Client Onboarding Checklist: Steps, Templates & Best Practices
We all remember those cliché first-day-of-school nightmares where we showed up in our underwear. As professionals, we’ve mostly left those in the past—however, sending out a cold email or showing up to a sales call having done absolutely no research on your prospects is essentially the equivalent.
How can you properly share how your business can help your sales prospects if you know absolutely nothing about them?
Short answer: You can’t. That’s why researching prospects is such an important part of the sales process.
Throughout this article, we’re going to talk more about what prospect research is, its main benefits, how to research sales prospects and so much more. You want to make sure you show up to each and every sales call 100% prepared.
A prospect in marketing is someone who may potentially be interested in your product or service—they just don’t know it yet. Prospect research involves discovering who these prospects are and their specific needs so you can best present your product or service’s solution to them.
As mentioned above, a prospect hasn’t heard of or engaged with your company yet. It’s someone who matches your customer profile and has a need for your product or service, but they haven’t actually been to your website, taken action to learn more or maybe even heard of your business.
A lead, on the other hand, is someone who has expressed some type of interest in your business—whether they’ve filled out a contact form, requested a demo, clicked on an ad or something similar. Prospects are people or companies you’re sending cold communication to while leads have already started the conversation.
Other than ensuring you’re informed and look professional in front of new prospects, there are a few other major benefits of researching prospects and making sure you understand their needs.
The more research you do to find potential prospects, the better you’ll understand which customer profiles you should be looking for. This is especially helpful after you start reaching out to prospects and gaining insight into patterns of who is responding and most interested in your solution.
Prospect research also helps you pinpoint more SQLs, or sales qualified leads. Once a prospect responds positively to your initial cold outreach, they’ve become a qualified lead. You can then start nurturing them according to your sales process until they (hopefully) become a customer.
Lastly, prospect research can help you increase the number of closed deals. Once you get a better understanding of your target market, you’ll start reaching out to more potential SQLs. You’ll get better and better at finding the right people to research and reach out to, further increasing the chances that you’ll get to close your deals.
Researching prospects can be a complex process. After all, you want to ensure you’re reaching out to those most likely to respond and become customers. So to help you get started, we’ve outlined some key steps to take and places you can use for your research.
A buyer persona outlines each of your customer profiles (though some businesses may only have one). It lets you know what demographics, interests, purchasing behaviors and other defining characteristics you should be looking for in your research.
You can easily use a buyer persona template like the one below to get started:
Make sure to study your buyer persona so you know exactly what types of prospects you should be researching. It can also help you get a starting point for your search if you’ve outlined where those people tend to spend time online.
Similarly, an ideal customer profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the perfect customer for your business. For B2B companies, it complements the buyer persona by highlighting the characteristics of the most valuable and profitable organizations.
While the buyer persona helps you understand people using your product within the organization, the ICPs are organizations that'll get the most benefit from your products or services.
Create an ideal customer profile and combine it with the buyer persona to streamline your research efforts and effectively target your marketing strategies.
You gain access to helpful analytics features when you use Visme to create and publish your marketing content. These features provide valuable information about how your content is performing and give you insights into your audience.
With these analytics, you can track views, unique visits, activity levels, and completion rates. You'll also get additional details like the date and time of views, visitor IP addresses, location and traffic source.
With the help of these analytics, you can understand your audience better and refine your buyer persona.
Create a spreadsheet or document that includes each of the prospects you want to reach out to. You’ll be able to flesh out your customer list with the research you’ll do in the next two steps. But essentially, you’ll want to create columns for things like:
Again, gather more information about each prospect through the next two steps, fill out as much information as you can and start your outreach.
If you’re finding potential prospects from industries that you’re unfamiliar with, start by doing research on the industry. This will help you identify whether you should be looking for more prospects within that industry or if they may not work well with your business.
For example, researching your prospect's industry can provide insights into the market dynamics, key players, emerging trends and competitive landscape. This knowledge lets you evaluate the industry's compatibility with your business offerings and identify potential opportunities or challenges.
It helps you determine if there is a demand for your product or service within that industry and whether your value proposition aligns with their needs.
Finally, you’ll want to dig deeper into research about each of your potential prospects. Who are they? Where do they work? What do they do? How can you get in touch with them? Everything that you wrote out in your spreadsheet needs to be filled out as much as possible.
There are several platforms you can use to get started on your research.
Look around online to see if your prospect is on social media. While you’ll likely want to stay away from their personal Facebook profile, public profiles like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the like are fair game for figuring out what the prospect does.
Especially when it comes to LinkedIn, you can find out a lot of information like:
Head to the prospect’s company website to gather even more information there. You can find out their USP, their industry, their product/service and everything else you need to know to be able to cater your own sales pitch.
You can also head to their About page to see their leadership hierarchy and find out where your prospect sits on the totem pole.
Check out the company’s social media profiles as well to learn even more about their specific messaging and marketing strategies. Understanding how your prospect’s company presents itself can also help with your pitch.
Conduct a Google search with the prospect’s name as well as their company name. This way, you can find potential PR information about them both that may also help inform your sales pitch.
Furthermore, you can also set up a Google Alert with your prospect’s name and company name to make sure you’re informed of any new updates about each of them.
Simply type in the person’s name, email address, company name, etc., in order to receive an email alert if they’re ever mentioned in any type of online article or communication.
Searching through press release sites is another great way to make sure you’re in-the-know about recent media mentions, launches, company updates or anything else related to your prospect or their business.
Crunchbase is an online website that provides public-facing information about other companies. This is the perfect place to try to find financial statements, contact information, acquisitions, investors, company profiles and more.
Although Crunchbase offers a free trial, this tool isn’t 100% free. Sales teams can sign up for plans starting at $29/month. However, this is such a key platform in prospect research that we highly recommend it.
Look at what their customers or clients are saying about the company. If your product or service helps to solve some of their customers’ complaints, you’ve got a surefire way to make your pitch.
Yelp is one of the most popular sites to check if your prospect’s company is more B2C. Other key review sites include Facebook, Google, TripAdvisor, Amazon, and Angie’s List.
If you need to dive deeper in research for your industry you can create a research proposal with request for additional funding.
You’ve filled out your potential customer list—now what? It’s time to start your outreach and move through your pitch and sales process in order to seal the deal.
The next is to create engaging content to help you capture and nurture leads.
And when it comes to creating marketing materials, Visme is your best bet..
But you don't have to rely solely on our claims. Let's hear from Anne McCarthy, the Senior Director of Learning Experience at EmployBridge, one of our satisfied customers:
“It’s easy to create something in Visme quickly that looks like we sent it out to an advertising firm to design.”
“My whole team has been using Visme for several years, but now seeing the kind of work we’re producing, our marketing team wanted to start using Visme.”
“If it’s something we need to turn around really quickly, we’re jumping into Visme. We either put together a one-page piece that’s easy to absorb, or we’ve started creating little animated pieces.”
Here are a few ideas to get started.
Case studies are great sales tools. This is because they’re showcasing your own company’s real-life proven success stories and results.
When you’ve worked with a happy client or customer, talk to them about a case study interview. You can ask questions about their experience, highlight quantitative results and write it up in a case study.
Use a template like the one below to create an easily shareable case study:
These are perfect additions to one of your initial outreach emails so that your prospect can immediately get an idea of what your company is capable of. It will help qualify the lead and generate a response much more quickly.
If you find it challenging to create compelling copy for a professional case study, don't worry! Visme has got you covered with its AI Writer. Whether you need to brainstorm ideas or outline the structure of your content, the AI Writer is there to assist you throughout the process. You can quickly generate the first draft for various text types and copy.
Once you’ve gotten a response, it’s time to qualify the lead. This process helps you determine if they are a good fit for your product or service. Here's how you can proceed:
1. Email Follow-up: Engage in a conversation with the prospect through email. Ask them relevant questions to understand their needs, challenges and goals. This exchange of information will help you assess if your offering aligns with their requirements.
2. Discovery Call: Consider setting up an initial discovery call with the prospect and ask them some sales discovery questions. This allows for a more interactive conversation, where you can delve deeper into their specific pain points and provide insights on how your solution can address them effectively.
Remember, not every prospect will be a suitable fit for your offering. Studies indicate that around 50% of prospects may not match your ideal customer profile. And according to Sandler's sales methodology, by qualifying leads early on, you can focus on those more likely to convert into customers.
Building a robust list of potential prospects is essential for this step. If you continuously broaden your list of potential leads, your likelihood of discovering qualified prospects genuinely interested in your offerings will increase.
Once you’ve turned at least half your prospects into SQLs, it’s time to nurture them until they’re ready to get started. From here, you should have a pretty solid relationship with each prospect and can create a personalized onboarding experience catered specifically to their needs and everything else you found out during the discovery process.
Everything from the onboarding information you require from the new client to the products and services you provide should be personalized based on what will best fit their needs and offer the best solution.
Provide an engaging and memorable onboarding experience to your prospects by making a wide variety of content such as onboarding videos, customized product walkthroughs, user guides and more.
For example, if your product is a software application, you can make an onboarding video that walks new users through the basics of using the tool.
Also, here's how Visme provides an interactive product walkthrough when a new user signs up for the tool.
Last but not least, just as it goes when you build out any new strategy, you need to leave room for testing. You may not nail your prospect research on the first try. But as you go through the process more and more, you’ll discover faster ways to find the information you need, specific channels that work for you, and what specific information works best for your sales pitch.
You can also take this chance to adjust your sales and onboarding processes to ensure you’re providing the best experience possible for your prospects and new clients. Learning and adapting will always be a part of any new process, so be sure to keep your mind open.
Researching your prospects is vital for effective marketing. The more insights you gather about their needs, desires and behaviors, the better you can tailor your content to resonate with their interests.
Now that you've learned how to find prospects for your business, it's time to focus on converting them into valuable leads and, ultimately, paying customers. That's where Visme comes in.
Let Visme be a part of your sales team, helping seal the deal every step of the way. From creating a sales plan and building out your sales collateral to creating winning sales presentations and playbooks, Visme has everything your sales team needs to be successful.
But that's not all. With Visme, you can also create engaging web forms that boost conversions by up to 207%. By harnessing the power of these memorable forms, you can seize more opportunities and drive growth for your business.
Find potential prospects and leads effortlessly and don’t miss any sales opportunity. Sign up for Visme today and unlock the full potential of your marketing and sales strategies.
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