Client Onboarding

Section 1: The 24-Hour Window

Within 24 hours of proposal acceptance, complete the following:

Send a personal welcome message to the primary contact. This is not a template. Write a message in your own voice that references something specific about the engagement, acknowledges that you will be moving quickly, and tells them exactly what will happen in the next 48 hours. The message should feel like it came from a person, not a system.

Move the company to Won in the pipeline if the app has not already done it automatically. Update the deal value to the accepted proposal total. Set the probability to 100 percent.

Send the client their access invitation to the client portal at app.thenorth.consulting. The client portal is where they will submit briefs, view project status, access deliverables, and manage their brand vault. The invitation is sent from the app. Navigate to the company workspace, open the People tab, and send the portal invitation from there.

Notify the delivery team. Every accepted engagement triggers an internal handoff. Your job is to introduce the client to the delivery team lead who will be managing their work. Send a brief internal message that summarizes the engagement scope, the client's primary objectives, any context from discovery that is relevant to delivery, and the client's preferred communication style and cadence.

Section 2: Access and Setup

The client will receive their portal invitation within minutes of you sending it. When they log in to app.thenorth.consulting for the first time, they will land in their company workspace. The workspace they see as a client is different from what you see as an Account Manager. They can see their briefs, their projects, their deliverables, and their brand vault. They cannot see your pipeline notes, the audit backend, or internal notes.

The Brand Vault is a section of the app where the client's brand assets are stored. This includes their logo files, their brand colors, their typography choices, and their voice and tone guidelines. For a new client, the brand vault will be empty. Your job in the first week is to collect all of these assets from the client and upload them. Once the brand vault is populated, every brief the client submits automatically inherits their brand profile, which means every deliverable starts on-brand without requiring the client to re-explain their brand each time.

Section 3: The Kickoff Session

The kickoff session is the first working meeting between the client and the delivery team. It typically happens within the first 5 to 7 days of onboarding. The Account Manager is present at the kickoff. This is not optional. You are the relationship owner and your presence signals that the engagement is being taken seriously at the right level.

In the kickoff session, cover these topics in this order:

First, acknowledge the scope together. Read through the proposal scope line by line with the client. Make sure they understand what is included and what the delivery sequence will be. This prevents the most common source of post-kickoff confusion, which is a mismatch between what the client thought they bought and what delivery is planning to build.

Second, confirm success metrics. Ask the client: three months from now, what does a successful engagement look like to you? What are the two or three specific things that would make you confident this was the right investment? Write these down. They become the standard against which delivery is measured.

Third, collect any missing information. If the audit or discovery process identified information gaps, this is the session to fill them. Access to tools, brand assets, existing analytics accounts, and any internal documentation that delivery needs should be requested at the kickoff.

Fourth, establish the communication rhythm. Agree on how often you will meet, through what channel, and how the client should submit feedback on deliverables. The app has a built-in system for this, but clients who have never used it before may need a quick walkthrough. Confirm they have logged in to the portal and can navigate it comfortably.

Section 4: Credits and Billing

The North operates on a credit system for ongoing creative and delivery work. Each credit represents a unit of hours. When a client is onboarded, they receive a monthly credit allocation based on their plan. Credits are visible in the app on the company workspace under the credits section.

As an Account Manager, your responsibility is to monitor credit usage and ensure clients never run out unexpectedly. When a company's available credits are low or negative, new briefs and project work are blocked automatically by the app. The workspace will display a warning that the company is out of credits, and a prompt to purchase additional credits or upgrade the plan.

If a client's credit balance goes negative, address it immediately. Contact the client directly, explain the situation in plain language, and offer to process a top-up or plan upgrade. Do not wait for the client to notice the block. They will notice it when a brief fails to submit, and that is the worst time for them to find out.

Credits roll over for 90 days. The app surfaces upcoming credit expirations so you can flag them to clients proactively.