What does your current onboarding process look like right now? If the answer is that you don’t have a process, or your process lives inside one of your team members’ heads, that’s a recipe for losing clients—and the most successful businesses are those that foster loyalty instead of focus on continual new client acquisition. After your sales team closes a deal, your onboarding process needs to prime them for success, and the only way to do that is with a process that you can replicate and optimize. Here are a few tips to streamline your process.

Write it Down

It might seem like writing down every step of your onboarding process is a waste of time, especially if you are a small company. But even if you have amazing onboarding now, not having a written process is a recipe for eventual failure because:

• Team members who own the process could leave the company or get promoted
• As you grow and scale up your onboarding process, onboarding quality becomes a function of how well your team is trained and can vary
• You cannot identify gaps or challenges in a process that isn’t defined, scalable, and replicable

Once it’s written down you can create a basic onboarding template that can be tweaked and customized to meet each individual clients’ needs but follows the same basic structure.

Set Client Expectations Early

The term “onboarding” can mean a lot of different things, so it’s important to talk to your clients early and often about what they can expect (that’s much easier to do if you have a standard process, by the way). Once everyone knows what to expect from the process, you’re less likely to get sidetracked with client requests that result in work that your team doesn’t normally do during onboarding. It also ensures that what you deliver is exactly what the client expects, limiting frustration and disappointment later.

Let Everyone Take Ownership of Their Part

Onboarding is a team effort, not just internally for your people, but also with the client. It requires everyone doing their part to complete tasks on time so you can move forward with the next steps. Make sure everyone knows their assignments and let each person take ownership of their piece of the overall puzzle. This is much easier with a platform like GUIDEcx, which allows you to add clients to your onboarding project management tasks so they can see the tasks they need to own.

Communicate Frequently

Finally, streamlining onboarding requires good communication. If you’re relying on a string of emails with 25 people cc’d and hoping that everyone meets deadlines and stays on task, good luck. Your project management software for client onboarding needs to include built-in (and automated wherever possible) communications about progress, reporting, upcoming and overdue tasks, and any other critical information.

GUIDEcx is designed specifically to streamline your client onboarding. Find out more about how our platform can help you by scheduling your demo today.