Summary:  Although it may not be their first impression, onboarding a new client is their first test of your firm’s operational effectiveness. Demonstrating your own well-oiled machinery on day one delights your clients and lays the groundwork for success and a lasting relationship. At Tuck, we know the unique challenges of small businesses and nonprofits, and that delivering a successful onboarding is critical for demonstrating the value your organization brings. In this article, we’ve collected our expert consultants’ best practices for driving success from day zero.

Defining the Client Onboarding Journey

The client’s onboarding begins effectively when they sign a contract and transition from the end of the sales process to the beginning of delivering an actual service. It ends at a variable point when all of the purchased services have begun in earnest. Although that may take some time, and each service-specific onboarding will differ, ultimately it represents a system of setting and maintaining expectations with your client on how you operate. This will convey your expertise, gain trust, and create clear expectations such as the timeline and expected effort of all stakeholders.

Regardless of the service, a descriptive handoff is where you start to back up the talk of your sales teams, and strong first impressions will help smooth the way for the rest of the work. Often a warm and responsive sale can delight your customer, then a fumbled transition — missing or incorrect information, redundant questions, misalignment on the client’s goals, or perhaps simply poor service at the outset — will leave the client questioning their choices.

Consider the unique needs of your services and your clients, how you can meet those needs most effectively with your existing resources, and tailor the details of your approach. Those details will be particular to your organization. The best practices below, on the other hand, will guide virtually any small business or nonprofit to delivering a successful client onboarding, and improving their outcomes over time.

How To Standardize and Templatize Onboarding

Identify the core components of your onboarding process and then begin to formulate a specific plan to onboarding. This may exist only as a written document like a checklist or a full SOP, or as a templated folder or project file in a work management tool like ClickUp or Monday.com. In this process it is crucial to recognize the basic elements that can be initiated across clients, once made available to the people conducting the onboarding, the plan will inevitably save them time and reduce errors. Even if it’s as simple as a manual checklist of steps, this standardization is the key to creating organized and thus time reducing systems.

Throughout this process, determine if any elements can be created into a template or automated. Loading a preset ‘Client Onboarding’ template folder, for instance, that loads an up-to-date SOP document and a set of universal onboarding steps, can take a few seconds once it’s been created the first time. Compare that to the labor of manually creating, renaming, copying, and pasting items ad infinitum for each new client and the benefits are obvious.

In cases where templates  fail to account for variations, you can leverage automations which will aid especially if there is any tool limitations. To do this there are third-party platforms like Zapier and Make.com provide endless no-code options to connect your tools and streamline processes even further. You don’t need to be a developer to setup an automatic process between your CRM and your work management system! At Tuck, when our sales deals close in our CRM of choice, HubSpot, we then send data to ClickUp, our work management platform of choice, via ClickUp’s native HubSpot integration to automatically create new client engagements. The new engagement task in ClickUp carries our client data from the sales process and our service delivery teams have all the context they need to get started, without lifting a finger or asking a question. Or you could very easily create an Onboarding Form for clients or sales teams to submit all the necessary details, then automatically generate new engagement tasks with the same template steps and docs outlined above, in only a few clicks. Automations can save hours and headaches with just a bit of upfront investment.

Now, once the internal work is done to hand-off and setup the new engagement, and all of your preidentified checklist items have been confirmed complete, we’re ready to introduce ourselves. Standardization, templates, and automations don’t end there — in fact, we recommend to leverage them at every available stage of an engagement. So next, let’s discuss some standard artifacts to progress the work, beginning with a Client Introduction.
Streamlining the Client Introduction

Moving forward, continue to use common artifacts whenever possible, like an Introductory Email template, or a Kickoff deck template. These serve to ensure engagements begin quickly and clients receive a consistent experience. For one, a well-crafted introductory email sets the tone for the engagement. It should clarify your upfront needs (such as system access, collateral information), introduce key team members, and outline any key next steps. We aim to book our first slate of meetings from the introduction email, either via a scheduling link clients, or by providing viable meeting times. We also provide clients with any contact information, desired prework, or other resources they may reference throughout the engagement.

Likewise, whether in the introduction or kickoff, we recommend to provide the client with collateral that outlines the basics of your engagement or approach. Creating this collateral is an investment that can save your team time conveying key details and ensure your teams and clients are all in alignment. For instance, a breakdown of our standing Onboarding on a phase-by-phase basis, as well as a standard timeline, are preloaded into our engagement templates and kickoff decks. This anchors our entire engagement from the first call.

The kickoff call itself serves to further align your expectations with your clients. How the work should proceed, the expected timeline, and your definitions for success of the engagement should be discussed and confirmed up-front. Kickooff calls are meant to be clarifying: if there’s confusion or disagreement on what items are to be completed or how or when, it’s imperative to talk out immediately and find common solutions. Once all parties have agreed on how they’re moving forward, we can begin to transition fully into delivery of those services.

And yes, this is all just the beginning. The real work starts here. Nevertheless, setting your team and your clients up for success with a refined, time-tested onboarding process will pave the road ahead with gold.

Input, Feedback, and Ongoing Improvement

As with any business process, continuous improvement and open feedback from your team and clients are essential to remain efficient over the long-term. Processes, people, and tools all change, and so must both your documentation and the workflows themselves, to adapt to these new realities.

Collecting feedback from users on what works and where pain points arise will help identify the best targets for refining how you work. For instance, with many of our clients, the sales handoff can create issues with lost documentation, missing context, or slow response times. Rather than merely conveying it to your team and hoping for the best (“Where’s the contract PDF?”), make a plan to fix the issue. You can first utilize a Lessons Learned Register or similar backlog to catalog issues and desired improvements as they arise. Then at the end of a project or broader time period, prioritize the top reported issues and make responsive changes to your templates and processes. You might add an intake question requesting a link to the Contract Document, thus standardizing and making it easier to find for all engagements. Similarly, you may solicit feedback from clients on the smoothness of their onboarding and areas for improvement, and any other affected stakeholders. You may be surprised to find downstream impacts of your client onboarding process that you’d never know, without involving the right people.

Among our clients at Tuck, the most common pain points we encounter in onboardings are:
Contact information issues: for instance, missing contacts for Accounts Payable delays invoicing
Inaccurate or unclear scoping: the purpose or limits of the work are not well-defined and many assumptions must be validated, leaving the definition of success too vague to achieve
Misaligned expectations: whether from false impressions during the sale, documentation woes, or simple miscommunication, the client’s expectations and yours are not in sync

Adding a step to a checklist, a field to mark receipt of a key document, or a reminder to ping a team member at a certain point, goes a long way to reducing possible problems over the long term. The hardest part is identifying those pain points (or really, documenting them centrally), and fostering the culture and behavior of improving processes on a consistent basis.

Final Thoughts on Automating, Scaling, and Maintaining Balance

The goal of this work is to onboard and satisfy, if not delight, your customers when initiating new engagements. The faster and more efficiently you can do so without losing quality, the better. Such typically linear, repeatable processes lend themselves very well to logical automations. As an example, when a new client folder is created, you can have it auto-collect with the standard onboarding checklist items in a tool like ClickUp. It’s still always important to keep a level of human intervention present to prevent issues piling up without noticing them, and to help identify problems or potential improvements preemptively.

Sometimes the human touch is worth the extra time though. If you can’t, or shouldn’t, remove a person from the loop entirely, the next best thing is to give clearer insight into the activities they oversee with dashboards and other reporting tools. Broader insights can clue folks in to where they should spend their time, without requiring human action at every stage. As your organization grows, don’t lose sight of the weight of human attention that your clients value. Just because it can be automated, doesn’t mean it should.

As we conclude, we’ll leave you with this: keep your sights on your own goals as you tailor your Client Onboarding process. do you really need an action or requirement if it doesn’t serve your interests or the clients’? Ask yourself if the action can be simplified, quicker, or removed? It takes the whole team and your clients to continuously reassess and refine your workflows, but when complete you will be reaching the finish line together!

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