Kickoff Decks: An Investment in Client Retention

The path towards client retention begins on Day 1 of your engagement.

Sales is hard.

The process of generating, prospecting, connecting, qualifying, pitching, and closing a new customer can take a seemingly insurmountable blend of time, effort, bandwidth, money, and coffee.

But once we’re able to move that opportunity over to Closed Won, the clock has already begun ticking for delivery and for performance. Acquisition over. Execution begun. And in a potentially surprising twist of events, the process of securing that customer’s renewal begins on Day 1 of the initial scope of work.

Don’t get off on the wrong foot with your clients — and don’t be assumptive in that he conversations you had during the sales process properly shaped where your engagement together goes from here. The process to ensure success for your customers, and their happiness with your services, should be formally reviewed in what we’ll call: a kickoff meeting.

KICK·OFF MEET·ING [kikäf / mēdiNG], noun

The first formal meeting between the project team and the client of a particular project, which allows the project team to demonstrate their understanding of the current client challenge(s), the action step(s) required, and the client’s definition of success.

Consider this your opportunity to deliver a top-notch first impression; do well, and you can generate client enthusiasm, validate their purchasing decision, and establish confidence in your ability to deliver.

The completion of a kickoff meeting also confirms that officially, the work has started.

Poor onboarding (or: the inherent risks of kickoff-less engagements.)

“Well, Kevin, we don’t have a formal kickoff process. We share everything covered in the sales process with the account management team.”

Nice try.

Failing to properly recap sales conversations through a formal kickoff process has consequences that can ripple through the life of the engagement.

Without reaffirming the client’s goals, we may prioritize the wrong KPI’s right out of the gate. Our execution can be misguided, unorganized. Without reviewing both sides’ team roles and responsibilities, task ownership can fall through the cracks. Without setting proper expectations and delivery timelines, project activities can hit a wall. Think about the times we’ve experienced campaign paralysis because a website project sat in development hell.

Now combine it all: misaligned goals and action steps, with cloudy timelines, unclear ownership and disjoined ETA’s will impact your ability to retain this customer long term. Avoid these pitfalls before customer retention and revenue is the consequence.

The anatomy of a kickoff meeting.

The scalability of your kickoff process will rely heavily on the tools you use — and more specifically — the way your approach your kickoff deck.

Every new customer coming on board will have a unique set of goals, plans, challenges and timeliness that you’ll want to affirm on your kickoff calls, but the way your organize and review this content can be templated.

Consider the following deck template(which we’ll cover in greater detail):

1. TITLE SLIDE
2. AGENDA
3. INTRODUCTIONS
4. GPCT [Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timelines]
5. WORKING TOGETHER
6. ACTION ITEMS
7. APPENDIX*

Title Slide.

The title slide, which appears to just confirm your name, the client’s name, and the fact that we’re having ourselves a kickoff, has the chance to impact a lot more.

First, it’s your chance to apply your brand. Your slick design, styling, colors and logo all get to appear on the intro slide. Validate the client’s decision in working with you, an established, savvy and impressive brand.

And by also including the client’s name, the deck itself looks to be personalized for them. Not just “KICKOFF_FINAL”, but rather a recollection of conversations and an action plan curated specifically for them. This slide also should include a talking point about the deck itself (and if possible, a recording of the meeting) being made available afterwards.

Agenda.

Consider this a form of courtesy. The client’s time is valuable — and therefore — we’re sharing the refined purpose of the meeting. No surprises: an agenda gives the client an opportunity to prepare for the conversation(s) ahead and to have a meaningful contribution.

On this slide, confirm buy-in and double check to see if there’s anything missing that the client prefers we add in.

Introductions.

While we’ll want to cover the teams on both sides, the primary goal here is to ensure a smooth handoff from any sales points of contact to new, account management points of contact.

Start informally with name and title introductions, a quick industry background review, and a personality token (i.e. a fun fact). You will then want to more thoroughly review the specific roles and responsibilities of each. Who does the client go to for what — and when and how.

If our primary contact at the client has brought in a team, we’ll want to do the same sort of review for their representatives as well. Be crystal clear on who owns what on both sides of this relationship.

GPCT.

The meeting is now in full swing; out of the full presentation, this slide should be where you park the car the longest.

Have the sales team and account management team collaborate on this slide. Recollect all of the important items discussed around the client’s goals, plans, challenges and timelines to ensure correctness and to make adjustments if necessary.

Remember: the majority of content on this slide may be carried over from the discovery calls in the sales process, but it’ll be critical to recap and reaffirm.

For goals, what does the customer consider a successful engagement? Encourage specificity when confirming client buy-in on goals. If they want to “see more leads”, get additional context into how many more + the historical benchmark. Identifying quantifiable goals will help us connect broader, high-level goals to day-to-day milestones.

For plans and challenges, tie your agreed-upon scope of work into these goals. This is what (again) will help connect the dots between small-scale action items into long-term success. You can also lean on the challenges your client has faced in the past to show how your approach will succeed. How will you navigate around these? How are you different?

What we want to do here is compare (and contrast) the current state of their efforts to the desired state in which you’ll help reach.

For timelines, this helps levy expectations around when to “see” success. Is their a deadline to see certain results? Is there a foundational or setup phase that requires attention first? Confirm your schedule of deliverables and when we anticipate hitting certain KPI benchmarks.

You can also use this time to land on an appropriate meeting cadence.

Working together.

According to the 2017 State of Inbound report, fewer than half of marketers would describe their respective companies’ Sales and Marketing teams as “generally aligned.”

Well, avoid that issue by aligning on the responsibilities of both sides of the relationship. On this slide, cover the responsibilities that both the project team and client team will own and adhere to.

For client responsibilities, get them to commit to turn-around times on deliverables requiring approval, the process for submitting revision requests, and content they are in charge of (think technical writing for niche products). You should also confirm any missing login information.

You should also define what the relationship between marketing and sales looks like. If we’re delivering new MQL’s every X [days/weeks], the client then owes us back updates on SQL’s and closed customers every X [weeks/months]. If we are hoping to deliver on ROI reporting, it is imperative to have visibility into sales, revenue and customer data.

For agency responsibilities, discuss your approach to working on submitted revisions + updated proofs, when they should anticipate reports + analysis, and the cadence for ongoing deliverables.

Circle back around on the sales / marketing alignment, too, by explaining how sales data will influence and help you optimize your marketing efforts.

Action Items.

Set the stage with next steps. The project begins now, so include a list of immediate to-do’s for the group. With an acknowledgement that the kickoff content is coming to a close, the floor can also be opened for any questions or lingering areas of uncertainty. We should use this “wrap up” to agree on the next call date — is it next month or at the start of next quarter?

That’s that — kickoff complete, expectations set and an action plan established. Now as we plan for growth, the kickoff deck is what allows us to scale our processes. These seven slides — and the design of your deck — should be a saved template, shared amongst the team.

For each new Closed Won deal, have the necessary parties internally plug in the client’s information, QA the deck, and schedule the meeting. In the end, having an organized + repeatable process for new client kickoffs will maintain momentum from the sales process, set your engagement up for success, and ultimately retain the business.

Now go forth and conquer.