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OPTIMIZING THE ONBOARDING PROCESS

VIDEO 1: WHY IS OPTIMIZING THE ONBOARDING

PROCESS IMPORTANT?
Hey there, it’s Evan from HubSpot. One of the most important stages of the client lifecycle is the
onboarding process, the phase right after they sign on with your agency. But are you making the most
of this critical point in your relationship with your clients? The onboarding stage sets the tone for your
entire client engagement. You want to make sure it’s optimized.

In order to excel in this stage, you must have a standardized and documented process for
onboarding all new HubSpot clients. This will help you improve communication, both internally and
externally. And this, in turn, will lead to increased efficiency. If you make the most of this stage, you’ll
also be able to invest time in educating clients about inbound marketing and its associated processes,
which will help you in the long run. This is also why it’s a great idea to involve the agency owner or
head of client services in mapping out this stage.

And instead of sending your clients one huge document with all the information right at the
beginning, give them the information in smaller pieces over time. That way they’ll feel they’re
constantly kept in the loop. Otherwise, they might not hear from you for days or weeks on end, which
can leave clients feeling like they’re in the dark. Small weekly or bi-weekly updates are a great way to
offer information over a period of time. That way, they’ll understand you’re constantly working toward
their goals. You want your clients to have a great experience working with you!

If you feel it’d be helpful to review the onboarding basics at this point, have a look at the
Onboarding New Clients class of the Partner Certification.

VIDEO 2: HOW DO YOU OPTIMIZE THE

ONBOARDING PROCESS?
Hi, it’s Evan from HubSpot. Let’s talk about how you can optimize the client onboarding process to
improve both your client’s and agency’s success. There are three main steps to optimizing the
onboarding process: (1) Collect information about your current process, (2) review and workshop the
process, and (3) update your existing process.

Let’s look at these one at a time.

First, collect information about your current client onboarding process. To ensure you’re
optimizing this stage of the client relationship, the best place to start is to scrutinize the process you’re
already using. Map your current client process so that you have a clear visual representation of every
stage, and how those stages relate to one another. Also, collate any
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information that you and your team have, such as tables of contact details, checklists, templates,
questionnaires—anything shared with a client during the on-boarding process.

Once you’ve done this, you can review and workshop your process. Get all the relevant
stakeholders in a room and review your current client onboarding process. Identify what works and
what doesn’t; what’s essential and what isn’t. Your goal is to produce an updated and optimized
process that takes everyone’s feedback into consideration. Before workshopping your current process,
make sure everyone on the team reviews what they’re currently doing and ask them to bring to the
workshop any resources they’re using or sharing with their clients.

During the workshop, ask your team questions like:

• Is this a question you can ask every customer? •
Does every client need support in this area? • How is
the rest of the team doing this differently? • Do we need
a template for that? • Does the timeline look the same
for every client? • What challenges are your clients
facing at each stage, and how can we help them? • What are the positive and negative
feelings client’s experience during the onboarding
journey? Where are they feeling the most negative, and how can we improve these areas?

Once you’ve gathered and explored everyone’s feedback, and agreed on steps moving forward, it’s
time to formulate your new process. You can now move on to the last step: updating your existing
onboarding process. Once this is signed off, you need to communicate the new process to staff and
roll it out internally.

To do this successfully, creating a streamlined, optimized process is vital. Here are seven best
practices to help you get through this challenging task.

First, make sure you build a well-documented onboarding process that’s accessible to all of
your team members. For example, your onboarding process could stipulate when the kick-off call
should take place, who joins certain meetings when, and what kind of documentation should be
shared with the client and at what point. Make sure to clearly identify all goals, and specify what the
outcomes of your onboarding process should look like. This will help you with handovers and upskilling
new employees.

If you don’t already have your onboarding plan documented, here are some tips on how to get
started:
• Look at your retainer documents, such as your SLAs, and pull out all the tasks that were
promised to your clients. Write these down.
• Split these deliverables into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly deliverables. •
Decide who on your team is going to execute each of the deliverables.

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• Document this in a step-by-step format, then post it somewhere where the whole agency
can see it.

At this stage, it’s also important to include a clear timeline of when things will be done and who will do
them—and to communicate this timeline with your client clearly from the start. While seeing results from
inbound can take some time, clients are spending their money from the beginning, and they want to
know where and how that money is being used. Because of this, account managers need to have a
sense of urgency to keep clients excited and motivated.

The second best practice of an optimized onboarding process is to go through a discovery call
with your client. This is the perfect opportunity to learn about your client’s brand. Ask them to complete a
questionnaire about their business, brand, and background as homework, and have them send it to you
before the call. That way, you’ll be able to prepare questions to ask them in advance. In the call, you
should also discuss their goals and business objectives. This process makes developing relevant strategies
infinitely easier.

Third, adopt a quick wins approach so that your clients see value early on. Include items that see
results in the first few months. This way, clients will be more likely to engage and stay with you. What
can you offer in the first 90 days to show value? For example, you could add HubSpot CTAs to the
website right away, or look for existing content offers that can be added to HubSpot immediately. This
will also help keep momentum from the sales process and keep that going through onboarding and
beyond. Set expectations around what to expect from quick wins, and remember to drip the information
to them over time so they don’t feel overwhelmed.

Fourth, use automation to improve the efficiency of the onboarding process. For example,
could you use your agency’s portal to create email templates in HubSpot Sales for the account manager
to use with their clients? If so, you could then use the meetings tool to make it easier for clients to schedule
calls.

For the next best practice, debrief past onboarding experiences. Look back on your past client
experiences to determine what worked well, what didn’t, and why. Have an internal meeting and do this
for every client moving forward. If you’re battling to see what went wrong, consider sending out a survey.

Make sure you set a clear cadence of communication with the client from the beginning. Apart from
setting overall client expectations, it’s vital to put some communication rules in place early on. Some
account managers fall into the bad habit of being at the beck and call of every client.
Inform your clients how they should communicate with HubSpot—through the support team.
Clearly identify the points of contact, and introduce them to any project management tools you may be
using.

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And lastly, create a service level agreement—otherwise known as an SLA—or statement of

work with your clients. A huge part of the onboarding process is to develop an SLA with every
client you work with. Keep it short and sweet, and ensure legal jargon is kept to a minimum –
everything should be explained in simple terms. Keep the deliverables of the SLA flexible, and
phrase contractual clauses positively and in line with the best interests of the client.

Remember, the onboarding stage is usually your clients’ first ever interaction with you. Many of
them might’ve been burned in the past by traditional agencies that have undelivered, so you really
want to earn their trust by showing value early on. A standardized, documented, and streamlined
onboarding process will ensure that everything flows easily.

To review, the first step to optimizing your onboarding process is to collect all the information
about your current onboarding process. Once you’ve done that, you need to review and workshop
the process with your team. And finally, you need to draw insights and update your existing
onboarding process. You then need to back these up with your best practices.
There you have it! Now you know how to optimize your client onboarding process.

VIDEO 3: WHAT DOES AN OPTIMIZED

ONBOARDING PROCESS LOOK LIKE?
Hey, it’s Evan from HubSpot. Let’s take a look at what an optimized onboarding process might look
like for your agency. We’re going to look at one of our top HubSpot Agency Partners, MPULL,
located in Cape Town, South Africa. MPULL is a strategic inbound marketing agency that mixes
creativity and data to help agencies grow their businesses.

While MPULL had a defined process in place for onboarding their clients, it wasn’t documented.
When they realized that in order to optimize their process it’d be best to document it, they also found
that everyone in the company was doing things a little differently. So, they started right at the top, by
collecting all the pieces of information they had regarding their current process.

When they moved onto the next step of optimizing the onboarding process—where they
reviewed what they had and workshopped it—they realized that some crucial elements of the
process were missing. When they then created a new process, they added these elements.

One of the first elements they decided to incorporate was a discovery call. This is a call with
clients to set expectations and to fully understand their clients’ goals and objectives. They
realized a few months later that simply introducing a discovery call wasn’t enough – their
processes still needed to be improved. So, they repeated the three steps to optimizing the
onboarding process. During these steps, they understood that they needed to create a document for
the client to fill in before the call takes place, called a business one-pager.

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Here are some of the types of questions you can include in your own one-pager: •
What does your company do? • Why does your company do what it does? • What
is your brand positioning statement? • What does your company sell? • How do
your customers pay? • What is your most profitable product, who do you sell it to,
and where do they work?

The one-pager allowed MPULL to get to know their clients’ businesses extremely well, and it
enabled them to prepare any further questions to ask during the discovery call. Some account
managers didn’t need to be told to investigate these things before the one-pager was introduced,
while others fell a little short. So, by adding this into the onboarding process, everyone now does it
for every client. If you’d like to know what a full business one-pager looks like, you can find one in
your additional resources.

During their reviewing and workshopping stages, MPULL also realized there were a number of other
things they could improve on. First, they decided it was more effective to split up the discovery call
and the persona workshop into two separate meetings. This way, before launching into the persona
workshop, they were able to fully digest the client’s business, needs, goals, and audience. On top of
that, they decided to send a persona questionnaire ahead of the persona workshop, so that time spent
on the call with the client could focus on understanding the personas better, and not on creating them.
This would better their chances of everyone being on the same page.

MPULL also noticed that a fixed-deliverable SLA doesn’t always work best. When they reviewed their
process, they decided to implement a flexible deliverables SLA. This allows them to provide their
clients with the best services that align with their goals.

As you can see, working and reworking their onboarding processes took some trial and error.
But, like most things in business, the only constant is change. MPULL’s onboarding process is now
in a good place, but they might find something else they can improve on later down the line.
If and when this happens, they’ll start again with step one of the three-step plan to optimize their
onboarding process even further.

There you have it – some of the small but significant ways MPULL optimized their onboarding
process.