---
title: "Onboarding"
type: playbook
evidence_type: method
category: "Delivery"
publisher: "LeanScale"
date_modified: 2026-07-27
word_count: 2939
topics: ["revenue-operations"]
canonical_url: https://knowledge.leanscale.team/playbooks/onboarding-playbook/
source: "LeanScale Knowledge Hub — https://knowledge.leanscale.team"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to LeanScale."
---

# Onboarding

**Evidence type:** method (what we prescribe)

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.

## 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.
Output Nothing left to set up
2
Build
Pre-onboarding assets, then a kickoff that's project-rich, not formality-rich.
Output Blueprints greenlit
3
Enable
Teach them how to work with us — three asks, the hub, the support agent.
Output A customer who knows their job
4
Maintain
Director close for two weeks, then the check-in ladder out to the QBR.
Output Sentiment 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 Copy prompt
# 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
Entry Diagnostic 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

## 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

### 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.

#### What this is, and isn't

It's a craft debrief , feeding straight back into this playbook.
It is not an assessment. Nothing here goes near performance review.
It's attributed — Anthony reads it with your name on it.
"This took two weeks longer than it should have because of X" is the most useful thing
you can say . Say it.

#### If it doesn't load

No mic prompt? Check the padlock in the address bar — the browser may have blocked it.
Agent talking over you? Headphones. It's hearing itself through your speakers.
Still stuck? Message Anthony rather than burning fifteen minutes on it.
The transcript takes a moment to generate after you hang up. You'll get a recap
emailed to you.
LeanScale · Delivery OS
The Onboarding playbook — the internal standard for the first thirty days of every engagement,
from diagnostic review to director sign-off.

## Canonical

https://knowledge.leanscale.team/playbooks/onboarding-playbook/