Our Onboarding Strategy

If you’ve worked with any marketing agencies before, you may be familiar with this strange process that exists between talking with your sales representative and your project being worked on. There is a lot that goes on between those two steps that are missed by most agencies or rushed because everyone wants to get the project done and the money in the door.

Our experience has been that the more planning we do up front, in general, the fewer mishaps and issues we have later on. When you sign a contract with us you are in for a good one to two weeks worth of onboarding homework to download your company to us.

If you have purchased our consultation package, a lot of this will take place during that time, as discussed in this blog explaining our consultation process. if you haven’t purchased our entire consultation package and say for example you are just getting a website done or a marketing campaign or a one-time project or moving right into monthly campaign management, you will still go through or extensive onboarding process.

Getting Started

Once your contract is signed and your first payment has been made, our sales and onboarding team start to work together in order to completely prepare you and your project to be moved over to our fulfillment team. During your consultation process, your sales representative may have collected a few items, such as logos, other assets, and any other documents that may explain your company such as flyers or white papers.

We will take everything or sales representative has started with and expand upon that. Every client gets their own Google drive folder. We’ve tried a lot of different Google drive folder templates over the years and, to be honest, our current template may change as well. We’re not stuck on any process because whenever we find an easier, softer, quicker way we will always adjust. Your Google drive folder will be created for you the moment we start consulting with you. So even if you never sign a contract with us, we still organize everything in a Google drive folder this way nothing ever gets lost.

Project Management

We have also understood over our years of experience the importance of project management. There are a lot of different ways to organize projects on a lot of different platforms. We have used Trello, ScrumDo, Asana, monday.com … there are so many! We have found benefits to all of these platforms, but the important thing is just that you do organize your projects in some way.

Currently, we are using Asana to organize our projects along with a Scrum/Scrumban methodology to track our productivity. Now if you’re a big fat business geek like us, we’d be happy to share more about our Scrum methodology, however for the sake of this article, if you want more information you can click here and read about our methods, or click here to read more about Scrum.

Basically, you will be assigned to your Asana project so that you can see what we’re working on it at all times. We believe in full transparency and we want you to feel that we are always moving forward on your project. Sometimes you may see a week where fewer tasks are getting completed, which is usually balanced by a heavier task week following that. The only time this usually happens is if we are waiting on assets or approval from the client.

We go through each Asana project once a week and update the tasks based on any data that is coming forth in our reports, and any new strategies that may come up in our weekly touch base. If you have a development project such as a website build or campaign launch, the entire project will be mapped out week by week. If you are on a monthly marketing project, we will plan as many weeks out as possible, all the while allowing for adjustments! We plan as much as possible, but we always follow the data.

The Actual Onboarding Process

So the onboarding process actually looks like this: two different emails leading to two different landing pages with various tasks. The first task being an Onboarding Form. Now you may be thinking “I gave them all the information they could need during the sales process, why do I still need to fill out this onboarding form?” And while that may be true, every single client is different and every single sales process is different, so in order to have a uniform onboarding process and ensure that the Fulfillment team has everything that they need, we have one form that every client fills out.

Along with this form, inside your Google drive folder, you’re going to find a password sheet. This is extremely important as we’re working digitally so we will need access to everything we are even going to potentially use for your digital marketing campaigns and projects. We will ask for the passwords to your website dashboard, Google accounts, your social media accounts, your Yelp accounts, etc. We will also sign you up for any other accounts you don’t currently have, as needed or as determined by your contract, and add them to this password sheet.

We also have a list of items that were going to ask you to upload in your Google drive folder and this just depends on your project. For example, if we’re building a website we’re going to want you to upload your logos, any images that you currently have, content, white papers, blogs, and the list goes on and on. Now when we are building out your project, we will have everything we need and won’t have to play phone tag or chase anything down.

The Pay Off

When we have had successful onboardings with clients in the past, we have been able to start projects much sooner and move much more quickly. We spend about 1 to 2 weeks in this phase, but it’s really up to the client. Our experience has been that lack of planning leads to lagging projects, and wasting time (and money) on both ends, and no one wants that!

We can’t wait to get started with you if you are not onboard with us already! If you’re interested in a free initial consultation, please contact us and one of our sales representatives will be in touch with you soon.