How We Onboard Our Clients: The True Discovery Process

Name an industry in which businesses don’t jump at the chance to work with a new client. This is not easy to find. Before taking on these new clients, however, it is critical to ensure you understand the end goals of the project at hand and the true needs and values of who you will be working with. Companies often make the mistake of seeing an opportunity for revenue, and jumping into a project without truly understanding who the client is and why they reached out for help.

Starting on a project without fully grasping the goals of the client can often lead to subpar results. There are many ways to get around this issue. Our solution is called Client Discovery: a streamlined client on-boarding process.

Since taking on the process of Discovery, we have not only been able to help our clients better understand their place in the market, but we’ve been able to produce more efficient results that fit their needs.

For years, we would often make the mistake of seeing the price tag and the opportunity of a new client and jump at the chance to get to work. More often than not, businesses that do this, take on more projects than their bandwidth can hold. This may result in working with clients that actually aren’t in their niche, and delivering work that could be better if they had the time to really focus. With Client Discovery, this has completely changed.

We dig deep into the goals of who we’re working with, their company values, competitors, target market and the process which draws people to become valuable customers. This paves the way for:

• Finished products far exceeding what our customers had in mind
• Setting the tone early to transparently manage expectations for all clients
• Creating strong relationships right out the gate
• Tailoring/focusing our work to our customers strengths and differentiators

Here’s how our process works:

• Qualification
  • Start with our own research to understand business at a high level
  • Hop on a 15 minute phone call with client to allow us to understand if we are a good fit for each other
• Discovery
  • Meet with leadership team to set a clear strategy and fully grasp the business ethos:
    • Learn about goals and sales process
    • Gather a quick list of competitors
    • Understand their means of communication
    • Learn about their customers (or as we call it, avatar)
      • Target
      • Demographics
      • Problems
      • Behaviors
      • Size and geography
      • Industry associations
    • Dig deep into their strategies and tactics:
      • Past and present digital campaigns
      • Past and present traditional marketing efforts
    • Internally conduct in depth research on the market, industry, and competition and organize all findings into our presentation document
    • Solution and proposal presentation
      • Review our discovery findings
      • Discuss any immediate questions, comments, or concerns
      • Review timelines
    • Allow for client to review all documents that were discussed in the proposal presentation on their own time, and get back to us with any questions, comments or concerns
    • Once approved from the client, we then move into the SOW and contract negotiations

Instead of rushing into a project, we take the time to learn about who we’re going into business with. Reach out to us and we’ll walk you through the true discovery process to guarantee your results are exactly what a new client is looking for.