Playbook · Onboarding

The Onboarding playbook.

Every other playbook teaches you how to build something. This one is about the first thirty days — the most aggressive stretch of the whole engagement. Diagnostic review to day thirty, in four phases. Start with the five-minute brief.

24 hrsSignature → welcome email
14Live before kickoff
3Things we ask of them
2Projects shipped by day 30
Watch or listen first · 5 min

The audio brief.

One narrator, five minutes, the whole shape of the project — now with the deck that runs alongside it. Play it before you open anything else; it's the fastest way to get into the right mindset for a new customer onboarding. In a hurry? Change the speed under the deck — it sticks next time.

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Chapter 1 Narrated brief · generated with ElevenLabs · Download ↓
Chapters
The whole idea

Onboarding doesn't start at signature — it starts at the diagnostic review. By the first real meeting the research is done, the systems are live and the blueprints are already written, so their only job is to say go.

The Shape

Four phases, thirty days.

Same lifecycle as every other playbook in the library — pointed at the start of the relationship instead of a single build.

1
Blueprint
Consume the handoff, learn the business cold, stand the whole stack up.
OutputNothing left to set up
2
Build
Pre-onboarding assets, then a kickoff that's project-rich, not formality-rich.
OutputBlueprints greenlit
3
Enable
Teach them how to work with us — three asks, the hub, the support agent.
OutputA customer who knows their job
4
Maintain
Director close for two weeks, then the check-in ladder out to the QBR.
OutputSentiment signed off
Start Here

Kick off an onboarding in one paste.

Copy this prompt, drop in the customer name, and send it to your Claude. It reads the sales handoff, runs the research, loads Teamwork and drafts every asset you're about to need.

paste into Claude
# Onboarding — kick off
Clone the LeanScale Onboarding template repo for my new customer [Customer Name].

Then work the sequence in AGENTS.md:

# 1 — Consume the handoff
Read the diagnostic, the SOW, and every sales-call transcript in their Drive folder.
Pull the stakeholder mapping from the handoff materials.

# 2 — Launch the research agents
Go deep on the business, then decide what other research agents you need:
  products & services · positioning & branding · competitors and where they
  win and lose · how the industry actually operates · the events that matter ·
  the people everyone in that world knows.
Past the website headline. We are not pretending to be titans of their industry.

# 3 — Build the relationship map
Everyone at [Customer Name] — including the people who haven't been on a call yet
but who we'll need.

# 4 — Load the systems
Teamwork: the first quarter of roadmap projects off the SOW.
Then work the 14-item punch list until every one is green.

# 5 — Draft everything
The welcome email (goes out same day — 24-hour SLA).
The pre-kickoff deck, the kickoff deck, and the Loom script for me to read.
Blueprints for the first two projects.

# 6 — Stand up the cockpit
Connect their CRM and build the GTM reporting dashboard: pipeline creation,
conversion rates, the metrics that matter for their motion.
1
Phase 1 · Before they've met you

Blueprint.

None of Blueprint happens in front of the customer. It starts the moment the engagement team is assigned — which is at the diagnostic review, not at signature. Everything here is done before the first call.

The handoff
Sales → Engagement team
EntryDiagnostic review→ Engagement team assigned→ Meet the team→ Signature→ Welcome email · 24 hrs
Meet the team is optional → Some deals close without it Main stakeholder + 1–2 others

The meet-the-team step is a deliberate part of the sales process, not a courtesy — it tests whether this is a commit deal, forces the start-date conversation, and moves the cycle. Plan for it, but don't wait on it: some deals close straight off the diagnostic review.

What you consume
  • The diagnostic — the whole thing, not the summary
  • The SOW — it's where the first quarter of roadmap projects comes from
  • Every sales-call transcript
  • Joe's handoff materials — stakeholder mapping and anything deeper
What you produce from it
  • Teamwork stood up for the first quarter of roadmap projects
  • The research dossier
  • The relationship map
  • The welcome email, drafted with all of that context in it
The research standard

Know the business past the headline.

Table stakes, day one — what customers expect of us. The bar isn't that we're titans of their industry; nobody's buying that. The bar is that we know what they do at more than a website-headline level.

1
Products and services
Everything they offer, in depth — not the category, the actual products.
2
Positioning and branding
How they describe themselves, and who they're describing themselves against.
3
Competitors — and the honest read
A handful of real competitors, plus where this customer is positioned better and where they'll run into trouble. The second half is the part that makes you useful.
4
How the industry operates
Not the customer — the industry. For a wealth.com, that means knowing how the advisory-firm world actually works.
5
Events and icons
The industry events that matter and the people everyone in that world knows.
6
The relationship map
Every person at the company — including the ones who haven't been on a call yet but who we'll need.

Calibrate it

Deep, not performative. We're not selling industry expertise — we're removing the tax of explaining their own business to us. If they have to teach you what the product does, you showed up late.

The punch list

Fourteen things live before kickoff.

Not a wish list. If any of these is still open when the kickoff call starts, the onboarding is already behind.

Systems
8 · Stood up & connected
  • Vasco deployed
  • Slack channel — customer-leanscale
  • Google Drive shared drive
  • Teamwork — first quarter of projects loaded
  • Fireflies transcript repo
  • Customer Hub set up
  • Dedicated support agent on the Claude server
  • Initial agent fleet deployed
Assets
4 · Written & sent
  • Welcome email — 24-hour SLA, same day if you can
  • Pre-kickoff deck
  • Pre-kickoff Loom — script written, video recorded
  • Kickoff deck
Research
2 · Done, not started
  • Company + industry dossier — all six areas above
  • Relationship map — including the people we haven't met

The clock

Signature to welcome email is 24 hours — usually same day. Kickoff dates and times get proposed in that same email. The immediacy is the message: it sets the pace of how we work before we've done any work.

2
Phase 2 · The two meetings

Build.

Build is pre-onboarding and kickoff. The rule for both: show up to meeting one with the work already done. Nothing in the first thirty days should be a blank page.

Day −5 · Before
Pre-onboarding goes out
Deck + Loom, as a pre-read. Every formality lives here now.
Day 0 · Kickoff
Kickoff call
Short intros, then straight into the projects and the blueprints.
Day +1–3 · Same week
Blueprint greenlight
Booked on the kickoff call. Both blueprints approved, build starts.
Day +5 · Friday
First end-of-week recap
The rhythm starts in week one, not week three.
Pre-onboarding

The deck and the Loom.

Historically the first ten to twenty minutes of every kickoff was formalities — how a sprint call works, what an end-of-week recap looks like, what's expected of you. That isn't a meeting, it's a document. Move all of it into a pre-read and buy the time back.

The pre-kickoff deck
  • Here's what we already learned about you — the industry read, straight out of the research
  • Your first two projects, already loaded in Teamwork
  • The agent overview — and the shortlist we'd start with
  • Who you're working with — the team and their backgrounds
  • Logistics — hammered out here, not on the call
The 5-minute Loom
  • Everything kickoff used to spend twenty minutes on
  • How you actually work with LeanScale, end to end
  • The meeting rhythm — sprint call, end-of-week recap, what else is available
  • What we're going to cover on the kickoff call
The fork

Who narrates the Loom?

Recommended · always
A human reads a generated script
Claude writes the script and builds the deck. You open Loom and read it. Five minutes of your actual voice, produced in the time it takes to record once. The personal touch is the entire point of this asset — it's the first time they hear from the person who'll run their account.
Considered · rejected
Fully automated ElevenLabs narration
Technically fine, and we already have the pipeline from these playbook briefs. But a synthetic voice welcoming a brand-new customer lands cold. Save the generated narration for internal enablement — this one is for them.
The kickoff call

Project-rich, not formality-rich.

You still need a kickoff. They'll bring more of their team than the individual buyer, and the meet-the-team session — if it happened at all — was the main stakeholder plus one or two. So the introductions are real. They're just not the meeting.

1
Introductions — properly, then done
Ceremonial and worth doing. If the same people were on the meet-the-team call, compress it; if they're new faces, run it.
2
What we already know about you
A slide or two from the research. Show the homework — it changes the temperature of the room.
3
What we need from you
The three asks. Reiterated here, not introduced here — they were already in the Loom.
4
Here are your blueprints
"We're starting with Market Map and then GTM Lifecycle — and we already have the blueprints for both. Here you go."
5
What's broken right this second?
The single highest-yield question in the call. We're here to help this instant, not to plan — hop in the Slack channel, tag LeanScale, start sending things over. Early wins, right out of the gate.
6
The setup walkthrough
Vasco, the Customer Hub, the support agent, the agent shortlist. Tactical, quick, covered in Enable below.
7
Book the greenlight meeting — before you hang up
On the calendar, this week. Tomorrow if they'll take it.

The failure mode to kill

You kick off Monday, the architect looks at their calendar and says "I've got time Thursday." That's the whole problem. Blueprints are already written — the greenlight meeting is a confirmation, not a working session, and it belongs in the same week as kickoff. If a customer leaves kickoff asking "so what happens next?", the call was run wrong.

The day-one artifact

The GTM reporting cockpit.

Built into the onboarding prompt: connect their CRM and stand up the metrics that matter. If Vasco is already deployed this is close to free — and showing up on day one with their real numbers on screen is the strongest possible opening.

Demand
Top of funnel
  • Pipeline creation by source
  • Volume by channel
  • Speed to first touch
Pipeline
Middle
  • Conversion rate by stage
  • Stage aging and stalls
  • Coverage against target
Bookings
Bottom
  • Win rate
  • Cycle time
  • Average deal size

This is the starting pack, not the finished dashboard — expand it from whatever the diagnostic said this team actually argues about.

3
Phase 3 · How they work with us

Enable.

Enable, on this playbook, is not enabling them on something we built. It's teaching them how to be a good customer of ours — which comes down to one slide.

The whole ask

Three things. That's it.

Say the "that's it" part out loud. Naming the ceiling on what we need is what makes them comfortable actually giving it.

Show up to the sprint call
Ask 01 · Attendance
  • Weekly, with the people who can answer things
  • Missing it is the earliest churn signal we get
Green-light the blueprints
Ask 02 · The critical one
  • Every project gates on this
  • A blueprint sitting unapproved is the single biggest cause of a slow engagement
Triage the ad-hoc queue
Ask 03 · Only when it's heavy
  • Tell us what matters most when requests pile up
  • Dormant until it isn't

Say it exactly like this

"We need sprint call attendance, we need green lights on blueprints, and we need guidance on triage if ad hoc starts to get out of hand. Otherwise you don't have to do anything else."

The support system

Walk them through the agent.

This is the part of the walkthrough that lands every time, because nobody else is doing it. Give it real airtime — and be precise about the boundaries, because the boundaries are what make it trustworthy.

What to tell them
  • It's dedicated to your environment — connected only to your systems
  • We don't use this Claude account on any other customer
  • Tag @LeanScale in your Slack channel and it picks the request up
  • It works the whole thing up to prep our engineer
  • It builds nothing until we give the green light
The rest of the walkthrough
  • The Customer Hub — active projects, completed projects, anything you need to know about LeanScale
  • Vasco — get it live here if the diagnostic didn't already
  • The agent shortlist — you may have twelve available; name the four to dial in first
  • The Slack norms — where ad hoc goes, and how fast to expect a response

On the agent shortlist

Twelve agents on a slide reads as a menu nobody orders from. "We have twelve, and we think getting these four dialed in right away is going to be awesome" reads as a recommendation. Pick the four off their diagnostic, not off a default list.

The operating rhythm

What the week looks like from their side.

Weekly
Sprint call
The one standing meeting. Ask 01.
As needed
Blueprint greenlight
Every project gates here. Ask 02.
Anytime
Ad hoc in Slack
Tag @LeanScale. The agent picks it up immediately.
Friday
End-of-week recap
Delivered, not requested. Starts week one.
4
Phase 4 · Who shows up

Maintain.

Onboarding is the most aggressive part of the LeanScale process — so leadership presence is heaviest here and tapers deliberately. Nail this stretch and you've got the relationship for the long haul.

Weeks 1–2 · Close
Director stays in it
In the discovery meetings, shadowing sprint calls where they can, real strategic oversight. Not a check-in — presence.
Day 14
Two-week check-in
Are we off on the right foot? Internal read, corrected early.
Day 30
Director feedback call
15–30 minutes with the primary stakeholder. Formal. They've stepped back enough by now to ask the right questions.
Day 90 → ongoing
CCO, then QBRs
Cam comes in at the first quarterly. After that the director rides the QBRs.

Why the director, and why two weeks

Three reasons it pays for itself: the engagement gets corrected early instead of at day sixty, the director actually knows the account, and if there's ever attrition on the pod, someone senior can bridge the gap instead of restarting the relationship.

The advocacy gate

Don't ask at thirty days just because you can.

Wait for it
Two projects delivered → then ask
After two shipped projects you've earned enough equity to ask the primary stakeholder for a G2 review, or an invite into the GTM Research Group. The ask lands because the work backs it.
The trap
Asking at day 30 on principle
You end up with a G2 page full of "we've only been working with LeanScale a month, but they've been great." Technically a review. Worth close to nothing. Stagger the asks deliberately.
Where onboardings go wrong

The four failure modes.

Failure mode

The kickoff was all formalities

Twenty minutes of process explanation, a next-steps slide, and a customer who leaves asking what happens now. Everything procedural belongs in the pre-read.

Failure mode

The next meeting drifts

Kick off Monday, book the greenlight for next Thursday. Ten days of nothing, right when momentum matters most. Book it on the call, for the same week.

Failure mode

A punch-list item is still open

The support agent isn't live, or Vasco isn't deployed, and it gets discovered in week two. Every one of the fourteen is pre-kickoff, not week-one.

Failure mode

Getting rusty at it

Architects run few onboardings by design — a good one means a client slot just opened. The infrastructure here is what keeps the motion sharp between reps. Run the playbook even when you think you remember it.

The Deliverable · Definition of done

The 30-day bar.

Onboarding isn't complete when the kickoff deck is delivered. It's complete when all ten of these are true — and there's money attached to hitting them.

Shipped
  • Kickoff materials and kickoff meeting delivered
  • End-of-week recaps landing every Friday
  • AI support system deployed and in use
  • GTM reporting dashboard live off their CRM
  • Vasco deployed
Proven
  • Two projects delivered — a stretch, on purpose
  • All systems access provisioned — no gaps on agents, none on support
  • A clean roadmap of projects and managed services actively being managed
  • Relationship map complete and maintained
  • Director sign-off on positive sentiment
The SPIFF

Every box ticked inside thirty days: $1,000 to the architect and $1,000 to the engineer. Two projects in thirty days is aggressive — but if you show up on day zero with blueprints ready to be greenlit, it's reachable.

Why two, not one

One project in thirty days was the old bar and it was comfortable. Two forces the entire method in this playbook to actually happen — the research, the punch list and the pre-written blueprints are the only way the math works. That's the point of setting it there.

✓
Closeout

Debrief the project.

When an Onboarding engagement wraps, spend sixteen minutes with the debrief agent. Teamwork already knows what got built and when. This is for the part none of our systems can see — the call that could have gone either way, the thing the customer wanted that you refused, the near-miss that never became an incident, and above all the places this playbook turned out to be wrong. What comes out of it gets written back into this page.

Before you start

Two minutes of thinking beats sixteen minutes of recall. Have these in your head — you don't need notes, and you definitely don't need a script.

  • The punch list — how many of the fourteen were genuinely live before the kickoff call started, and what any gap ended up costing you.
  • Kickoff to greenlight — how many days it actually took, and what the kickoff call really got spent on.
  • The defaults — the human-read Loom, the three asks, four agents out of twelve, two projects in thirty days: which held, and which you quietly dropped.

Sixteen minutes, one sitting. It's a voice conversation, so your browser will ask for microphone access — use headphones or the agent will hear itself. Chrome is the safer bet over Safari.