38. How to onboard clients (and why it's so important)

When your clients decide to move forward with you, it's critical you make them feel like they made the right choice. 

After all, they are dropping some meaningful $$ on you (or should be), so first steps and impressions will mean a lot.

Here's how I do my initial onboarding process, why it's so important to get right, and my template for the initial email once they decide to move forward with me (copied below).

I've also linked my onboarding questionnaire in the content below, so feel free to make a copy of it and use it in your own practice (just change the header and footer, of course!).

Here's my initial email:

Hi [Name],

Glad to hear you've decided to move forward with [Name of Program! I'm excited to get started.

Agreement (if unsigned)

Attached is an agreement for you to sign and return. I've dated it for Monday, which is the soonest I can get you in (and fits in nicely before my next project starts). Does that timeline work for you?

Invoice

I'll send an invoice which can be paid using most credit cards. I suggest setting up auto-pay on those to securely handle the payments each month. They're due by the 1st of each month, so if you need time to manually process/pay the invoice, just let me know so I can send them earlier.

Kick-off Call

Our next step is to set up an initial kick-off call to go through these items and begin exploring a roadmap for the next few weeks. Are you available any time Tuesday afternoon or Monday at 11am for a 90-minute call? If not, could you suggest a few times later in the week?

We'll set up our recurring calls during this first meeting.

Questionnaire

To save time and make sure I download any known information from you, please fill out this questionnaire to the extent you can before our kick-off call.

Access

I'll need access to any/all of the following if you have it set up. The most important right now is Google Analytics and the rest may be required later on.

• Google Analytics (please send to [my email])
• Google Search Console (please send to [my email])
• Google Ads (please send to [my email])
• Google Tag Manager (please send to [my email])
• Google My Business (please send to [my email])
• Website CMS Admin (please send to [my email])

That should do it for now, there's more to cover but we'll take it a step at a time.

Thanks again and I look forward to working with you!

Kevin

Have questions about this process or something to do with your work? Let me know in the comments.

Yours,

—k