The kickoff meeting is a chance for your MSP to win the trust of a new client. Here’s how to do it right.
The client kickoff meeting is a critical moment in an MSP’s relationship with a client. Do it well and this relationship will flow beautifully, whatever happens next. Flub it and you will eternally struggle to regain the client’s trust. This is pure psychology. "If people are failing, they look inept,” explains renowned psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. “If people are succeeding, they look strong and good and competent. That's the 'halo effect.'”
This meeting is your team’s chance to make a great first impression and earn yourself that halo. The alternative? “If the company looks inept,” says Kahneman, “you may assume everything else they do is inept.”
Preparation is the secret to not looking inept. Becca Campbell, Sr. Onboarding Engineer at Moovila suggests getting your ducks in order at an internal kickoff meeting before the client-facing meeting to make sure you nail this important moment. “This can be helpful for complex projects to align the internal resources on the project goals and objectives,” she says.
Define the goals
The kickoff meeting is your opportunity to make a good first impression. A detailed meeting plan and agenda will help you do that. Knowing your goals for this meeting will help you develop a meeting plan that works for your team, this project, and this client.
Most MSP kickoff meetings have similar goals, though. Those might look like this:
Introduce everyone
This is an opportunity for your people to meet the essential parties on the client’s team. Your goal is to build trust and to make sure the client and your team know who to turn to when they have questions. Line up some introductions, ice-breaker questions, and an agenda that gives everyone an opportunity to speak.
Align objectives
This is where you make sure everyone on the client team understands what your team will deliver, the timeline for the project, and who does what. What are the high-level goals of the project? How will it benefit the client? Who does what?
Establish lines of communication
If you use a work management tool to keep your project on track, this is a good time to introduce it. If there are meetings the client’s team will need to attend, lay out that expectation. You will likely need details from the client – administrative credential, roles of the contacts on their team, and contact information – and this meeting is a great moment to make sure you have those. “For projects that may require onsite work or in situations where the client may have multiple sites, confirm the key site, contact details and location,” says Moovila’s Campbell.
Identify roadblocks & mitigations
Discuss any potential challenges with the client. You have done this work before and know where problems tend to occur. The client might be completely naïve to them. Discuss where you see challenges happening and clarify how you will deal with them.
Be prepared
Show up prepared if you want to create the sort of first impression that makes the client believe in your skill and expertise. This is particularly important when your client isn’t technical. The stronger their faith in your knowledge, the more they will trust you – even when things go wrong. But they will have little technical expertise upon which to form that trust. You will need to demonstrate competency in areas they can evaluate, such as this meeting.
Here are some things to do before the meeting that will help you be exceptionally prepared:
Know the client’s business
Before you can intelligently speak to how technology can serve this client, you need to know what they do. What industry do they serve? What is their business model? What is their product or service? Who are the key decision makers at the company and who are the influencers? What roles do each of your contacts play in their organization?
This is usually available on their website, or you can do a pre-kickoff meeting call with your contact to be sure you get this right.
Show up with a meeting agenda
Running an organized meeting gives an impression of competence. So, show up with an agenda. Share it before the meeting. And stick to it. Your meeting needs a facilitator and, possibly, a scribe. Be sure to know who is doing what before the meeting is assembled.
A possible meeting agenda might look like this:
Introductions
Overview of the project and why it’s important
Set objectives and KPIs
Review the SOW and project timeline, highlighting dates of key deliverables
Define roles and responsibilities
Schedule update calls & meetings
Outline communication protocols
Identify risks and potential challenges and how to handle them if they occur
Clarify how you will handle rescheduling anything
Q&A and next steps
Bring a detailed scope of work
This meeting is an opportunity to go over the scope of work in detail, line by line. So be sure to bring an accurate, detailed, SOW. If the key stakeholders understand what is included – and what isn’t – you can prevent scope creep and other problems. If something the client wants is not already included in your SOW, this is a great place to discover it.
Prepare your team
Before you schedule the meeting, think about who you want on your team. Only after you know who is on your team, can you schedule a meeting everyone can attend. “Oftentimes, the resources performing the work are not the same resources who scoped the work out,” says Moovila’s Campbell,” “so ensuring that the team is aligned before meeting with the client may be necessary.”
Once you rally your team, hold a pre-kick-off-meeting meeting and give everyone the opportunity to add to the agenda and offer insights and concerns.
Everyone on the team should have clear roles for the project – project manager, technical expert, sales or business development, administration – and be available for the project’s duration.
Take a few minutes at the pre-kickoff-meeting meeting to gather some key points about each of your team members that you can work into the introductions. Does someone have experience that’s relevant to the client’s business or interests that align with someone on the client team? Those make terrific ice breakers and can help build trust.
This meeting is more than a task on this project’s timeline. It is an opportunity to become a trusted partner to this client. Recovering from a bad kickoff meeting is hard. But the project – and all future work you do for this client – will benefit if you use this meeting to establish trust, express your own competency, and earn the coveted halo effect.
For more MSP project management resources, be sure to check out our blog.
