Onboarding & Bonuses

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awesome to stay

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Before

After

Development

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MVP

Competitor analysis

Design

Design concept

Marketing

Unit economy estimation

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Analytics

Audit

Data warehouse prop. and unit economy estimate

Securing a new client often takes a lot of time, energy, and financial investment. Also, competition in the digital landscape is quite tense and every one promise “to deliver the best result possible,” because of it we invest resources in pre-sale client development (e.g., market research for ads, design concepts in design, etc.). Other than that an onboarding process is also vital for long-lasting relationships.

1. Identifying common requirements

As a digital agency, we have a core set of products and services that we deliver – design, development & marketing.

Since we have many packages already created (at least internally), we can identify which elements or components any particular client will engage with.

For example, a basic deal consists of:

  • Dedicated landing page (design/development/copywriting),
  • Google AdWords setup & management
  • reporting

It sounds simple, and it is simple.

2. Identifying unique requirements

Like no two snowflakes are the same, nor are two clients. Even two straightforward competitors in the same niche can be wildly different from their internal competencies, their objectives, and their expectations.

Identification of these unique requirements is critical in the success (short and long term) of the marketing campaign and long-lasting partnership.

I like to do this part of the process easily enough by just asking a series of questions. Below is a screenshot from a real conversation I had recently.

3. Key stakeholder meeting

At this point, it’s time to invite key stakeholders to a physical or virtual round table meeting.

My preference is to have a set agenda and to keep it on point. We’re respecting each others time and resources, and this can now pave the way for all/any future meetings of a similar nature.

The agenda should be sent to people involved ahead of the meeting time.

An agenda might typically include but not be limited to;

  • Introductions
  • Client’s company overview
  • Client’s objectives
  • Key people in the client’s organization
  • Client’s core products/services/revenue/margins
  • KPI’s
  • Reporting preferences

Who are the key stakeholders?

This changes on a case by case basis, although let’s look at the more common roles;

  • (Agency) Account Manager
    • Many companies tend to include the whole set of specialists her, but GRIN tech believes that a maximum two people should be facing client and be responsible for A. communication B. results delivered
  • (Client) The business owner (or senior delegate)
  • (Client) Marketing Manager
  • (Client) Department Manager (or delegate)
  • (Client) Single point of contact

4. Internal kick-off meeting

Now we’re getting to the pointy end, and a well-communicated internal project kick-off meeting will get a team dedicated to your project on the same page.

This internal meeting will include any/all personnel who will be actively working on the campaign or project.

WIP meetings conducted regularly. For constantly evolving projects such as web development, these could be weekly. For an AdWords or PPC client, they can be monthly arrangements.

The outcome

A well-structured client onboarding process can make a massive difference in the length and strength of the relationship between the two parties.

Changelog – pre-ecosystem era

v0.1.8 Hound @ apps.the.gt – b2b prospecting platform

v0.1.8.1 Business directory – content experiment to support b2b prospecting platform.

v0.1.6 GRIN tech affiliate program is live.

v0.1.5.2 Working on cool in-house lead gen project - Art Director is preparing 100 picks of Business Cards in various niches.

v0.1.5.1 GRIN games emerged

As a web agency we never could and never will be able to escape the urge of building things.
Among million other things we played with an idea of text-based games and the last piece that was missing was the story itself. So via in-house outreach platform we found two established writers that believed in the project and agreed to participate.

Shout out to Richard Abbott who wrote Fraud on Thetis and Eva Pohler who sent us a huge draft we are still reading through.

v0.1.4 GRIN launcher is born.
It is an outreach platform that we use to establish connections with editorial teams.
They say samples of published articles look good but pricing looks even better

At some point we realised that list building, fetching contact details & outreach tech work just as well for b2b lead generation

v0.1.3 Once, we fell in love with ecommerce, because of short feedback cycles on marketing & development efforts.
Today we ship into production inhouse SaaS project - AVOKADO - the web app for learning languages with flash cards.

The year after we built it we realised how long is the road map ahead & what resources we'd need to promote it and decided to put it on hold.

One day as we ship GRIN tech v3.0 into production we'll distrupt the language learning market with Avokado.

We love Wordpress and recently shipped two plugins into open beta for commercial sale.

v0.1.2.2 King The Monk - wordpress plugin to virally grow your email list

v0.1.2.1 Plain Conversions - wordpress plugin to convert your visitors

v0.1.1. Expanded core offering to visual productions

v0.1 It's Autumn 2017 and GRIN tech agency's website is born.
We have it saved for the history.

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