You just landed a new client! After the celebration, the work resumes, switching from sales to service. Bringing a new client onboard changes the dynamics of your staff because new clients bring their legacy processes with them and those can either improve or derail they way you run your business. Especially for companies integrating clients to perform services on those clients’ behalf, each additional new client adds layers of complexity. Nowhere is this more evident than in management companies which must understand, implement, and integrate new services, pricing structures, programs, customer categories with those assigned benefits, and so forth.
Developing and implementing a structured process to integrate new clients into the workload minimizes downtime, prioritizes tasks, and puts everyone on the same page of expectations. In “The 6 Essential Steps of an Effective Client Onboarding Process,” Eric Pratt states, “According to the Marketing Agency Growth Report 2018, a major 43% of agency businesses don’t have the free time to focus on administrative work which includes client onboarding,15% of agencies neither customize their service offering nor deliver services on time, acquiring new clients has been one of the big pain points for almost 60% of the agencies and 16% of them face client retention problems.”
Vendors imperil themselves by taking on clients that need services they cannot provide. Sure, you can outsource almost everything, but the clients hired you for that expertise you promised. In other words, make sure you can provide the services the client both needs and expects before signing on the dotted line. The discussion of services leads to a conversation about goals, which the team must understand so they can hit the ground running.
Onboarding a new client requires that the team members working with that new client be involved in the kick-off meeting. This is where people put faces and names together, get a glimmer of the personalities involved, and have the opportunity to ask questions. Before the kick-off meeting with the client, you should meet in private with the team. All members of the team should have access to and the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the new client’s assets, the positives and negatives of bringing that client onboard (for internal information only, of course), and opportunities in serving the client in which your business can position itself as an expert.
Jennifer Bourn advocates frequent and clear communication throughout the onboarding process to keep everyone on the same page. It does no good to promise the client customized billing and then hold your staff to internal protocols. Client leadership must understand and accept where your company will customer and adjust for them and where it will not. This entails review, review, review. If the client’s leadership rotates or changes frequently, then the onboarding meeting must be repeated to bring the new directors up to speed with what your company does and does not do for that client. Otherwise, expectations morph, but the contract doesn’t … and that leads to misunderstandings and hard feelings.
Do not negotiate which services to provide and to what extent during client integration. That part of the process occurs before signing the contract for service. The onboarding process reiterates the contracted terms and ensures proper implementation of the service for which the client hired you. The process of bringing a client onboard sets the framework for bringing two cultures together like a marriage and requires work to build trust. The onboarding process works out the kinks of the new relationship and signals the end of the honeymoon period when the real work begins.
The Heggen Group has over 20 years of experience assisting companies in the development of feasible, robust processes that integrate the work to be done in an orderly fashion. Contact CEO Jayne Heggen for more information.
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