Most B2B/SaaS companies are doubling down on their marketing efforts, and it’s not hard to see why: it helps them gain more market share and drives more leads to their businesses. So far, hiring a marketing agency has proved to be the most effective method to achieve this.
However, many believe hiring a marketing agency will magically solve all other issues, such as the acquisition process, market positioning, scaling, and demo strategies. Well, this is somewhat misleading. In reality, onboarding processes are usually the major point of failure for both agencies and clients.
So what’s the remedy? From our experience, we know that the first 90 days after onboarding a marketing agency are the most crucial for the partnership’s long-term, medium-term and short-term success. This has helped us create a great onboarding strategy to ensure everything goes smoothly.
We have curated this article to show you what most people get wrong during the onboarding process, why the first 90 days are important, and what an effective onboarding process looks like. Let’s dive in.
What Many Get Wrong When Hiring a Marketing Agency
While client-agency relationships can get sour in various ways, most of them result from poor communication and setting unclear expectations. The two of the most common pitfall that clients and agencies fall into are:
- Mismatched expectations: Many companies expect the agency to take on all of their acquisition, positioning, and scaling issues and turn them around overnight. However, the reality is that marketing is a long-term game, and it takes time to see results.
- Unclear communication: It’s important for both parties to be on the same page and to have a clear understanding of the company’s goals and objectives. Without this, it’s easy for the agency to overpromise and underdeliver or for the company to become frustrated and lose faith in the agency’s abilities.
Why the First 90 Days Are Crucial to the Partnership
An agency’s client onboarding process sets the tone for the entire partnership and ultimately determines whether the client will succeed or fail in their marketing, demand generation, and revenue engine growth. Therefore, it is necessary for marketing agencies to streamline their client onboarding process to avoid overpromising and under-delivering. It’s also important for the agency to manage client expectations to prevent reputational harm and resource wastage.How a Winning Onboarding Process Looks Like
Our onboarding process at T.A.Monroe is always systemized and crafted from a holistic perspective. When a client first approaches us about helping them build their B2B/SaaS business, they are already quite acquainted with our approach and are informed about how we produce results.
Here is a breakdown of how our onboarding process looks like in the first 90 days:
- Discovery (Day 1-30): We put a lot of effort into learning the background of the client’s B2B product and SaaS throughout the first month or two. Here, we’ll thoroughly study their marketing, go-to-market, and paid acquisition tactics and outcomes and start developing a revenue engine blueprint to place them on a fast track for reliable and long-term revenue development.
- Test and Learn (Day 30-60): After the initial 30 days of discovery, we’re often prepared to go on to the next stage of an engagement, which entails conducting brief, accurate testing of our growth strategy. This phase’s objective is to put our demand-generation strategies to the test. We drive the right traffic through paid and organic channels, measure the outcomes, optimize campaigns, give insights, and compound outcomes from the tests.
- Accelerate (Day 60-90): The discovery and test phases help us understand what works, and we scale it from there to deliver the best growth results for our clients. In this phase, our clients usually see a sizable boost in demand triggered by our demand generation and paid media activity. After that, we optimize our strategies to speed up growth even more.
