An outbound client onboarding checklist for a LinkedIn outreach agency has nine steps: intake, LinkedIn connection, audience sentence, seller profile, value offers, prospect preview with client approval, message sequence, launch readiness and launch. With the client on two short calls and the build done from an AI chat, the nine steps fit into one working day. The checklist and the hours are below.
This is for the delivery lead at an agency where a client signed on Monday and expects to see activity before Friday. The usual onboarding takes a week because it is five handovers. Here one person runs it in one chat, and the client is asked for exactly three things.
The scene: Elif leads delivery at a 9 person agency. The new client is Corvin Fleet, a 40 person firm that sells route planning software to regional delivery companies. The contract came back on Monday evening. Tuesday is the onboarding day.
The one day checklist
| # | Step | Where | Who decides | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Intake call, 10 questions | Call | Client | 09:00, 40 min |
| 2 | Client connects LinkedIn | Link from gtmbud.com | Client | In the call |
| 3 | Audience sentence, criteria check | Chat | Agency | 10:00 |
| 4 | Seller profile of the draft | Chat | Agency | 10:20 |
| 5 | Value offers | Chat | Agency, then client | 10:45 |
| 6 | Prospect preview, client approves | Call with shared chat | Client | 13:00, 25 min |
| 7 | Message sequence | Chat | Agency | 14:00 |
| 8 | Launch readiness | Chat and gtmbud.com | Agency | 15:30 |
| 9 | Launch | Chat | Agency | 16:00 |
The three things the client does: answer the intake questions, connect a LinkedIn account, and approve the people in the preview. Everything else is yours.
Step 1: Which intake questions do you ask?
Ask ten, and ask them in this order, because the first five build the campaign and the last five protect it. Write the answers in the chat as you go. They become the input of every later step.
- Who is the buyer, by job title, in the last five deals you won?
- What size is the company when it buys, in employees, lowest and highest?
- Which countries or regions, and which ones never?
- Which kinds of company look right and are wrong? Give two examples.
- What happened in the company just before it bought?
- Whose LinkedIn profile sends, and what is its URL?
- What is your website, and which page describes this product best?
- What can we offer a stranger for free that is useful without a call?
- When a lead says yes, what is the next step: whose calendar, how long, which link?
- What must we never say? Prices, customer names, promises.
Question 4 is the one agencies skip, and it is the one that prevents the “these leads are bad” email in week three. Question 9 and question 10 go straight into the reply playbook of the campaign.
Step 2: How does the client connect a LinkedIn account?
Through a connection link that you create on gtmbud.com, and not through the chat. On the account page, choose Share Connection Link for LinkedIn, enter the client sender’s LinkedIn profile URL from question 6, and copy the link. The button shows after one LinkedIn account is connected, so connect your own account first. The link works once and expires after 7 days.
Send it while the client is still on the call. The link opens on gtmbud.com. The client sees a page that says “Connect your LinkedIn account”, their own profile URL, and a button to continue to LinkedIn, where they sign in in a separate tab. Then the page asks them to confirm when the account can send: the timezone, the hours and the days. The page can also show the charge that the account adds to your GTM Bud plan. The client needs no GTM Bud account for this. The connected account then appears in your GTM Bud account.
Three things to know before you promise it works:
- It can be refused. If the same LinkedIn profile is already connected by another GTM Bud user, the link says that the profile is already in use. Ask about earlier tools in the intake call.
- You verify it in the chat. Ask: “List my sending accounts and show the status of the newest one.” The answer gives the display name, the connection status and whether the account has Sales Navigator.
- The trial of a GTM Bud account starts when its first campaign launches. Connecting a LinkedIn account does not start it, so the trial does not run while you wait for your first client to connect.
A plain limit: GTM Bud has no white-label dashboard and no client login, so the white-label part of your onboarding is the service around it. The client connects one account through one link on gtmbud.com, sees that address there, and then deals only with your agency.
Step 3: How do you write the audience sentence?
Write one sentence from intake answers 1 to 5, and let your AI turn it into criteria. Elif typed:
“Create a campaign draft named ‘Corvin Fleet | Ops leads regional delivery DE’. Audience: heads of operations and fleet managers at regional parcel and food delivery companies in Germany with 50 to 500 employees that run their own vehicles.”
The AI wrote five criteria from the sentence and marked three as must-have. GTM Bud checked each one and saved the draft. One criterion was flagged: “plans routes in spreadsheets today”. The check said that a LinkedIn profile, a company page or public web content cannot show which tools a company uses, and it suggested a rewrite. Elif made it a nice-to-have that reads “job posts or company page mention dispatch or route planning”.
Use answer 4 here. “Freight forwarders that subcontract all transport” went in as a must-have exclusion: the company must operate its own vehicles. A person who fails one must-have is not a match, so keep must-haves to what is truly necessary.
The wider method for this step is in a LinkedIn campaign draft from one sentence.
Step 4: What is the seller profile of the draft?
The seller profile belongs to this one draft. It is two things: a website and a personal LinkedIn profile URL. GTM Bud reads both and uses them when messages are written. For a client campaign, that means the client’s website and the profile of the client’s sender, not your agency’s.
“Set the seller profile of the Corvin Fleet draft: website corvinfleet.example, LinkedIn profile linkedin.com/in/jonas-corvin-example.”
Two traps:
- A company page is not a profile. A campaign with a LinkedIn company page as its profile cannot launch. Clients often send the company page link, so check that the URL has
/in/in it. - The read is not instant. Launch readiness has a check for it. If GTM Bud could not read the website, correct the URL now and not at 15:55.
Step 5: How do you get value offers the client will sign off?
A value offer is the free, useful thing that the campaign offers each lead. Your AI gets a brief from GTM Bud with the instructions, the seller profile and the audience, researches the client and the audience, and writes the offers. GTM Bud checks them and saves them. If the check finds a problem, nothing is saved until it is fixed.
The brief makes the AI ask you two questions that you should answer from intake answer 8: the format of the offer, and whether it is one offer for all leads or one that the client makes for each lead after the lead replies. Decide the second one with delivery capacity in mind. A personalized deliverable is work for somebody at the client, every time a lead says yes.
Elif asked: “Get the value offer brief for the Corvin Fleet draft and write the offers. One offer for all leads. Show them to me before you save.”
She picked two to test and sent the client one message, not a document:
“We open with one of these two. A: a one page benchmark of stops per route for regional carriers. B: a checklist for the first week of a route planning rollout. Any reason not to use either?”
A closed question gets an answer in ten minutes. “What do you think?” gets an answer on Thursday.
Step 6: What does the client approve in the prospect preview?
The client approves real people, not a description. The prospect preview searches for people who match the audience and returns a list with name, role, company, location and a short reason for the match. The search takes one to three minutes. Start it before the call.
On the 13:00 call Elif shared the chat and went down the list with Jonas from Corvin Fleet:
- “Show me the first eight people in the preview of the Corvin Fleet draft.”
- For each person, Jonas said yes or no and why. Elif typed his words: “Mark Katrin H. as not a fit. Reason from the client: municipal waste company, buys through public tender. Exclude everyone like this.”
- For two people Jonas was not sure. “Open the full profile of Mehmet A.” showed the experience, the company description and the result for each criterion.
Six of eight were a good fit. The two that were not gave Elif a new exclusion, public sector operators, and she updated the targeting of the draft after the call. Then she started a new preview for the changed audience to confirm.
Two limits that shape this call. A preview is one list per run, and each campaign has a daily limit on previews. So do the rough work on the criteria before the client joins, and use the call for judgment and not for search.
Write the approval down. One line in the onboarding notes: “Jonas approved the audience on 6 Oct on a call, 6 of 8 marked good fit, public sector excluded.” It costs ten seconds and it is the first thing you will look for if lead quality is ever questioned.
Step 7: Who writes the sequence?
Your AI writes the messages, with a brief from GTM Bud, and GTM Bud checks and saves them. The brief gives the writing instructions, the facts about the campaign and each value offer, the steps of the sequence, the length limits and the placeholders. There is one set of messages for each offer you selected for the test.
“Get the sequence brief for the Corvin Fleet draft and write the messages for both offers. Keep the first message under 60 words.”
GTM Bud saves the messages only if every check passes. If one fails, the result names the problem and the AI fixes it. The first message starts with a personalized opener that GTM Bud fills in for each lead, so read the rest of the message as the part you control. Read every message aloud once. It is the client’s name on it.
Use the time to set the campaign reply playbook from intake answers 9 and 10: the booking link, the call length, what is never said. The AI shows the exact text, and it saves the playbook after you approve it in the chat.
Step 8 and 9: What does launch readiness check, and what happens at launch?
Launch readiness is a checklist that GTM Bud returns for the draft. Each check is met or not met, and each unmet check says what to do. Ask for it at 15:30: “Get the launch readiness of the Corvin Fleet draft.”
Expect two or three unmet checks on a first client. In Elif’s run:
| Check not met | Fix | Where |
|---|---|---|
| No LinkedIn account sends for this campaign | Choose Jonas’s account in the Connect step of the campaign | gtmbud.com |
| The account has no sending schedule | Choose when the account can send, in the Review step | gtmbud.com |
| The campaign has no sequence | Open the Sequence step once, and GTM Bud sets the default steps | gtmbud.com |
These three are done on the website and not in the chat, and the AI gives you the campaign link for them. Plan fifteen minutes. The schedule check is unmet only when the sender closed the connection page before the step that confirms the sending hours. Ask Jonas for his working hours in the intake call, so that the schedule is his and not a guess.
Then launch. The launch always takes two calls. The first returns a preview: the accounts that send with an upper limit for the first day, the sequence, and the first message of each channel. Elif read the first messages one last time and typed “Yes, launch it.” The second call must follow inside 10 minutes, or the AI shows a new preview.
After the launch GTM Bud starts to find leads, and the first messages go out when the first leads are ready. Tell the client that in the same sentence as the good news.
Frequently asked questions about an outbound client onboarding checklist
What is the most common reason a one day onboarding slips to day two?
The LinkedIn connection. The client has to open a link and sign in to LinkedIn, and a busy founder does that when the meeting ends, not when you ask. Send the connection link during the intake call and stay on the call until the account shows as connected.
Does the client need Sales Navigator on the LinkedIn account?
Ask in the intake call and check it yourself after the connection. The list of sending accounts shows for each account if it has Sales Navigator access. Record the answer in the onboarding notes, because the client will ask about sending volume and the answer depends on the account.
How many campaigns should a new client start with?
One. A second campaign on day one doubles the approvals you need from a client who has not yet seen a single reply. Launch one audience, read two weeks of replies, and then copy the campaign for the second segment with what you learned.
Who should be in the prospect preview call from the client side?
The person who will take the sales calls, not only the person who signed the contract. That person knows in two seconds if a profile is a buyer. If the two are different people and only the signer attends, expect a complaint about lead quality in week three.
What do we tell the client to expect on the first day after launch?
That the first day is quiet. After the launch GTM Bud starts to find leads, and the first messages go out when the first leads are ready. The launch preview gives an upper limit for the first day for each account, and the real number can be lower.
From signed on Monday to launched on Tuesday
This outbound client onboarding checklist is short because the client does three things and you do six, and because the build happens in one chat with no handover. Run it once with a timer, note where the day slipped, and move that step earlier next time. To prepare, add the connector by its address with the steps on GTM Bud for Claude, and read AI LinkedIn outreach for agency owners for the build steps in more depth. On Friday the client gets the first page of the weekly client report.