Why a Good Client Onboarding Process Matters for Your Business
The client onboarding process for any service business is a double-edged sword ⚔️.
On one hand, onboarding means you’ve successfully converted a new client and are opening up a potentially long partnership…
On the other hand, onboarding is a make or break point in that partnership.
Because if one thing goes wrong, the client might decide your business isn’t right for them and will walk away.
And walking away = less revenue = struggles with your business’ operations to get the numbers right.
And this doesn’t just happen during your clients’ onboarding process.
A bad onboarding experience can make clients cancel a month, 2, or even further down the line.
And many business owners like you don’t even realize their onboarding is actually the problem.
So if you’ve been able to convert clients but can’t seem to keep them a few months later, your client onboarding process might be the problem.
I know this because I’ve dealt with the same problem. But luckily, our clients have been extremely satisfied with their onboarding process.
Here’s what one client had to say about their experience delegating their marketing tasks to AutoGrow:
“The onboarding was quick but thorough, and the platform is simple and clean. It was so easy and fast that I thought I did something wrong at first…”
Michelle L.
And that’s exactly why I wanted to share with you this resource. To teach you what a smooth client onboarding experience should be like.
With this resource, you’ll learn:
- Why your clients’ onboarding process is so crucial for your business’ long-term success.
- What does and doesn’t matter for creating a successful client onboarding process.
- And 7 easy steps you can take to ensure your client onboarding process is as productive and frictionless as possible.
Ready to dive in? Let me ask you then…
Why Is the Client Onboarding Process So Important?
The most obvious reason why the client onboarding process is important is because without it, your work would be total mayhem.
How would you be able to deliver high-quality marketing services when you don’t even know who a client is and what they want? How would they tell you what they want if they didn’t know what processes they needed to go through to communicate with you?
However, there are also more subtle reasons the client onboarding process is important.
Years ago, I remember stumbling upon this article from ProfitWell and seeing this graph measuring the impact of each growth strategy to a company’s bottom line:
This data stuck with me because it revealed something counterintuitive: client retention actually led to double the profits that acquisition did.
This is interesting because agencies, like many other businesses, seem to be primarily focused on acquisition. You want to get more clients in the door to sign up for your services, because this means your business is doing well — right?
Well, not exactly. The amount of new clients you acquire each month doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know how to keep them.
And when you’re trying so hard to acquire them, it’s easy to completely neglect retaining them.
So what does this have to do with client onboarding?
Well, through my years of experience running AutoGrow, I’ve found that one of the biggest indicators of success in retention is how well the client onboarding process went.
When our clients went through a thorough onboarding process where everything was explained clearly and a genuine connection was made, they stuck with us for years.
When elements of our onboarding process were ineffective, focused on the wrong thing, or didn’t include clear communication, clients dropped off easily after a few months of using our services.
What Does (and Doesn’t) Matter for Client Onboarding
So what elements are important to include in an effective client onboarding process that leads to long-term client retention?
Here are some of the biggest patterns we’ve noticed.
What Matters
Setting Proper Expectations
The client onboarding process is all about establishing what you and the client can gain from collaborating with each other.
If your onboarding process doesn’t involve a reliable method for ensuring your clients understand:
- What kind of services you offer
- What their project timelines will look like
- The price they need to pay
- The details for how the work gets done
…You’re going to risk having major miscommunications that can lead to complaints or cancellations further down the line.
Creating a Genuine Connection
People can tell when you genuinely care about helping them compared to when you’re just going through the motions. And when clients feel like you care, they’ll be a lot more excited to work with you.
Adding a human touch to the onboarding process, such as a consultation call or even just having a representative check in with the client, can go a long way in helping the client feel like you’re a group of real people who want to connect with them and their business.
Focusing on Partnerships That Make Sense
As an agency, it can be tempting to take on clients and projects that don’t quite fit with what you normally offer. Whether you want to secure extra profit, tackle a new challenge, or simply pride yourself in never saying no, it’s easy to bite off more than you can chew.
However, partnerships like this hurt both parties in the long run. Use your onboarding process as a way to gauge whether a client is truly a good fit for your agency. If you notice any red flags, like a lack of professionalism, repeated requests for services you don’t offer, or other signs that they’re not a good fit, it is better to say no.
What Doesn’t Matter
Undervaluing Your Services With Freebies
In the beginning days of AutoGrow, we used to offer a project proposal for free as a way to attract leads into becoming full clients. I thought that once they’d see the value we could offer with a free deliverable, they’d be happy to sign on full time.
The result? We wasted hours of time doing work for free for leads who ended up going for a competitor anyway.
Then one day, with the help of a colleague, I decided to start charging for these proposals. I started pricing them at $300, then went up to $500. As a buffer, I even offered to refund the money if a client wasn’t 100% satisfied.
Although you might think this would result in less people signing, the result was just the opposite. More people than ever bought the proposal and went on to become full-fledged clients.
When you give away your services for free, it sends the message that your time and labor isn’t valuable. And when leads don’t feel like your work is valuable, they don’t turn into clients.
However, when you put a fair price on your services, it communicates that you’re selling a high-value service that deserves their attention.
So, if you’ve been offering free or discounted proposals or other services as a way to entice new clients, consider changing your approach.
Finding the Perfect Tool or Software
Delegation and automation are cornerstones of successfully growing your business. And with so many software solutions and tools out there designed to automate your onboarding process or client communication, you may become convinced that your problem lies in the fact that you haven’t discovered the perfect tool yet.
However, this likely isn’t the case. Onboarding isn’t something you can 100% automate, as it requires human-to-human communication and working with clients’ problems on a case-by-case basis.
Although there are tools you can use to ease the process (for example, we use ActiveCampaign to automate our series of onboarding emails), don’t worry too much about it.
Instead of looking for a magic wand solution, focus on creating a thorough process for your team to follow when communicating with clients.
7 Steps for a Frictionless Client Onboarding Process
So how do you create a smooth, easy onboarding process that incorporates these tips?
Here are 7 steps to creating a flawless client onboarding experience that eliminates the potential for miscommunication and dissatisfaction.
1. Make Your Value Offer Clear
Although it may technically start the moment someone clicks “sign up,” we like to think of the client onboarding process as starting much earlier — as early as the moment they get on your website.
With this in mind, we try to make our value offer as clear as possible right from the beginning. As soon as a potential client clicks on our pricing page, they immediately know:
- What services we offer.
- What our typical timelines are.
- The price points we offer.
- What’s included in each of our packages.
- FAQs about our processes, timelines, brand-specific terms, and conditions of signing up.
This makes it so that clients already know what they’re getting into before they even sign up or book a call with us, which means they’re pretty much ready to make a decision before we’ve even spoken to them.
By making our offer clear (instead of obscuring our prices, scope, or timelines until the sales call), we minimize miscommunications, misunderstandings, and wasted time.
2. Get on a Call
While written guides or instructional videos can be incredibly useful, we find that we get the highest client retention rates with clients who book a consultation call with us.
Why?
Because talking to a real person (whether through video chat or in person) helps clients form a human connection and allows them to get answers to more complex, personal questions a guide might not cover.
It also allows us to go into depth about how we can help them with their particular needs or problems and show that we genuinely care.
So, if you’re not offering a consultation call (not a sales call — it’s about offering information, not selling) during your onboarding process, try incorporating one.
3. Offer a Service Slice
Remember our failed experiment to offer freebie proposals?
While our idea to make it free ended up being a bust, the idea of offering a trial run to your services is still very effective — as long as you do it right.
We call this offering a service slice — something small that represents what your agency is capable of doing. You can offer this for a fee that’s less than your full set of services but not so small it undervalues your time and labor.
This will give clients a great way to see the value you can offer without diving in headfirst. And when they’ve already been sold on a small version of your services, it’s a lot easier to sell them the full version.
It’s also a great way of giving new clients an idea of what working with you will be like. Proposals, a quick funnel, or a small sample deliverable (such as a single ad or graphic) are all service slices agencies can offer.
If you’re struggling to convince potential clients who are on the fence, or want to create a way for clients to ease into working with you, consider offering a service slice of your own.
4. Set Expectations — On Both Sides
One of the biggest mistakes agencies make during their onboarding process is failing to set proper expectations with the client.
This goes both ways — your client needs to know what you’re capable of just as much as you need to know what they want from you. Without a mutual understanding, scope creep, misunderstandings, and complaints and cancellations are all likely to happen.
In order to set good expectations, have several processes in place that allow each party to formally and thoroughly explain their needs. This may include:
- Creating an onboarding questionnaire that lets a client describe the basics about their business, what projects they need done, their timelines, and anything else that might be relevant.
- Creating onboarding guides that explain what you offer, your timelines, how your workflow is set up, who the client can communicate with, and how to use any technology (such as a CRM) required to work together.
- Setting up a required call that goes over all these details and ensures the client understands the scope of what you can do for them.
5. Explain Your Workflow
Although it’s part of setting expectations, I’m bringing extra attention to this because it’s often overlooked.
When your team is using the same tools, communication processes, and project standards they always use, it can be easy to lose perspective and forget that just because you’re familiar with your workflow, doesn’t mean your client is too.
Although it may be self-explanatory that a logo design, for example, takes 1 week at your agency, the client may not know this — they may have no idea what’s involved in creating a logo or how long it takes. They may even have worked with other agencies that take 3 weeks or 3 days.
To avoid misunderstandings and errors, make sure you explain your workflow to your clients during the onboarding process. A simple guide that shows who works on what, how long projects take, and what the process is for completing each project can help your work go much more smoothly.
6. Kickstart the Process
Have you ever had someone explain something to you, and after they walked away, you completely forgot everything they said?
The onboarding process and all the new rules, people, and policies it involves are a lot to take in for clients. It’s easy for them to forget crucial elements, like who to contact to start a project or what platform they need to use to send your team needed information or notes.
At its worst, this can result in clients getting irritated that progress is slow or nonexistent because they forgot they needed to take some action to kickstart the process.
To avoid this and make the whole process less overwhelming, it’s a great idea to help kickstart the process in real time. An easy way to do this is by providing a guide or set of notes that gives clients a clear step-by-step process on what to do next.
However, we’ve had the most success with a live video call where our strategists lead the client through the process. During this call, our strategists help clients set up their first project, their business profile, and other important things they need to successfully work with us.
You can easily replicate this by setting up a secondary call with new clients (after the initial consultation call) that guides them through important tasks like filling out their onboarding questionnaire or sharing project details.
7. Have a Continuous Acquisition Mindset
The biggest way you can create a successful onboarding experience, and more importantly, ongoing client relationship, is to view onboarding as more of an ongoing, perpetual process.
In order to retain clients, you must not view existing clients as leads you’ve already conquered and don’t have to worry about. Instead, continually touch base with clients to keep them excited about and engaged with your business and services.
Too often, clients are met with a thorough onboarding process filled with people ready to help them and answer their questions, but then, as time goes on, this attention goes away. This can make them cancel as they no longer feel like your agency is giving them the focus they need to succeed.
To avoid this, keep reselling your product. Make sure your clients feel like they’re valued and like you care about helping them. Schedule monthly check-in calls, and be proactive about finding solutions to specific issues your clients are having. Ensure they’re always getting their needs met, and if there’s a quiet period, go out of your way to ask them if there’s anything they need.
Conclusion
If you’re seeing client retention rates drop, the problem may be the expectations and tone you’re setting in the very beginning during your client onboarding process.
Remember: first impressions matter, and this is especially true for business relationships.
If you want to improve your client onboarding process so your agency can retain more clients and generate more revenue, remember to:
- Focus on setting proper expectations, making a genuine connection, and engaging in partnerships that make sense.
- Don’t worry too much about finding the right software or tools, and don’t undervalue your services by offering them for free.
- Make sure your onboarding process involves creating clear expectations about what you offer, the way your workflow operates, and what clients can expect from partnering with you.
- View onboarding as a continuous process.
What kind of challenges and successes have you experienced with your client onboarding process?
Let me know in the comments below.
Keep AutoGrowin’, stay focused.
