The client onboarding checklist

Agency onboarding fails quietly. Nothing dramatic happens; the first month just takes six weeks, the client loses confidence early, and the relationship never quite recovers from a start that felt slow.

A checklist fixes most of that because most of it is sequencing rather than skill. Collect the right things in the right order and the first month feels fast even when the work is the same.

Stage 1: before the kickoff (8)

• The signed agreement, with scope and term written in language the client would recognise six months from now.
• The single point of contact on the client side, named, with a deputy.
• Your single point of contact, named, so nobody is emailing an inbox.
• The success definition, written in one sentence with a number in it.
• The reporting cadence and format, agreed before anyone builds a dashboard.
• The list of access you will need, sent in advance so the kickoff is not spent reading it aloud.
• Any compliance constraint that shapes the work: regulated industry, consent obligations, brand or legal review.
• The kill criteria: what would make either side end this early, said out loud while everyone is still friendly.

Stage 2: the kickoff call (7)

• Who the customer is, in their words, and who they refuse to work with.
• What they sell, at what price, and what the margin structure means for what you can spend.
• The sales process as it actually runs, including the step that always slows down.
• Who answers the phone and who answers email, and what happens after hours.
• What they have already tried, what worked and what they will not do again.
• The seasonality: which months are busy, which are dead, and when the budget resets.
• Agreement on the first thirty days, with two or three concrete deliverables and dates.

Stage 3: access and setup (12)

• Their instance created, in the region their data should live in.
• Pipeline stages configured to match how they actually sell, with a probability on each.
• Dispositions and outcome values agreed, because reporting depends on them.
• Their mailboxes connected, or the sending domain set up if you are running outbound.
• The calendar and booking link connected, with a real test booking put through.
• Website forms pointed at the inbound endpoint, tested with a real submission.
• Their existing contact data imported into the data bank, checked there, then published.
• Their suppression list imported before any outbound touches anything.
• Analytics and ad accounts connected read-only for reporting.
• Users created with the right scopes, including the client's own read access if they get one.
• Credentials stored in the vault, never in a shared document and never in a message.
• Agent modes set, all in review, with the kill switch owner named.

Stage 4: the first two weeks (6)

• The knowledge base loaded with their offers, terms, service area and voice, so drafts sound like them.
• The first cadence built and shown to the client before it sends.
• The first week run entirely in review, with someone reading every draft.
• A short check-in at day seven that is about the work, not about the relationship.
• The first real deliverable landed inside two weeks, whatever it takes.
• Anything that turned out differently from the kickoff assumptions written down and sent to the client.

Stage 5: handover to steady state (5)

• The first report, in the format agreed in stage one rather than one you invented.
• The recurring meeting scheduled with an agenda that is the same every time.
• Which agents move from review to auto, decided deliberately after a clean week rather than drifting.
• The configuration written down, so the next client of this type starts from a pattern.
• A dated note of what you would do differently, filed where the next person will find it.

Every setup step in stage three has an MCP tool as well as a screen, so an agency running several clients can keep the standard setup in a script rather than in someone's memory. Stages, cadences, segments, ICPs, suppression entries and agent policy are all created that way.

Two roadmap items sit directly on this checklist. Snapshot export and apply, which would turn a standard setup into one action, is on the roadmap. So is branding, meaning your own name, logo and subdomain, which is worth telling a client at the start rather than at the demo.

The part that is real today is isolation. Each client gets their own Supabase project, so one client's data and credentials are not stored beside another's, and their export is a full database dump rather than a filtered extract.