The World Class Onboarding Blueprint

So before we get into onboarding, right, I just want to zoom out for a quick sec and recognize, like, if you want to build a 7-figure agency, right, which is $83,000 or more, there's a couple of key things we have to put in place, a couple of key pillars, right? Number 1 is we've got to land clients. We're going to have that process to get clients on a consistent basis. Number 2 is we have to deliver results in a systematized way, and we have to knock it out of the park for the clients that choose to invest with us. Number 3 is we have to retain those clients, right? We, we actually have to get the clients sticking with us long term. And then number 4 is we have to scale up, right? Put the systems, the procedure, the team in place so we're not doing it all ourselves. And if you think about, you know, building your 7-figure agency as a house, right, there's, there's these pillars that have to be put in place and Reality is, if we don't have all of those pillars in place, stable, the house will fall, right? If we're not landing clients consistently, if we're not delivering results in a systematized way, if any of these, these pillars really aren't set and built all the way, we're going to struggle. We're going to have massive, um, slowdowns within the business. And so, you know, these training sessions, that's what we're trying to do, is help you build the blocks, build the pillars so that you can truly have a sustainable, high-growth digital marketing agency. And so there's a visual that goes along with this. It's gonna be hard for you guys to see. I'm gonna share my screen because I'll just kind of zoom in and then we're gonna zoom right back out. But let me share this real quick. Because I think we wanna, we wanna look at the big picture and where onboarding fits into this process and kind of, you know, where, where growing your agency and accomplishing your goals fits into that process as well. So really fill our funnel, right? We've got to have the agency funnel. We've got to do cold outreach. We've got to put systems in place to get clients to come to us prepositioned to buy. And then we've got to drive traffic, right? We got to figure out how we get more and more people into that funnel so we get appointments and sales. From there, we got to land the clients, right? We got to have our growth system, the things we do daily, weekly, monthly. We've gotta have a nice tight sales process. We need to put hot lead follow-up so we can convert those people we meet with into sales. And then we've gotta track the activity. What we measure gets done, right? And when you get these dialed in, you know, that funnel or that pillar is nice and tight, but then we've gotta deliver and retain, right? And so when it comes to delivery and retention, we've got our onboarding, we've got our quick win strategy, we've got reporting and like how we report and check in with the clients and show the value. We've got our client success system, which is all around, you know, how do we put a team in place so we're not doing that client reporting process on our own? And so there's a lot of components that go into building your agency so that it can sustainably grow to 7 figures beyond just landing clients. And so today we're just gonna zoom all the way in to your onboarding process and what it takes to come out of the gates well, to get those clients an amazing experience so that they can and will stay with us. And so we do have a workbook for this that you can, you can use as a point of reference with resource links and things. If you want the blueprint, just type blueprint into the chat. That will give our team the heads up. All right, we will reach out and get you the link for the blueprint. So whether you're watching this with me live on Zoom, or maybe you're watching this after the fact, Just type blueprint. That'll be your heads up to say, okay, I want the blueprint. I want that PDF with all of the links and resources. The bunch of you guys typing it in, thank you for engaging with me. Super good. I also, I'm gonna give you guys the link to download this as well. Don't get distracted, stick with me here. But if you go to 7figureagency.com/world-clash-onboarding, you can get it, right? And you can grab it there. I think Justin on my team, just dropped it into the chat. Okay, so I want to start by asking if this has ever happened to you in your agency. You get a client, you're super excited, feel like, okay, we're like, I know I'm gonna do good work for this client. I know they're gonna, you know, they're gonna get great results with me. Get excited about it. You go to work, you start doing your thing, whether it's you or your team or your subcontractors, but you go to work And then at some point in the relationship, you get the cancellation notice. Either they email you or they say, hey, we need to talk, or they get you on a call. Just give me a yes if you've experienced this in your agency at some point. The dreaded cancellation, the dreaded, you know, I'm going a different direction. I got— I'm seeing yeses, right? You're on this call because you recognize it's going to happen, right? It's going to happen eventually. Now the other question is, have you ever had a situation where the client signed up, they gave you the credit card, it seemed good in the sales process, they were, they were on board, they seemed like a good fit, but then within the first couple of months they were canceled? Um, you know, does that happen every now and then? Just give me a 1 in the comments if that's happened to you, right? 1 in the comments. Yeah, it's happened to us over the years. You know, our agency Plumbing and HVAC SEO, we now do about $7 million per year. We serve hundreds and hundreds of plumbing and HVAC companies. That used to happen pretty frequently, right? You know, we, we would come out of the gate strong, but we would lose the clients. And what we discovered in that process was we might have our roadmap completely fleshed out. We might know exactly what we're gonna do for the client with their website, with their SEO, with their pay-per-click. We might even have a bulletproof strategy that is definitely going to get their phone ringing, that is definitely going to get them business, that's going to be a home run for them. But if we don't come out of the gates well in the onboarding, if we don't communicate to those clients, if we don't get them excited about that plan where they're bought in, we're going to have cancellations. And unfortunately, we're going to have early cancellations, the cancellations that happen within the first couple of months. And that's really what we want to solve for. The important quote on this, you know, just thinking about retention in general, is a new client costs 5 times more than retaining an existing one. And if you don't land— if you don't nail your onboarding process, clients will leave and you'll be stuck in a cycle of constantly getting a client, hustling to do the work, Losing the client, resetting the client. Is chicken protein? I hear William. Chicken is definitely protein, and I'm glad you asked. That's an important question on today's session. Everyone, if you could mute yourself in the background. Somebody on my team grab that. But you're thinking good. You're getting your protein in. Okay. So type retain if you know that retaining clients is mission critical to the growth of your agency. Just type retain, and then we're gonna get get right into it. All right, I see retains flying in. I appreciate you guys lighting the chat up for me today. So here's what we're gonna do. Here's what you're going to get on today's session. Number 1 is we're gonna talk about how to craft an onboarding process that wows your clients, that really sets a good expectation. How to leverage automations to make it as seamless as possible so it's not you and your team doing all of the heavy lifting. And then, you know, Number 3 is the power of client communication within the first 90 days. And I really had to craft a world-class experience within the first 90 days. Retain. Now Adam says, hope this covers a client on the edge of leaving. We could talk about some strategies. This is mainly for, you know, usually when they've just signed up with you, they're excited, right? They wouldn't have given you their credit card if they didn't believe that you could help them. So you've just sold them. As long as you don't go silent, as long as you don't fumble the ball, you can carry that momentum into the first couple of months, right? And then if they're on the edge of leaving, that's usually because you dropped the ball in some way. There was some performance issue. I can talk about that a little bit, Adam, towards the end. But today's really more about let's make sure we don't fumble the ball coming out of the gates. And let's make sure that we carry that momentum into them rather than staying for 3 months, them staying for years and years on end. So let's get into it. Couple of keys when it comes to your onboarding process, and I just want you to think real quick. Client had a sales process with you, they said yes. I'm talking about retainer-based services for the most part. They agreed to the $2,000 or $3,000 a month thing. They gave you the credit card either over the phone or they signed a DocuSign and sent it in. And now we've started, right? And there's a ticking time bomb between when they've given you the credit card and them starting to get buyer's remorse. And just type buyer's remorse in the chat for me if you ever, like, if you experienced this yourself. You made a big car payment, you know, maybe you rented a property, and you start to get worried. You're like, I don't know if I did the wrong thing. I hope that they're actually, you know, not liars and they're like actually on the other side of this thing going to do something for me. It's natural. And so what we want to make sure is that we squeeze the timeframe between when they've signed up and when they're completely confident that delivery is going to happen, right? They're going to get what they expected. And so one little thing I would suggest if you're not already doing this, Once they sign up, immediately schedule the kickoff call. The call that you're gonna have with the client to gather the usernames, the passwords, the details to set the expectation. Don't just like, okay, let's, let's, hey, you signed up, somebody on my team is gonna reach out, we'll talk to you whenever. Like if you can almost immediately, whether that's you doing it still in the agency, or you've got a launch coordinator, or you've got an account manager, you wanna schedule that right in. 'Cause in their mind they're like, "Okay, I know what my next step is. I know there's gonna be this conversation or this meeting where we're going to kick things off." Now outside of that, right? And outside of that, one of the best things you can do to eliminate buyer's remorse is send something physical. I like to call it welcoming with a bang and appreciation. You can come outta the gates and send them a bunch of emails and have a lot of great meetings, but that rarely manifests in the physical world. And so one of my favorite things to do is build into your process, once the client signs up, somebody on your team is going to send a gift basket. And I'll talk about some of the different gift basket services you can use for this. You know, invest $50 to $100. That way they're gonna get something physical that they're like, wow, okay. Hey, thanks so much for hiring Plumbing and HVAC SEO. We appreciate your business. You know, we're excited about working with you. And there's lots of ways that you can welcome with a bang and appreciation. I think in addition to a gift basket, and you can use Larry and David, Harry and David, you can use one of our favorites today is Sherry's Berries, which is like those chocolate-covered strawberries, especially if they're in an office where they've got a team and they're like, those berries, those gifts are going to get passed around. Just give me a yes in the comments if you can just add that simple touch. Client signs up, we're gonna mail them something quick, right? And speed of delivery is important on this as well. And that's why something like Sherry's Berries is so great because they sign up and the next day it's at their office or it's at their house and it's an unexpected professional touch. The other thing you can do would be to put together a little more professionally branded welcome box. And so in our case, we've got, you know, a nice branded Plumbing and HVAC SEO box. It looks, you know, comes in the mail, it's hefty. We open it up, inside of it, it's got a, like, a padfolio. It's got a copy of our book. It's got a branded logo. It's got a t-shirt. It's got things that say, hey, like, you're welcome to the team, right? We're excited about working with you. For some of you guys, that's, that's advanced, right? It's like, well, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go custom build a box and all that stuff. A Sherry's Berries goes a long ways. And, you know, if you think about the book Giftology, I don't know if you guys have read this, I would highly recommend you, you read it. He talks about, you know, if the gift is branded with your stuff on it, it's not gonna land the same way for the client. It's really more like you trying to get something in their world versus you just doing something for them. And so sending a welcome basket, sending a Sherry's Berries is a great touch. If you can do both, this is what we do today. We do both, right? And what's nice about a welcome box like this is you can build it once, design the box, put all the stuff together, have a third-party service provider pull it off the shelf every time you get a client, and they mail it out. And so day one, they sign up, their onboard call is launched, is scheduled. The next day they get like a box of goodies in the mail. Could be cookies, could be Shari's Berries. They're like, wow, that was amazing. A week later, a couple days later, they get this, this box in the mail with all of these other goodies. Just give me a yes if you feel like that would create a great experience, or type experience if you feel like that would create an experience they, they would not expect and probably wouldn't get from most other agencies. Right? And that's what we want. It's usually the things that people aren't expecting that have the biggest impact. Like if they were expecting you to do it, it's, it's good. Hey, cool. They check that box. But it's the things that you're going to do that the other agencies they've worked with in the past haven't that make you stand out. All right, cool. Lots of experience. Amazing. Yes, for sure. So that's the first thing. We want to welcome with a bang and appreciation. Number 2 is we want to make sure the gathering of the details are as seamless as possible. We all have stuff we have to gather from the client, just like stuff. If you got a lot of stuff, like in my world at Plumbing and HVAC SEO, we've got to get domain access, we've got to get access to the Google Map, uh, you know, we're— if we're doing Google Ads and they've got an existing account, we've got to get access to that. Their social profiles, we want to customize a website for them, so we need to get pictures of them, their team, their logo, in a variety of different formats. We want to understand what their unique selling proposition is. Stuff, right? There's lots of stuff we have to gather. And we've played with a lot of ways to get that stuff over the years. And I've seen it, you know, from we're going to put all the heavy lifting on the client. We're going to send them a form and they got to fill in the form. And once the form is submitted with all of that stuff, then we'll kick off the next step in the relationship. And while that's good from an efficiency perspective, you know, that might not be the best experience for the client, right? That might be, you know, the client feeling like, wow, I hired these guys and now I got to do all this stuff. Or they got the form, they were too busy to fill it in. 1 week, 2 week, 3 week, 4 weeks have passed and they haven't even submitted it. And so your team hasn't even been able to get started. Um, that's not a recipe for a great client experience, right? And so we want to think about how do we make this more seamless? How do we take the burden off the client and put it on us, put it on our team so that they feel like, man, I signed up with these guys or gals and they're like, they hit the ground running. They plugged in with me. They got me everything started without me having to do all of the work. Depending upon how your client onboard process works, typically in the agency game, there's gonna be a Zoom meeting. You're gonna ask a bunch of questions, you're gonna share the value, you're gonna, um, ask for the business, they're gonna give a credit card, they're gonna sign a DocuSign, uh, and then there's gonna, there's gonna be like that scheduled onboarding call. In some cases, they may like click a link based on the conversation and enter their credit card details elsewhere. Um, in a lot of cases, we're taking the credit card over the phone just to seal the deal, but we do still need them to submit a, a document that's agreeing to the terms and conditions, just to, you know, to CYA on all of that stuff. And so what we like to do is make sure that once that agreement is submitted, it automatically redirects to a welcome video. Hey, welcome aboard. We're really excited about working with you. You know, here's what you can expect in the next couple of days. Here's your next step. I want you to fill out some of the details below and ideally give them the opportunity to schedule in that launch call. Now, if it happened over the phone, do it like that, but also leverage some automation to move them to that next step. I think the other, like, piece of the puzzle that a lot of agencies don't put in place is just— if you think about your current sales process, just type funnel. If you've got a funnel where somebody can schedule, they get reminder sequences, maybe you've got a nurture sequence in place where they get dripped a bunch of emails and a bunch of communications. Just like funnel, if you do. I know we do, and we invest heavily on the content behind that, the strategy behind it. Yeah, most of us— I see Sandy and Eminem, you guys— we have funnels for ourselves. Most of us, though, don't have an automation sequence that fires once somebody signs up. And I think that's an opportunity to overcommunicate in the early days. And so when they sign up, you know, hey, welcome aboard, start to fill in this form. Don't make that form all of the details, right? Because that's where they feel like, wow, I'm overwhelmed, there's too much to do. Gather some basic information, leverage some automation to move them to the appointment. And then I really believe you want to have an orchestrated launch call. Like, here's the meeting we're going to have with the client. It's not just about gathering details, right? It's about getting to know them better. If there's a new account manager involved, it's about resetting expectations. It's about selling them on what's going to happen in this relationship together. And yes, it's, it's also about getting what we need to hit the ground running and implement. And I would err on the side of let that call, let that launch conversation with, with the client be the main mechanism to gain usernames and passwords and access details. Because I don't know how many times, you know, we ask the client for their domain access. Or we ask for whatever it is and they don't know, right? And so they stop filling in the form and now we've hit a stall point in the relationship where if you could just say, hey, look, we're gonna get on Zoom, I'm gonna, you know, get access to your computer so I can actually drive and train your team that that's going to take a little bit of time. Maybe it's a 45-minute to an hour-long onboarding call with the client, but that's where we can really make the gathering of the details and things. As seamless as possible, right? Because you're going to deal with the spectrum of technical expertise with the clients where some people, you know, they have all their stuff together and others like they have no idea. They hired some other company and they're completely lost. Give me a lost if this happens to you a lot where the client just, they don't know, right? They don't know what their USP is. They're like, they don't have those details. Lost, yeah. Will this recording be available? Yeah, I'll make sure you guys have access to the recording. You know, just like somebody could schedule in for a sales call, make it easy for them to schedule a kickoff call or a second step call in that launch process to keep things moving, to keep things lubricated. We have an actual new client welcome sequence, and I would encourage you guys thinking about putting something like this in place because, again, buyer's remorse, right? They just signed up. It's going to take a little bit of time from when they sign up to when what you do generates a result, regardless of the quick wins you have in place, regardless of how great you are at this process. And so what you can do early is over-communicate, right? I, I think it's much better to over-communicate within the first couple of weeks than to be like, okay, they signed up, I got their credit card, I sent them the form, And now we're gonna go to work. And even if you're doing a million little things, if the client doesn't hear about it, if the client isn't in the loop, they're gonna feel like, I don't know, these guys just went radio silent. And so yes, drop a gift in the mail. Yes, have it like a message that goes out, hey, welcome aboard, we're excited about working with you. Yes, have an actual launch call and tasks that you're— whoever you, your launch coordinator, or you if you're still kicking off the client relationship, manual tasks where you're communicating with the client, but you can also have a sequence of communication, right? Which is day 1, send this email. Day 2, send this, which might be like, here's what you can expect. Here's our, you know, here's our game plan in our first 90 days. Day 3 might be, hey, you know, we're gonna need some pictures and images. Here's some examples of the types of images we're gonna need from you. You know, day 4 might be, hey, can you, can you like tell me what you think your top 3 to 5 competitors are. And these are just casual conversational type messages that are coming from you or the account manager, who's like, whoever's the point person in the relationship. Because when they're hearing from you in that way, often they're like, wow, I signed up and these guys are on top of the ball, right? They're, they're, they're asking me the right questions. They're engaging with me in an intelligent way. And it buys confidence that you're going to do something with that data and that you're going to get the results, right? The worst thing we experience in our agency we would do when it came to early cancellation was radio silence, right? We, they signed up, we had the launch call, we went to work, right? It's just type work. If that's how you operate sometimes, it's like, I got things to do. I'm gonna go to work for this client. I'm gonna let the work speak for itself. That's what we would do. We would go to work. And then 60 days in, the client's like, hey, what's going on? We're like, oh, we're doing all this stuff, right? We set up the website and now we claim these directories and we put all of these things in place. To them, it feels like radio silence. So having an automation sequence like this that's dripping check-ins on them automatically, in addition to actually manually checking with the client, makes it— makes a really big difference. So we talked about welcoming with a bang. We talked about seamlessly collecting the usernames and passwords. Number 3 is to get really clear and map out the first week, the first 30 days, and the first 90 days to create a great experience. And I think one of the best examples of this, how many of you guys have read the book The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber? Just type E-Myth in chat here if you've read that book. You should all read it. It's a great book. Lots of great insights on being a business owner versus being just an employee or a technician within the business. A lot of you guys have read this. So I don't know if you remember, but there's a chapter in the book where he talks about this person that owns a hotel. And the experience he had with the hotel was he pulls up to the front desk, or he pulls up to that little gate on the outside and gives his name and says he's going to check in. And then when he pulls up to the front, somehow they know exactly who he is. They greet him by name. They take him back to the room, and the room's already preset with the fire on. You know, this amazing experience that he had at this hotel was unlike what he'd experienced at any other hotel. And what he realized was they were just very intentional about the touch points along the way, right? They, they have a process where when a person gets to the front desk, they call the lobby. The lobby says this person's coming in. They pull up the notes and they go and they say, okay, last time he liked you know, this scent in the room and he like the fire on and they orchestrated that. And that's what I want you guys to do in your agencies. Be intentional about the touchpoints. How are the calls gonna go? What are they gonna receive in the email? What are they gonna receive in mail? What are the actual deliverables that they're gonna get early in the process? We can orchestrate an experience that makes us different than other agencies that makes us more likely to, you know, obviously we gotta generate results, but more likely to have them be like, I'm confident this organization has what it takes and they're gonna get a different outcome than what I've experienced in the past. And so I want you guys to do this exercise for yourself because I think it's different in every agency depending upon your deliverables, depending upon how you approach it. But in our world, first thing is like right away they're going to get a personal message. And so, you know, if you're the salesperson and the account manager, you know, and you're going to be dealing with them, this is going to be, you know, just a message. Hey, welcome aboard, excited about working with you. If you've got a salesperson in place and you weren't involved, you know, like I will send a message to the client through the system that's like, hey, so you just signed up, you know, Christian said, you know, you guys are a great company, I'm really excited to have you on board, excited about generating great results for you. So just a personal note recognizing, hey, look, I, I appreciate the trust you've placed in our organization. Um, from there, we're going to get them an onboard form to try and get at least some of the data without expecting them to fill it out all in, without expecting to have everything before we go to the next step. But certain people do have that data, so we want to make it easy for them to submit that information. From there, we're going to kick off the welcome sequence. And so once that welcome sequence fires, We know they're gonna get a touch from us as the company almost every day over the next couple of weeks, letting them know what we're up to, letting them know what we need from them, letting them know what they can expect, kind of like kicking that off. We try and have the launch call within 48 hours of them signing up, right? And so for us, this launch call is super important, right? Because it's not just that meeting, right? It's, it's an orchestrated process where they're increasing confidence and we're getting what we need in order to hit the ground running. Typically, by the next day, ideally, they're going to get a, a goodie basket from us, right? They're going to either get the Sherry's Berries or some type of goodie basket that we think they would appreciate. So these are like little checkpoints, right? Within the first week. Lots of little touch points, lots of little experiential things that check the boxes of, okay, these guys are on top of the ball. These guys are professional. These guys are gonna knock it out of the park. We also wanna think about like results-oriented things that they're gonna get that they're going to experience. Right? So these are things they'll see, they'll touch, they'll interact with. And so within the first week, we wanna launch our paid search campaign. And our programs usually are gonna be pretty comprehensive. Well, we're doing website, SEO, paid search, retargeting, marketing automation, the whole nine yards. The beauty of paid search is we can set up the campaign quickly. We can pick very specific keywords and we can get something up and running, right? Because we know our web design process is gonna take a while. We know our SEO process is gonna take a while. We wanna get some quick wins. So if we launch a paid search campaign, not with our whole budget, just with a portion of the budget, that's something they'll say, okay, there's a landing page there. There's some keywords I'm coming up for. And ideally, we can start to generate a couple of leads, right? The sooner you can get them from, I believe they might be able to help me. I see they're creating an amazing experience to, I already see a result. The better, right? So we want to engineer those quick wins. I'll talk about that more in a minute, but we're usually launching that within the first week. From there, review tracking, right? This is a big key to the reputation. It's a big key to— it's a big key to their rankings on Google Maps. And so we're gonna run a review audit. Here's how many reviews you have. Here's how many reviews you have compared to the competition. You know, here's a strategy we're gonna put in place to help you, you know, reverse engage all your past clients and get a couple of new reviews to build that average review rating up. This is just, it's something you can bring them into and they say, wow, they've got insights, they've got data, and they've got a strategy that's gonna immediately impact my reputation, right? If you do any type of review generation as part of your strategy, spend some time, right? Because there's 2 ways we did this. In the past. So in the past, we would say, all right, we're looking at their reputation, it's a problem, they don't have enough reviews, or it's good, look, they got all these 5-star reviews. And then we would, you know, set up an automation that would like fire after every service call that they do. And then we would even in a lot of cases just grab their past customer base and send an email out. And that had a certain level of impact. You know, it's like we did the thing. But they may or not have perceived the value of it versus making an experience that like, this is a meeting where we've run these reports and we're saying, hey, look, this is your average review rating. This is how many on Google. This is how many on Yelp. This is how many on Angie's List. This is your top competitor, right? This is why this is going to be an issue. And here's the strategy. Here's what we're going to do. Here's what we need from you. And here's what you guys need to do on a consistent basis to elevate the experience you're creating out in the field And this is the tool we want you to use every single time to generate more reviews. Do you guys just type yes in the, in the comments if you see the, the difference between just doing the thing and bringing them into the process, getting them to perceive the value, and now they're like, okay, these guys are on my side. Right? And we can all do this, right? These reputation management tools are ubiquitous, right? They're, they're very available, but it's the way that you approach it that can make a big difference. Okay. The next piece is the design comp. And so we do websites as part of our program for our clients. And that's one of those things they get to feel, they get to touch, they get to see that they're very excited about. And for a long time in our agency, our process was, alright, you signed up. We know we've got your stuff. We're gonna build this website. And We would just like literally build it on the fly inside of WordPress. And if they didn't like it, it turned into an issue and they're like, oh, can you redesign it? Can you change it back? And all of that stuff. And so we moved to let's get them to approve a design comp, right? And so we would design the homepage, the internal page, and show it to them. Hey, here's, here's what it's gonna look like. Give us a yes if you're okay with it. The way we elevated this was We made this a meeting, right? And this is now a meeting where we're sitting down on Zoom. We're saying, hey, look, our team went to work. We've looked at the most important design factors that are gonna help improve the conversion on your website. We've taken your color scheme, your authenticity, and here's what we've come up with. Here's why this is gonna work. Here's why this is going to, you know, get a better result in the long run. And we get their buy-in and we sell them on why we built it that way. We sell them on why it's going to be a home run. And again, this checks 2 boxes. First of all, we know the client likes it, right? And we know that they're gonna be comfortable with the design once we build it out into a website. But it also gives them an excitement point, something to look forward to and gets them to buy in not just to the, hey, I've got a website, but I've got a best-in-class website that's built to convert. Alright, so we've got the design comp. From there, we're gonna review tools. Right? And you guys all probably implement different tools. We're putting high-level marketing automation in place. We're putting chat on their website. We're putting all kinds of tools in place. And so we have a formalized meeting. Let's, let's review these tools. Let's review how we're gonna track the reporting. Let's review everything that we're gonna work on together and how you need to understand it and how you can engage with it to get the, to get the outcomes. And then from there, usually by the 6th week, so we're looking at the first couple of weeks. We're shooting for by the 6th to 8-week point to have the website launched, right? Because once we get the approval on the design, now we gotta write the content, we gotta do the on-page optimization, we gotta build it all out, put it on the dev server, and it's like 6 to 8 weeks and, and the site is launched. Lots of touchpoints. I think at a minimum we can do most of these on, on this call. But I really want you to think through those touchpoints. I want you to think through that experience that you're creating for your clients. Give me a 1 in the comments if you feel like there's at least 1 idea from that initial 6 weeks that you feel like, yes, I could do that, and I see how that would benefit the launch experience. Awesome. All right, fantastic. Kevin, good. All right, cool. So I want you to do that. I want you to map out that experience. I want you to develop that. I want you to systematize it into what you do for every client every time they come in. Matthew says, difference between review tracking and review tools. Review tracking is gonna be actually specific to the reviews, right? You know, their reputation, their score. Review tools, isn't review, it's like you're reviewing the tools with that client. Hopefully that makes sense. Okay. So number 4 is we wanna, we wanna engineer quick wins. I talked about this briefly, but our experience at Plumbing and HVAC SEO was we were an SEO company, right? And that's, it's in the name, SEO. And so our, our, our service was we're gonna build the website, we're gonna write the content, we're gonna do the optimization, we're gonna get you ranked. And what we know is that that usually takes some time, right? SEO takes time. Building the website takes time, claiming the citations, building the reviews, all of that takes time. And so the client would sign up and let's say best case scenario, week 6, we've got the updated website launched. Ideally, we did some citations and some link stuff before that. But usually, it's gonna be maybe 3, 4 months in before they start to see an increase in rankings. Before they start to see an increase in phone calls, before they start to see results from what we're doing. And regardless of how good you are in setting that expectation, regardless of how good you are in like, like getting them to even sign off— I understand it's going to take 3 to 6 weeks, 3 to 6 months before I start to see results from this. It's human nature that you expect to see a return on your investment, right? If they're paying you $2,000 to $3,000 every single month, and they're in month 3 or month 4 and they haven't even generated anything from it, they're going to start to question. They're gonna start to be like, what are you doing? When is this gonna work? What's the, you know, what's the outcome that I'm gonna get? And so we started to think like, what can we do in that first week? What can we do in that first 30 days that would generate tangible, measurable results? Tangible, measurable leads. Maybe not the entire outcome, where they're ranking number 1 for all their keywords, they're getting hundreds of calls every single month. But what can we do to start to get some results? And so a couple of things, and I want you to brainstorm this because the, the things you can do out of the gates are constantly changing, right? There's new innovation in digital marketing with AI, with new strategies. But the things we found work really well, and I think work for most agencies, that you can implement right away to start to get some quick wins Number 1 is to launch a paid search campaign, right? This in today's market could be Google Ads, could be Bing Ads. Like, if there's enough search volume in your industry, maybe you can't afford to put a large budget towards Google Ads, but you can put some money towards Bing. Could be kicking off a Facebook campaign. Could be kicking off something else, but it's doing something that's going to launch quickly that's gonna generate some lead flow. It's gonna generate some deal flow. I'm just gonna mute that real quick. Strategy number 2 would be to do a database reactivation. And this, this is getting a list of their past customers, getting a list of their past inquiries, and sending an email. If you can do SMS, and the regulations are constantly changing, this has gotten a lot harder than it was even, even a couple months back. But Sending an offer to their previous customers and previous clients is something that is as simple as getting the data, putting it into your HighLevel account or whatever your HighLevel subaccount is, and making an offer, right? And if they've got an active past customer base and you've got a little bit of intelligent thought around, you know, what's an intelligent offer that we could make that would make them want to do business with us again now, that is huge. And you can actually make their cash register ring right away without spending any additional money. Right? So, doing a database reactivation campaign. This is built right into HighLevel or whatever marketing automation system you use for your clients, past customers, unconverted opportunities. Number 3, and we like to do this early, is even if we haven't launched their new website yet, we can put a live chat onto their website. Most of our clients, either they have something and they don't really monitor it really well, or they don't have any chat. And we know in today's market, your customer's customer would prefer to engage via chat or to book directly online. And so what we like to do is let's put a chat widget on the site, leverage automation so that they can chat two ways, or have somebody in their office engage with the chat. And from the existing traffic they already have, you can usually start to generate some leads. And so, you know, these are little things, but little things can make a big difference to the client between you just doing your thing and waiting around for months and months and doing some things right now that are going to start to generate some results. Are we charging setup fees for this stuff? Says Jennifer. Program pricing, you know, is going to be different for everybody. We, we have an all-encompassing program fee, usually between $3,500 to $5,000 per month plus ad spend. and we're building the website, doing the SEO, setting up the marketing automation. And so whatever we can implement, that's gonna generate a quick win. I'm all for it, right? I'm gonna put that into play. And, you know, usually if we're doing paid search, that's not including the ad spend, right? They know that money is coming, you know, in addition to whatever it is that we charge. And live chat, you know, if you've got HighLevel, it is literally just setting up a subaccount, turning that on, and then turning on a, you know, automation AI, at least, how can I help you? Oh, I got this question. Oh, great. Would you like to schedule a meeting? Sure. And sending them a link to the meeting. Like, that's gonna do better than just people sitting on their website doing nothing. You can put live chat on their website, Google profile, Facebook page, etc. Missed call, text back. Especially if you've got, you know, companies that their calls aren't being answered live and this happens, like, call your client, and see if there's a live answer 24/7. Uh, and if not, put a missed call text back, submit a form on their website when they just signed up, and, and see how long it takes to get a call or an email. And if that's not happening, that's a huge opportunity you can solve in the first couple of days with that client. That's going to excite them, that's going to generate leads, that's going to make what they already have in place more effective. Activate retargeting, right? This is something you can do early, right? Get the pixel onto their existing site, turn that on, then they start to see their banner ads, right? And that has a, like a duplicate benefit because first of all, they're usually visiting their own site. They're usually gonna be in the pixel. And so they're gonna see the ads. They're like, oh, wow, you guys are advertising. I see, I actually see myself. Wow. It has like a, you know, that benefit to it. But it also has the benefit of we know retargeting is going to generate a better result than the absence of it, right? It doesn't cost a lot of money to put some money behind retargeting. So just, just think about those quick wins. Like, this was a game changer for us as we started to realize when our thing's taking too long to generate a result, we can put that in place. Jennifer says, are you offering AI voice agent? We are. We're beta testing it. And it's only for certain clients because we deal mainly with $1 million to $10 million plumbing and HVAC companies. Most of those companies have a really solid dispatch process, like professional, you know, team in office answering the phone. That's going to beat voice AI. There are, however, clients that between the hours of 5 o'clock and, you know, the next morning, it goes to a voicemail. Right? And that's, that's like total dead end. And so we're telling them, look, we're going to voicemail right now. Let us put a voice AI. And we've already tested that the voice AI has a very conversational tone and actually booking appointments from it. So, you know, don't say it's the end-all solution for everybody. But if the client has a clear problem that you can solve, that's a quick win. So I'm glad you brought that up and it's a good example of something you could put in place early on. Does anybody other have other quick wins that you use or that you've been playing with? That's like, hey, this is what we do in the first couple of weeks that, in addition to whatever else we're doing, starts to generate some activity, starts to generate some wins. And remember the idea behind the quick win, it's not experiential. It's something that's actually gonna generate a lead or generate a sale or generate some revenue early, right? Because if you can get them revenue right away, now they're excited. They're like, okay, I see the process. I see the big picture, but I'm also seeing the fruit. I'm seeing the results relatively quickly. Let's see. Oh, so Charlie says Voice AI can sell quick also. We did 4K in one day after we brought a client in. Wow, that's amazing. Right? And I love that you're testing it, right? Start testing these platforms. You know, the two-way text AI is, it's there, right? You should turn that on immediately. The voice AI is there as well, but you're gonna have a more of a hurdle from the client being like, I don't want my phones being answered by artificial intelligence. Yeah, Charlie, you're making everybody feel good. So thank you for sharing. I love for you guys all to share quick wins that are working. All right, so we talked about coming out of the bang with, with a bang with appreciation, seamless connection and seamless gathering of the usernames, passwords. We talked about crafting that experience over the first 30, 60, 90 days, and we talked about engineering quick wins. Number 5, to create an amazing world-class onboarding experience, is to communicate every step of the way and leverage automation throughout the process. And, you know, this, I think I've kind of touched on it a little bit, but it's just recognizing you're doing a lot of stuff in the back, backend, right? You're setting up HighLevel, you're setting up a keyword ranking report, you're setting up analytics, you're setting up call tracking, you're setting up their Google profile, you're creating graphics for their social, whatever, all those little things that you know you do and maybe it sits on a project management system like ClickUp or maybe it's just a Google Sheet where you track all those things that you do. The client doesn't give us credit for the things that they don't see, right? In long-term relationship with the client, they don't care, right? And I recognize they don't care about the minutia. They don't want to know all the details. That's one of the reasons they hired you. Eventually we're going to get to a place where they're seeing, I'm spending this amount of money with you, I'm generating this much in revenue, you know, do your thing. But in that first couple of months, you don't have that luxury, right? And so why not make sure that everything we're doing is communicated? Hey, we just did this. And hey, we just did that. And what's beautiful is you could set up some automations. So like as you complete whatever that task is in ClickUp, automation fires, send this email, right? It's like, hey, just wanted to let you know we just claimed and verified your Google My Business profile, my Google, Google Business Profile. If you got any questions, let me know. We just wanted to keep you in the loop. Hey, just so you know, we've just set up your call tracking, which is gonna give us the ability to track every single one of the calls that come in down to organic versus paid. This is gonna be super powerful. Let me know if you wanna hop on a call so I can show you how to listen to the calls or if you've got any questions, but just wanted to give you a heads up. Type communication in the comments if you feel like you could do that. And it would have an impact on the client where they're like, wow, these, these guys and gals, they're doing work, they're getting things done, they're getting me results right out of the gates. This will make a big difference in the way the client perceives you and whether the client more importantly values you and values that monthly fee that they're making with you month in and month out. So good. Alright, I see a lot of communication coming in. So when you think about client retention, right, and really maximizing client retention, this is one of the key strategies to grow your agency. World-class onboarding is mission critical, and we've really unpacked that today. Hopefully you got some new ideas, strategies, and insights on how to do even better with your client onboarding process. Additionally, right, we've got to focus on The way we communicate month over month, right? So once we're out of onboarding, we also need to be thinking about how are we showing them the value? How are we keeping them engaged? How are we seeding the vision? And then ultimately, to truly retain clients, you've got to develop a success management protocol, right? Which is eventually you don't want to be the person launching the call. You don't want to be the person checking in with every one of those clients and having those monthly review calls. You want to build a team around that. And so we got to think about how do we hire, how do we train, how do we onboard account managers, how do we track those KPIs so that, you know, as we're managing hundreds of clients as opposed to just handful of clients, how do we still maintain world-class retention numbers? And so that's the big picture. So what we covered on today's session was the launch call and really what we want to make sure we've crafted that conversation with the client out of the gates. Automating the onboard process and really the communication flows that happen to keep that client engaged and understanding what we're doing. Um, creating quick wins and thinking about some of the quick win strategies that we can put in play that will make the cash register ring right out of the gates. Um, consistent communication and the welcome box, right? The welcome gift strategy that we can drop right out of the gates. Once the client signs up. I offered you guys the workbook that kind of goes along with this. If you wanted to access it, you can hit this QR code or go to 7figureagency.com/world-class-onboarding. That's got a lot of, a lot of the details and things like that to go along with it. Coming back to the, to the big picture here, and I'm just gonna, I'm gonna zoom in because again, this is It's hard, hard to see. We went deep on onboarding, right? We went deep on this and we got it clear, like, here's how we wow the clients right out of the gates. Give me a— on a scale from 1 to 10, like, 1 being like, this was kind of a waste of my time today, and 10 being, I got some good insights, I got some good value. I feel like this was powerful stuff that's gonna help me elevate the way that we manage our client relationships, the way that we come out of the gates, the way that we impress our clients is gonna improve our retention. Awesome. I'm seeing a range from, from 9s and 10s. Great stuff, as always, says Adam. Fantastic. And so, you know, again, this is just one sliver of the things we need to think about, the things that we need to put in place in order to scale a 7-figure or multiple 7-figure agency. And so, you know, that's