, plane accidents, all those kinds of things are the result, not of one thing going wrong, usually, but a series of things. And it’s the reason why pilots have checklists before they take off and before they land so that you can make sure that you’re crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s and onboarding is very much about making sure that you have a process and that you honor it.

And so we’re going to talk about some of that. But before we get into the actual nitty gritty of the onboarding process, the onboarding really starts during sales. It starts during your business development activity. It’s why I always encourage you to have the team members who are going to be part of solving the problem for clients of delivering their services to be part of business development.

And I know many of you maybe out there being the rainmakers yourselves and you may not have team members who are actually engaging with the prospect during that stage. But it’s particularly important that you don’t play a shell game. You don’t want to be in the place where the client thinks they’re going to be working with you all of the time or they think they’re going to be working with other people that may be involved with the sales process if those aren’t going to be their day to day contacts.

Now clients are reasonable. They understand that you’re not going to be a hundred percent. In on their work in most cases, but they still need to see the faces. They need to hear the voices of the people who they will be working with. You don’t want them to feel like they’ve been the victim of a bait and switch.

And this is something that large agencies have a tendency to do. They’re historically bad at bringing in rainmakers and then replacing them with the actual service deliverers later on. Small agencies, you have less ability to do that. You have less bodies available to do that. But there is still that tendency and it’s why a lot of owners end up doing way more client service than they really want to because they’ve created the expectation at the sales stage that they’re going to be part of it.

So think about onboarding from those very early days. Think about the relationships that you’re building. You want your account manager, your account executive to start creating the trust with the prospect before they sign on the dotted line. You don’t want them to meet for the first time after they’ve already made their initial payment when they’re being handed off from you to them, make sure that they start to create those bonds.

They get the warm, fuzzy feelings around those individuals at that very earliest stage of the conversation. That will help you immensely in doing successful onboarding because keep in mind onboarding… yes, it’s partially about all of the mechanics of the relationship and the things that you’re doing to to serve the client and the information you have to exchange and we’ll talk plenty about that over the course of this session, but fundamentally onboarding is about building the relationship.

It’s creating that foundation of a relationship that will carry you through that will have the ability to weather those storms that you will inevitably have between agency and client down the road. It gives you the opportunity to build a relationship where you can be in a trusted position when you want to sell them something new.

When you say, hey, here’s an additional service or solution that you might want to consider from us. So think about the onboarding process, not just about the mechanics. But also about the human interaction, the relationship that you’re building, and that’s critical to make sure that you’ve got the right people involved from those very earliest stages.

The other thing that you need to do, and this, this crosses over from the business development portion, Into the beginnings of the client relationship, and that’s to set expectations. Most agency client relationships go astray because there’s not a meeting of the minds on expectations. You need to be in a place where you’ve created a clear roadmap for what you’re going to do for them.

And as part of the onboarding process, it needs to be a clear roadmap in terms of how long it’s going to take to be doing things. You know, there’s a often an expectation when a client signs the contract that they’re going to start seeing results immediately. And we’ll talk a little bit later about how you can address some of that with more specificity and how you can give some early wins, but you need to set the expectations that It’s going to take two or three weeks to learn this.

It’s going to take this many press events before you really start getting a return. It’s going to take this long to get the first, draft of your website out. Whatever it is that you’re doing for them, make sure that you’re setting those expectations even before they sign the contract, but then continuing on throughout so that they know what the process is going to look like and, and make sure that they understand those interim steps because.

You don’t want them to think that it’s going to take you four or five weeks just to start working. You want to make sure that they know what are those things that are going to take place in those intervening periods. What’s going to happen as soon as they sign the contract? What are you expecting from them?

What are they expecting from you? And getting those expectations right will really help. And I find it can often be helpful to put this either in a calendar form or a timeline form, something that really parses it out so that there’s not a misunderstanding and they don’t say, well, why didn’t you get this to me immediately?

Why didn’t this, you know, why, why is it taking so long? And the reality is you want them to understand that it takes time for you to get up to speed on what their needs are, to understand what their messaging is, what their, what their preferences are. And all of that is a learning process on both sides.

They need to learn about you. You need to learn about them. And so a good onboarding process will make sure that those expectations are set very early on. You also want to make them understand that there’s a method to the madness. Because there is. And I know that you may be sitting there saying, I, Chip, why, why do I have to do all this?

I really just, I’m, I’m chomping at the bit. You know, my team and I just want to get engaged. And I understand that, but there’s a magic phrase that you’ll want to be using with your clients during onboarding. And that is, this is our process. You want to make sure that while clients feel like you’re customizing everything for them, they also need to understand that you have a process that you go through.

And you can use this process to your advantage. First of all, you should have the process and we’ll talk more about why and how that all comes together. But it’s also important to phrase it that way, to frame it that way for your client so that they’re less likely to question your approach. Think about it this way.

If you’ve worked in the past with a large corporate client, a lot of times they will say, you know, we’re gonna use our contract. That’s our process. And you naturally say, okay, it’s your process. We’re gonna go through it. You may not be happy with it. You may hesitate. Maybe you push back a little bit, but because they’ve said this is our process, you’re much more willing to go along with it.

If they just said, we’d like to, or we prefer to, that’s a little bit different and you’ll push harder. So frame things with your new client in terms of this is our process, because that’s how you’re effectively training your new client on how you do things as an agency, how you get the best results. And usually agencies that do deliver superior results for their clients have some sort of standardized process.

It allows you to be more efficient. It means that you’ve tested what works and what doesn’t. And ultimately that leads to a healthier financial situation for your agency because you’re building profitability and profitability is really at the core of the success of any agency because that’s what allows you to continue to make smart decisions for yourself and for your clients going forward and make sure that you have the right matches.

So I encourage all of you to have that process, have a very clear checklist that outlines all of the things that you need to do, and it should be pretty detailed because a lot of things can get overlooked easily in the excitement of that new relationship that we talked about. So some of the key things that you want to have on that checklist would be legal and finance.

We talked about earlier, how you need to make sure that you are having a signed contract before you get started. You probably should be insisting on a first payment before you get started. And obviously that will depend upon what kind of work you’re doing, whether it’s project based or retainer based or those kinds of things.

But you really want to make sure that you have got those ducks in a row, because there’s nothing worse than jumping in with two feet for a new client, only to find out that procurement’s holding it up. Or the person who said yes really isn’t the final decision maker and then you’ve got a lot of time and energy wasted on something that isn’t worth spending the time on.

So make sure that you get those things buttoned up and whatever your process is, make sure that you’ve got this on the checklist and communicate these to the client. So say, you know, we invoice on this date and we invoice whatever your terms are, net 15, net 30, due on receipt, it doesn’t matter. Whatever your terms are, make sure they understand it.

Communicate with them how you send it. Are you sending it these days most likely by email. Are you setting up automated credit card payments with the clients? Whatever your process is, be clear about it. And hold firm to your process as much as you can. Doesn’t mean that you won’t have to make exceptions from time to time or make accommodations, but the more that you can hold to your process, the more efficient you’ll become.

And the more you will be building that appropriate relationship with the client where they know what to expect. And it’s not everything is a negotiation. You want to make sure that you’re sharing your contact information, the contact information for your critical team members, and getting the same from the client.

Make sure that you know who’s going to be in charge of approvals, who’s going to be the person to contact in the event of some emergency, particularly if you’re doing, say, PR or crisis work, who are the contacts on each end that should be your, your first port of call if there’s something that comes up?

Who is it that will give ultimate sign off on things so that you know if you have to act swiftly on anything. Maybe it’s a website update. Maybe it’s a social media post. Maybe it’s a press release in a crisis. Whatever it is, you want a well defined process for all of these things from the get go.

And so it should be part of your onboarding process and tailored to the actual service that you deliver so that you have what you need. This, by the way, is also the opportunity for you to indicate what your preferences are with the client and get the same from them. Do you prefer not to be contacted on a regular basis by text, or are you okay with that?

Do you prefer email? Do you prefer phone? Find out the same thing from the clients. And if you get these preferences down and you share them, that helps set those expectations. You’ll also want to set expectations around timeliness of response. We usually respond to emails within two hours, four hours, same day, whatever it is.

And just, you know, set a reasonable perspective for the client so that they’re not surprised. And then try to stick to it in those early stages, because again, you know, I always hate to describe clients as being trained, but that’s really what you’re doing. You’re training their behavior as part of this onboarding process.

And so if you just jump in willy nilly doing things, you know, we all want to please people. If you do too much of that early on, it’s going to be hard to reset those expectations later. So use this onboarding process to get the expectations the way that you want them and need them to be in order to be as effective as possible for that client.

You want to make sure as part of onboarding, you’re getting whatever you need. Logos. Information sheets, product sheets, product samples, whatever you need from the client as part of your onboarding process, be clear about that and start getting those early on. And that’s probably just a simple list that you would standardize and maybe customize slightly for each client engagement.

But you know what you need in order to be effective. Make sure you’re getting that. Make sure you’re getting any style guides or messaging preferences. We use this word instead of that word. Or we, we never use this color. We always use that color. Or this is how you can use the, the logo. You know, this is what you have to, to do as far as, Spacing between other things, you know, whatever their, their, their brand preferences are, make sure that you’re getting that because almost every client has them.

And the more that you can get that as part of the onboarding process, the more you can ensure that you and your team are smoothly navigating those waters. And not inadvertently saying or doing something that’s going to unnecessarily set off the client during that early stage of the relationship because you’re really, you’re using that to make your first impression.

So you want to get it right. And finally, you want to be including things here that are specific to the work that you’re doing, you know, whether that’s, you know, you’re, you’re getting information about, their websites, their, their accounts, you know, maybe you’re doing social media management.

So you need some of those logins or you need to get some sort of access through an API. All of those, those things should be part of your onboarding checklist and the key items that you’re gathering. And then finally, you want to have, you want to build on that timeline concept, the roadmap that we talked about earlier and laying out what to expect in the first 30, 60, 90 days of the relationship, and you want to lay out, this is what our meeting schedule is, and maybe your meeting schedule is more frequent early on, and then it sort of ebbs off.

So maybe you meet weekly for the first month or two. And then it’s every other week and then maybe it moves to monthly. Whatever your cadence of meetings is, whatever your reporting structure is, maybe you say we produce a weekly report for you every Friday afternoon or Monday morning, whatever, lay it out as part of the process and this is how you do it.

And that means that you can build those things into your own structure and the way it works best for you. It’s, it’s laying out that expectation that they can then say, well, you know, it would be better if. But that’s, you’re now framing the discussion on your terms rather than just meandering around and starting out where they just, they may not even have a preference as to when they get a weekly report or how often they meet.

And so you don’t want to just let those things go in an aimless fashion because then you may find yourself with more meetings or with deadlines that don’t work for you and your team and the way that you work. So use this onboarding process, this checklist to drive it in the direction that you’re looking to take it.

Other important thing that you need to do as part of onboarding is you need to be absolutely crystal clear about how you’re going to measure the success of the relationship. Ideally, you’ve done this as part of the business development process, but I know from experience that a lot of times it’s pretty nebulous during that stage because everybody’s doing a little bit of the dance, trying to figure out roughly where we’re going.

And so maybe you’re not. As crystal clear as you would like to be on that. You need to use the onboarding process to make sure that you get that ironed out. And so you need to know what you’re going to be measuring over the course of the relationship. And I always like to get that meeting of the minds by asking the client.

How are you going to judge the success of this project a year from now? How will you know if it’s been successful? And I like using an open ended question like that because it allows the client to express things that are perhaps different from what you expected. And so if you started out by saying, okay, well, you know, how many sales do you want to make?

Or how many leads are you looking to get? You’ve now framed that conversation in such a way that maybe you’re not really getting at what the client is trying to achieve. And you really throughout the course of the agency client relationship always need to tune in to the actual pain points that the client has and what they’re actually hiring you for.

Oftentimes it’s not for the specific activity that’s defined in a statement of work. So it may be that they hire you to build a website. Almost nobody just wants a website, right? That’d be like saying, I’d like you to build me a house. But I never plan to live in it. I don’t plan to rent it out. I just, I just kind of want a house sitting over there.

Nobody’s going to do that. It’s the same thing building a website or putting together press events or putting on an in person event or a virtual event. Whatever you’re being hired to do is usually part of a bigger, broader purpose. And your job is to make sure that you’re getting to the root of that.

Because that will allow you to tailor the reports that you’re generating. It will allow you to focus your services effectively. And it also gives you first understanding of how you can look to expand the relationship 6, 12, 18 months down the road, perhaps even sooner, depending upon the nature of your engagement.

So make sure you’re getting that meeting of the minds on how they’re going to judge success, if not as part of the business development process, at least now as part of onboarding. Make sure you are clear about that. Now, I know I said you can’t just jump in and you can’t just, you know, take excitement from you and the client and just run with it, but you do need to find a way to at least appear to be starting fast out of the gate.

You want to make sure that the client feels like you are giving them white glove service right from the get go. That you are – you are indeed jumping right in with two feet again. This shouldn’t happen until you’ve crossed the T’s dotted the I’s from a legal and a financial standpoint, but you do want to be the early bird that catches the worm.

You want to be in a position where they say I hired these folks and they are right on top of it. They started immediately. They came out of it. With, with guns blazing and had the information, that, that we needed, they started moving the process forward. And so if I’m telling you that you, you don’t wanna rush things, you don’t want to, you know, just dive in with, without a plan, how do you do this?

How do you start fast? Well, this is where I think it’s important to be able to package up something as part of the start of your engagement. And, and this should be almost productized or perhaps actually productized. You may have heard the term paid discovery. You may know that I’m a big advocate of paid discovery, but whether you’re doing an actual separate paid discovery project where you’re basically being paid to put together the building blocks of the relationship by using a short term project engagement, whether that’s an audit or a strategic plan or something like that, Or, if it’s part of an ongoing retainer relationship but you say the first two weeks we do this and describe it as a productized thing and so maybe it’s producing talking points and producing, you know, core message documents or maybe it’s putting together, that style guide if they don’t already have one and you’re a design firm.

Whatever that, that initial step is, try to describe it. In productized fashion, try to give it a name for the deliverable that hopefully you can deliver in the first, say, two to three weeks of the relationship. You want something so that they feel like they’re sinking their teeth into something solid and tangible as part of the start of that relationship.

So even if, again, you’re building the website and it takes, 7, 8, 10 weeks to build it out completely, make sure that you’re giving them something early on to start to latch on to and to start to feel like they’re making progress. I guarantee you whatever kind of work that you’re doing as an agency for your client, you already have these things.

So it’s just packaging it up. In such a way that you can show it to the client and make it feel meaty and substantial and help them understand the work that you’re going to be doing and that you have already done in those early stages. That’s how you start fast, but still avoid just, you know, sort of running around aimlessly at the same time.

You want to be careful about, over servicing in these early stages. And again, you know, we talked about, you know, the excitement that tends to, to overarch these early days, but over servicing in those early stages can really make a huge difference in how profitable that client relationship is over time.

The decisions that you make, the expectations that you set by your work, by your turnaround times, by the, amount that you deviate from your statement of work or whatever contract documents you have in place. All of those things that you’ve set the tone on in those first few weeks of onboarding that new client, all of them go to how profitable that work will be over time.

And the reality is that most clients become less profitable over time because the longer they’re with you, the more that you’ve accumulated little bits of over servicing the more afraid you are of losing the business because we all hate losing long term clients have been with us forever. Maybe they represent a significant chunk of revenue.

Maybe it’s just a pride thing at that point, but we’re always going to be in that place. So we need to start out by getting appropriate work levels, appropriate expectations set as part of onboarding and avoid that over servicing conundrum. Because even though, even though we are generally people pleasers in the agency industry, I’m just as guilty as all the rest of you.

I want all of my clients, whether I was in agency world or when I was running my software company or now, even as a coach, I want everybody to be happy. And you have to always balance that out and make sure that you’re, you’re keeping them happy. But at the same time, you’re keeping the best interests of your business in mind.

If you’re not, you’re not going to have something to fall back on. You’re not going to have a business to run because you’ve done too much of this over servicing and you’ve eaten away all of your profit margin. And you’ll be unhappy with it. And you will be in a financially bad place. So make sure that you are pacing yourself.

Make sure that you are doing the things that you can to show that fast start, but also remembering that the relationship between the agency and the client is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. And I know that’s an overused phrase, but it’s so true. You need to make sure that whatever that tempo is that you’re setting in those early stages, how fast you get back to them, how much you’re turning around, how quickly you produce whatever collateral it is that they’ve asked for.

Make sure that that’s something that you can sustain over time. And this is something that we saw particularly last year with agencies, particularly, you know, during the course of the pandemic, a lot of you had workloads decrease from some clients. So when you brought on new clients, you had the ability to respond more quickly, but remember, you’ve now set that expectation.

And so if a press release takes you one day to turn around today, when you’re starting and onboarding a client, you want to make sure that you can still follow through on that same turnaround 6, 8, 12 months down the road. When you’ve got a more robust client base back. Maybe you’ve got clients who put you on pause who have come back.

So you really need to focus on that and make sure that you’re making smart decisions during this onboarding process about avoiding over servicing and setting those expectations about turnaround times and such accurately. You also though want to be focused on the relationship here. So, you know, we’ve talked about some of the, you know, the, the mechanicals, if you will, of the relationship, the checklist type items, the, the boring stuff like legal and finance that none of us want to think about, but ultimately, onboarding is about setting the relationship up for success.

It’s. Think about any relationship in the earliest stages, right? So if you, if you compare a personal relationship to the agency, client relationship, the business development stage, you know, that’s sort of the, you know, that that’s the blind date. It’s the, you know, it’s the first couple of dates. You know, once they’ve actually signed the contract, you know, now they’ve at least moved in with you, right?

And so you’re, you’re really starting to get to know each other. You’re starting to see each other’s warts. You’re starting to understand, you know, what the real challenges are. And so you want to make sure that you’re still doing that in a way that you’re building the relationship up for long term success.

And so you really want to focus on that piece of it where you’re making sure that there’s quality time being spent between your team and the client’s team. Because even if you’ve had all the right people involved in the business development process, chances are everybody’s still getting to know each other.

It’s just, it’s a little bit different when you’re in those, business development conversations, everybody’s being a little bit guarded on both sides, client doesn’t want to pay too much agency doesn’t want to give away too much agency really wants to close the deal. Client probably does, but you know, they’re kind of keeping their options open because of the risks. But now once they’ve become a client, once they’re into this onboarding process, now’s where you really start to get to know each other and some of that guard will be let down and it should.

You need to have a You need to create a sense of transparency between yourself and the client. Because if you can’t trust each other, if you can’t share information accurately, you’re going to be in trouble. You need to make sure that you’re comfortable and your team is comfortable pushing back when appropriate.

You need to make sure that you’re getting honest feedback from the client. And so you want to set that expectation from the beginning. And I like to sit down with clients very early on and say, look, you always need to, to commit that you will be honest with me if myself or my team are not giving you what you need. I would rather hear it from them sooner and be able to address it than to allow it to fester.

And so the relationship portion of this that you’re creating. And this is at all levels. If you’ve got three or four people on your team who are working with this client, make sure that their counterparts, the people that they’re working with directly on the other side, that they’re doing the same thing, that they’re being open and honest with each other, that they’re cultivating that relationship.

Because what you’re really doing as part of this onboarding process, from a relationship standpoint, is building the capital. You’re accumulating the chips, the chips that will allow you to weather whatever storms come your way. When that press release has a typo, when that website has a bug, when that social media post maybe shouldn’t have been posted right when it was.

All of those things are recoverable, but they’re even more recoverable if you’ve got strong personal relationships that you’ve built starting with this onboarding process or earlier as part of business development and you’re working it through during the onboarding and you’re, you’re making it stronger.

All of those things will help you when those inevitable bumps in the road come along. But it also creates the capital as we talked about before so that you can leverage it and find ways to grow the relationship. You’ll always be better off if you can find ways to increase the size of your existing client engagements than going out and finding new clients.

Maybe not always at least most of the time that’s going to be a better thing to do because you don’t have all of the client acquisition costs and all the challenges you’re not there’s not all the unknown on both sides of the equation. Once you work together you know what to expect and so if you can find ways to nurture those relationships and grow those engagements that will generally be a very good thing for your agency so make sure that you’re focused not just on you know the very important but more sterile checklist type items and instead you’re focusing in addition on the relationship building piece of this. Because if you can get that right, then the onboarding process will have been a huge success.

So tying it all up with a bow. It’s important to have a process. It’s important to make sure that you’re following that process. It’s important that you don’t allow clients to move outside that process without good reason. So you need to be firm. You need to, to work to find those early wins for the client so that they can, they can see what they can get from you.

You need to have the meeting of the minds over what you’re expecting and how you’re going to measure success. You need to build the relationships, but you also need to cross the T’s and dot the I’s. Those are all the key components of a client onboarding process. If you include all of those things in it, you’re likely to have a successful start to the relationship.

But even if you don’t, you’re building the capital that will allow you to recover from any of the mistakes that you have made during the initial days. With that, I will take a sip of water as I always do at the end of my presentation, and then I will turn over here to any questions that you may have.

So feel free to use the Q& A function, on the, the bottom of the screen here on Zoom. They’ve got this nice Q& A function. Go ahead and send your questions in that way, and I will do my best to answer as many of those as I can in just a moment here.

All right, let’s see if I can open up the Q& A window without messing anything up. There we go. We’re down here on the screen. Okay. Do I have a checklist that I can share? So I don’t have, I don’t, I don’t think in the resource library there’s an actual onboarding checklist beyond what I have here on this slide, , earlier in the presentation.

You know, that’s, that’s something I probably ought to put together. So I’ll, I’ll make a note of that , and maybe I’ll add a workbook into the resource library. In the near future, where it has some of the things that I’ve talked about here laid out, but also some samples where it’s a little bit more specific about some of the contractual things that you’ll want to make sure that you have or the finance things, some of the things that I talked about briefly here, as far as, you know, payment terms and who you’re going to send to in those kinds of things, I have some samples of these onboarding documents, I think, from my own businesses in the past that I could probably, you know, clean up makes generic enough. So, I will look to include that in the resource library soon. Let me just make a note of that. And the resource library, by the way, on the SAGA website is a good place to go for a lot of different, sample documents and guides for doing things. But if you see things that you’d like me to include that maybe are not there, feel free to, to reach out to me anytime chip@sagaimpact.com. I’m always looking for, for new ideas, just like this question that will allow me to, Increase the utility of that library. So, all right, let’s see. This one’s a longer one. Actually it’s not, , how do I introduce team members to the client if they weren’t part of the sales process? So obviously, as I said, it’s ideal that you have everybody that’s going to be working on the project, or at least the critical people to be part of that business development process so that the client starts to get them, get to know them early on, let’s see if I can.

Watch that tongue tied thing. And, But I’m also a realist, and I know that a lot of times that doesn’t happen for whatever reason, so it may be that the first time that a client is meeting, perhaps even their day to day contact may be after they’ve already signed their contract. So in those cases, it’s very important that you as the agency owner or whoever was involved in the business development process be present for those early meetings, and it really needs to be a well defined handoff from you to the day to day account manager or client contact whoever it may be. And so you want to make sure that you’re you’re going into this where you are.

Explaining that you will be available and that you’re always going to be keeping an eye on things, but that someone else is going to be their day to day contact. And typically what I suggest is a weaning process. So, what I generally suggest, and it depends upon the actual engagement and, you know, you’ll have to read the client for their comfort level.

Obviously you want to, if you’re not going to be involved in the day to day of a client, you do want to find a way to extract yourself as early as possible because the longer that you stay involved, the harder it is to get out. I mean, as I talked about as part of the onboarding process, you’re setting those expectations.

So if you’re sitting in on every single client meeting for the first few months, it’s going to be very difficult for you to just disappear. You’re going to have to, to, you know, to take time to pull yourself out of that role. So if you know that you’re not going to be involved on an ongoing basis in the day to day, and so you have to do this kind of a handoff, that’s where you want to make sure that you’re being very clear about that during the onboarding process.

And you want to set your team member up for success. Talk about, you know, their skills, their background, the great things that they’ve done. So you’re, you have to think of it this way. You’re effectively selling this team member to the client. So they’ve already bought your agency. They’ve, they’ve bought you as the owner or the leader, because you were there as part of business development, but now they’re meeting someone new.

And so you need to transfer the, love, the appreciation they have for your talent to your team member. So you need to, without going over the top and without appearing silly, you need to make sure that you’re communicating that person’s skill sets and their effectiveness during those initial meetings.

You also need to be careful that you’re allowing them to shine in those meetings. Don’t step on them. Let them do most of the talking. If they’re going to be the, the day to day, they’re the ones who should be taking the lead. You should immediately take yourself to that secondary role in those early onboarding sessions.

And you need to allow that individual to drive it. Even if you think, That’s not exactly how I would do it. You need to give them a very long leash. A lot of ropes so that they can have the opportunity to build a relationship. Yes, they will make mistakes. Yes, they will do things not exactly the same way that you would do it or the way you would like to see it done.

Those are conversations you can have outside of the room. outside the presence of the client. Don’t undermine them or undercut them in those meetings. And it’s so hard. I know it is. Because the client may turn to you and say, you know, hey Chip, what do you think? And you need to be very careful that you’re consistently, whenever possible, whenever it doesn’t feel foolish or look foolish, you need to pass it back to the client contact to be the driver of it.

Because that’s how you’re transferring your skill, your expertise and the affection they have for you over to that individual. So do that as soon as possible. The other thing that you need to do is probably have additional conversations between the client contact and the client in those early stages.

So this may be one of those areas where I would over service a little bit. If it’s, if they haven’t gotten to know that client contact yet, you really do want to make sure that both of the the main client contact on your side and on their side are getting to know each other as quickly and as well as possible.

So ideal world, get them involved in business development, realistic world. If they’re just coming in later, you know, really do everything that you can to help them grow their own relationship with the client as quickly as possible. All right, let’s see, got at least one more question here. Is there an onboarding process for new staff working on an existing client?

So that’s a good question. So a lot of what I talked about a moment ago would apply. There are some differences though. So, When you have a situation where you have one team member is leaving, or perhaps you’re just reorganizing, maybe, maybe someone is, is having to work full time on a different project, or, you know, we all know there are plenty of reasons why someone may be off of an account, you may be adding someone new to the account.

So those circumstances are similar to some of the things that I said when you’re bringing someone new in who is not involved in business development. But there are some differences. So when you’re talking about basically onboarding a new client, a new account lead to the mix, you want to think about a little bit about how it’s all come together.

So there’s going to be some nuances depending upon how it works. So for example, in an ideal world, I would have the new account lead and the old account lead in meetings together for a period of time. If it’s someone who’s already been on the account, obviously that’s, that’s easy, right? But I’m assuming that this person’s question is referring to a situation where you’re bringing someone in that the client has never met before.

It’s not someone being promoted from within the team. It’s someone coming in fresh. So ideally, you have both the old and the new together and then they can have some overlap for some meetings. And it would be that weaning process where, you know, they first, you know, their first meeting, they’re probably observing.

Then they’re taking a more active role and then finally they’re sort of swapping places with the old lead and the old lead is going to more of the advisory role that I suggested that you as the agency owner or leader should be following if you’re bringing in someone fresh at the start, they should be falling into that same role where the new account lead is now the dominant one in those regular meetings that you’re having with the client.

Now, I’m also realistic. I know that many times those transitions may not be possible. It may be that someone has left for a new job, or maybe you’ve decided to make a change for whatever reason, and so it’s not realistic to have both old and new overlapping. In those cases, what you’re probably going to have to do, or probably should do, is you as the agency owner or someone who is senior to whoever the client, the account lead is on your side, someone, someone in a more senior role comes into those meetings, ideally someone that is already known to the client, and so you bring that person back in for a period of time along with the new, Account lead so that again, you’ve still got that sort of transitional process.

Ultimately, in all of these transitions, what you want to do is make sure that the client understands that they are being fully served, that they’ve got the expertise, that you’ve got the bandwidth that you need. And in that transitional period, when you’ve had a change in the account lead, you really need to double down on making sure that you’re getting things right.

So you are going to have to at least behind the scenes over service this client during those transition periods, because whenever you have that, the client is always going to be on the lookout for mistakes, right? Because they’ve, you know, they’ve essentially been alerted that something might be up. And so they’re going to be paying more attention, more careful attention to everything that you’re doing, so they will catch more things that you wouldn’t have had caught before that they would have allowed to pass.

Maybe there are things that they noticed before and they’re like, well, it doesn’t matter. But if they see the exact same thing during a transition period, It may raise their their red flags. It may show up on their radar and they may bring it up to you. So find ways to make sure that you’re being extra accurate in everything that you’re doing during those kinds of transition periods.

But again, you want to make sure that even as you’re doing that, even as you’ve got time. yourself or some other more senior person in those meetings to smooth the transition. You do want to make sure that you’re empowering that new account lead, both in the minds of that account lead as well as in the minds of the client.

Because the sooner that you can get it to a place where the client trusts and respects that new account lead as much as they respected the old one or they respected you, the more smoothly the whole relationship is going to go. So, So, great question. It definitely some similarities to the initial onboarding, but there are some of those key differences as you’re doing that kind of,passing of the baton later on in the relationship.

All right, let’s see. Any other questions here? Don’t see any other questions. So, so with that, then we will, be drawing today’s webinar to a close. Hopefully I’ve given you some good tips on the onboarding process. If you have questions, That you either didn’t get a chance to ask during today’s session, or that you think about later, feel free to email me chip@sagaimpact.com. I would also love your feedback on today’s session and whether you think it met your expectations or not. How did how did I onboard you on this web now. Anyway, I’m terrible at these transitions, but in any case, I would love your feedback. I would love suggestions for future webinars did just, as I said, roll out those half dozen new webinars so that I showed you at the start of today’s session.

If you came in late. You can see them on the replay or you can go to sagaimpact.com/webinars and see all of the upcoming webinars that we have scheduled and register for all of them absolutely free of charge. This replay will be posted to the SAGA website within the week and I look forward to having you back on another webinar very soon.