Key takeaways
• Effective onboarding is about building understanding, not transferring information.
• Prioritising one area of the business often helps an agency become useful faster than if trying to get to grips with everything at once.
• Seeing products, customers, and operations firsthand accelerates learning in ways presentations rarely can.
• Onboarding shouldn’t be a one-off event, rather an ongoing conversation throughout the client-agency partnership.
Onboarding a communications agency can feel like a daunting task. How do you condense years of product, technical, market, and organisational knowledge for the benefit of people who weren’t there as your business evolved? But don’t worry. You don’t need to tell them everything all at once because that’s not how understanding is built.
We’ve experienced onboarding programmes that lasted several days, covering every corner of the business – and we’ve hugely appreciated the effort. But the reality is that no one can absorb and retain that much information in such a short space of time. Understanding doesn’t come from hearing hundreds of facts, rather from having opportunities to apply them.
Start with today’s priorities, not yesterday’s history
Experience builds understanding faster than explanation
Presentations and briefing documents are useful for us to refer back to but the moments that have helped us understand clients most quickly have been on factory floors, at exhibitions, during product demonstrations, or on construction sites.
Sitting with engineers as they explain why a particular design decision mattered, listening to dealers describe the questions customers ask every day, and hearing customers explain why they chose one solution over another creates context that is difficult to capture in a PowerPoint presentation.
These are the experiences that help us connect technical information with commercial reality and remember it because we’ve seen it first-hand. So wherever possible, bringing your agency closer to your products, people, and customers is one of the fastest ways to accelerate understanding.
Explain how your organisation really works behind the scenes
Think of onboarding as just the beginning
We’re never going to be able to learn everything about your business within the first few weeks. We’ll do our best to pick up as much as we can as quickly as we can to start being useful, but our expectation is that we will keep learning throughout the relationship.
New questions will emerge, different colleagues will become involved, products evolve, and markets change. When the agency remains curious and the client continues to share context as they work together, that’s how understanding grows – not through one intensive onboarding programme, but through dozens for conversations, experiences, and projects over time.
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
