Episode 91: Welcome Packet Overview
Summary
Nick Disabato and Kai Davis walk through the welcome packet, a PDF sent to qualified prospects before any sales call. They cover when to build one, what goes in it, and how it functions as a gatekeeper that surfaces bad-fit leads before they waste anyone’s time. The conversation runs from the basic structure through specific lessons both have learned running the format for years.
Highlights
- Nick’s welcome packet has three sections: damaging admissions and objections up front, a description of what the work actually looks like, then a FAQ. Pricing is absent entirely. Nick delivers pricing live on the Skype call so he can see the prospect’s face.
- Kai buries the booking link at the very end of the welcome packet. A prospect has to read the whole document to find the Calendly link. Anyone who asks how to schedule a call without reading it self-selects out.
- Nick duplicates the DraftRevise packet for each additional service offering, runs a find-replace on the service name, then swaps out the service-specific details. The objections section stays ~70% identical across all versions because clients ask the same questions regardless of offering.
- When a prospect asks a question that the welcome packet already answers, Nick doubles the engagement price. He treats it as a signal about what working with that person will be like.
- Nick’s intake sequence is a strict chain: apply, clear the qualifying criteria, receive the welcome packet, click the Calendly link at the end, get on a call, then receive terms. Each step gates the next. Prospects who try to skip directly to a call never get through.
- Kai’s first attempt at welcome packets collapsed. Five packets with 50% unique content each made updates painful, he fell off maintaining them, and they stopped existing for six to nine months. He rebuilt with a smaller set focused on the entry engagement and higher-priced retainers only.
- Both recommend waiting until after the first client before writing one. Before that, you don’t have enough real objections or questions to fill it with anything useful.
Read the transcript
So you were one of the first consultants I encountered who used a welcome packet as part of their introduction materials. With a prospect. A prospect contacts you, you send them the welcome packet. I’m really curious about how you sort of generated that idea and how it’s evolved over time. So, let’s start at the beginning. When and how did you first start using a welcome packet in your practice?
So I started doing it with draft revise about ah three and a half years ago. It was like Five or six months after I I started with DraftRevise, so it was like the second round of me trying to get new clients again, right? It was this interesting situation where like I had parted ways with some people And now I was starting to do the sales process again. And by that point, I had already been on over a dozen Skype calls with people about kicking off engagements, auditing objections, figuring stuff out, right? So that’s cool. It was really easy to put together because by that point I had already had basically all the questions I was going to be answering in the welcome packet. A welcome packet is like an upscale consultant version of a FAC. It comes in a PDF. You answer a lot of questions. You talk a lot about how you’re going to be working together, and you send it out after a qualified lead has come in. So you don’t want to just give it to anybody or post it to your website. You only want it, you want to hide it from people and then give it to them later. It doesn’t include pricing. It does include next steps. Usually, for me, next steps is getting on a phone call. For me, the anatomy of the welcome packet is threefold. Introducing objections, what in MBA speak would be called damaging omissions or admissions. The second thing is talking about what it is we’re going to be actually doing together. And then the third thing is going to be answering questions. That it’s had that same format, that same process for the past three years. Yeah.
So do you have a welcome packet just for DraftRevise or for your other services? Since your service ladder has multiple rungs on it and there’s multiple engagements a client could sign up for. Do you have a welcome packet for each? Just draft reference. So there’s a separate welcome packet for each one.
Yes. Yes. And frankly, I just rewrote the draft revised welcome packet for each one. Like I it begins by me duplicating the page’s file and control f-ing and replacing draft revise for the service offering in question. And then I go through and like cut out everything that’s about A-B testing and replace it with Google Analytics.
So pretty simple. 70% the same between, if not more, between different service offerings.
It’s very similar. Clients tend to have similar objections, right? Especially when they’re coming into the same business. And those are bespoke to your business. Like, I’m sure clients have a different set of questions for Kai Davis, but it’s going to be pretty consistent for Nick Disabato, right? Like, Are you really only one person? How quickly can we get started? Like, these are things that matter a lot for draft, but they don’t vary from offering to offering.
Now, for me, it’s very similar. I focus on having welcome packets for both my road wrapping session and any recurring services that I offer, any larger recurring services. When somebody comes in, I’m able to give them a welcome packet that steps them through, similar to the major areas you outlined. Hey, this is exactly what we’re going to be doing. Hey, this is what we are not going to be doing. Refers them to other service offerings or other providers if there’s something out of scope. Next steps: frequently asked questions. On a previous episode, we talked about sort of the Trojan horse I put in my welcome packets to make sure clients read them. Including the book a call link towards the end of the welcome packet. So they have to read the thing to find the link to book a call if they actually are serious about working together. But what I discovered is by having these welcome packets It addresses a number of the objections or questions they have off the bat. It gives them an understanding of how I work as a consultant. And it also is putting our best foot forward as soon as we’re starting the conversation with the prospect. Instead of saying, yeah, we could jump on a call and then nothing. And then you get on a call and then see what happens. You say, great, we’re going to jump on a call. First, read this welcome packet. It’ll tell you more about the service. And a prospect might say, oh wow, thanks for sending that across. We need something completely different. Congratulations, you just saved yourself 30 minutes. That is a victory. So, welcome packets in my mind excel at helping surface objections earlier on in the process, helping bad fit prospects discover that, oh, I’m not actually looking at what I actually need, I need to go somewhere else. And also help you avoid repeating yourself, answering the same questions again and again and again on calls. I think your point about taking questions that are frequently asked and mixing them back into the welcome packet. is ingenious. It needs to be an incremental, iterative product that grows over time, answering more and more questions as they’re surfaced.
Yeah. So if somebody asks a question, it goes in the welcome packet. If something if a sales process goes south, which was way more frequent, it usually has to get addressed in some capacity in the welcome packet. And those aren’t bad things. It’s just a thing you notice and you change the welcome packet and update it to. Address your business as it’s evolved and you move on.
The most frequent thing I’ve encountered is prospects. Say, and I’m curious how you’ve approached this in the past. Prospects saying they’ve read the welcome packet, but then coming back and asking questions that are completely answered within the welcome packet, like in my welcome packet for my podcast outreach service. It clearly states, hey, you’re going to pay three months up front, and then it’s quarterly renewals, and this is why. And I sent it over to a prospect, and they wrote back, Great, can we do month-to-month pricing instead? And how do you address those types of scenarios?
Questions around pricing. Usually I just say I tailor my pricing to individual clients. It can be a huge red flag if they demand half pricing. It can also surface things that I consider to be a non-starter, like they’ve white-labeled it But for other businesses, I have to have people, the economic buyer has to contact me and pay me directly for any draft revised engagement or any draft engagement. Really. So, you know, I’ll talk about it in the welcome packet. I’ll be like, there’s a pricing heading, and I say, I match it to your needs. We’re going to have a phone call to discuss those needs, so that will be forthcoming at the end of the call. I’ve learned to provide pricing at the end of the call and not in a separate email because I want to see their face as I tell them the price. This makes it more difficult. There’s a trade-off with that, which is that you don’t get to like step back and breathe and provide pricing. But I usually have a sense of what the pricing is, and depending on how many brown MMs you give me, the pricing goes up or down. So yeah, that’s definitely like what it ends up being.
Sure. And I guess it’s just a brown MM or a strong brown MM sign that you should not be working with the client. If you send over the welcome packet and they come back with questions that are just clearly answered, it’s sort of like, go back and read it, please.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if a client asks me questions that were obviously in the welcome packet, that doubles the price of the engagement. I’m not kidding. I don’t think you are. Not per question, just the first question. That’s it. Per question pricing. I mean, it makes the most sense. Per question pricing would be hilarious. There was one guy who had like a Twitch on the phone call and was clearly like, Give me the money. Give me all the money. Fuck you. And he was doing this while clearly in his mother’s living room on the Skype call. And asked me a bunch of questions, like almost in order that were addressed in the welcome packet. And that’s a point where I was just like, it’s $50,000 per month. And they’re like, oh. Oh, wow. Okay. Or I could just be like, this isn’t going to be a good fit. Fuck off. You know, like, like, this, that’s basically what I do by. you know, by doing that. But yeah, fair.
No, and so tell me again when you send a prospect and welcome packet in sort of that prospect life cycle.
So they apply if they qualify through the whole process actually getting so you can’t even get an application into my inbox if you don’t get enough statistically significant traffic or revenue or you like You know, go step around pricing. So it has to get in my inbox. About a third of the ones that get into my inbox actually get A link back that’s not revise express payment link because a lot of people are just like, not a good fit for draft revise, or it’s not the right time for my business, or I’ve had a bad day that day. And so they get the Revised Express link. But if they get all the way through there, they get the welcome packet. And then at the end of the welcome packet is next steps, including the Calendly link to schedule a Skype call. So I automatically I learned this from you on a previous MMO episode and I’ve been doing it. If you haven’t read the welcome packet You don’t know to click the link at the end of the welcome packet to schedule a call with me, and then you cease to exist.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. That one, I think that’s great. One question I get often from freelancers and consultants is, when should they create a welcome packet? And I interpret that question in terms of like At what stage of sort of like advancedness of my business? At what experience level does it make sense? Since for somebody just starting out as a consultant, you probably don’t know enough To create a welcome packet that actually describes your services or your market or your objections or even know what questions people ask, when do you recommend somebody should start thinking about a welcome packet for their service or services?
I mean, after the first client comes in the door, basically, right? Like, I think if you don’t have any service together at all and you’re doing your first service. After client number one, you start to have answered questions about the service. Create your welcome packet then. Follow the format I just mentioned. But before that, you don’t know what you don’t know. So I wouldn’t sweat it. Like, really, what you should be doing at that point is like listening and trying to close the sale and understand what objections look like. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What do you do with it? Like when did you start creating welcome packets?
I started creating welcome packets about three years ago. I initially went way, way, way too broad and brought in the number of welcome packets. So I had like Five different services at the time, five separate welcome packets. Each welcome packet had like 50% unique content. Updating them was a nightmare, and I just fell off the train hard. And then welcome packets ceased to exist for a good six to nine months. And Then I found myself just experiencing that same problem. Clients would be asking, or prospects would be asking the same questions. There’d be bad fits coming in. People wouldn’t know what the next steps were. People wouldn’t be prepared for a call. And so I realized, okay, welcome packets are essential, but for me, I only want to have welcome packets for that first engagement so they understand what it’s like to work with me, the roadmapping session. and for my higher priced retainer engagements. Since those are the engagements where we’re going to be working together for a much longer time, where it’s going to be a higher dollar value. And there might be more emotion involved. Hey, you know what? We’ve been working on this for six months and we’re seeing results, but it’s not as fast as we expected. Well, the welcome packet is going to set that stage earlier on, saying, hey, how long does this Take to see results. Well, you know, sometimes it takes six to twelve months to see results with a campaign like this because of reason one, two, three, and four. So if there’s an objection, we’re able to point to the welcome packet, say, hey, we both read this, we reviewed this, we agreed on this, this is what the expectation was set at. Let’s talk through what we’re feeling right now. But I found that having that welcome packet helps immensely just in terms of setting those client expectations up front.
Yeah, yeah. It’s I mean, it’s really, really important to be setting those expectations. And if you don’t do that, like you’re going to end up with an engagement that doesn’t go well. An engagement that doesn’t go well is one where everyone isn’t in alignment early. Usually, when people are like, I forgot to tell this client this and now they’re angry at me, what do I do? I’m like, well, you have a really shitty situation to salvage, and you will probably lose the engagement. Because you didn’t have a good intake process. It’s so important to have a good intake process, not only to qualify leads, which is something that I talk about frequently, but also to like. Understand what the client thinks and get alignment about it. I think that’s tremendously important.
Completely agreed. No, in the welcome packet for my podcast outreach service, I take multiple pages to spell out: like, these are the outcomes we’re looking for, and these are the outcomes you might be expecting. And this is the difference between the two sets of outcomes and how we’re going to reconcile those two. And it’s been incredibly valuable just to Set those client expectations. So it’s not, hey, we’re going to get on podcast A and immediately make a million dollars. It’s, hey, we’re going to get on podcasts and consistently do this to produce the results we’re looking for, which could look like. More email subscribers, more revenue, more sales, more authority, or something else. But setting expectations like that, a welcome packet just it really delegates it to a PDF and lets the PDF handle it for you.
Yeah. Yeah. And you want to automate the process, right? Like you get another knock-on effect about this by like having something that you can stamp out that’s fair to everyone. So if people try and short circuit the process by say not applying, Great. You never get to go in my inbox. You get to annoy my assistant a lot, which is super cool. If you just try and get on a phone call with me, like people will try and find my phone number and accidentally call my Google voice. Yo, I’m not going to pick that up. Like, you have to apply. When you apply, there are specific criteria. When you fulfill the criteria, then You get the welcome packet. When you read the welcome packet, then you get to go on a Skype call. Once we get off the Skype call, you get terms and conditions. This exists so that everyone can stay adult and mature, and I do not know how and on what planet people could possibly find it unreasonable. Like, there’s a giant fucking button at the bottom of DraftRevise’s marketing page that says to apply. You are not special. And you’ll be special eventually once you’ve paid me. For now, you’re not special.
I think there’s a reason there’s a lot of sort of Client, not distrust, but like uncertainty around a strong application process or a welcome packet like this is it’s very different from how 90% of consultants present themselves. It’s Book me on the website. Hey, I’m available. Here’s my hourly rate. There’s a distinction that’s made between somebody that says, hey, if you want to work with me, you have to go through this application process. This is an overview of how I work. Review this before we move forward. And somebody who says, yo, I’m available for $75 an hour, hire me here. You are presenting yourself in a much different manner, and you’re going to get pushback from clients that have never worked with somebody who’s as confident And put together as a consultant, as somebody who has a strong application process and a welcome packet, and a standard operating procedure for how new leads and new prospects come in.
It keeps you adult. That’s what it is. It ensures a maturity to the whole process and a certain amount of professionalism. And, like, why? Why wouldn’t you want that? I don’t know what objections I mean, you’re on the line. What objections do you think people would have against creating a welcome packet? Like, do you think anyone is on Team Fuck Welcome Packets that’s listening to this?
I think if they are, it’s because they don’t understand what to put into it, and they don’t understand what tools they necessarily should use. Or they don’t see the value, or they’ve created welcome packets in the past and had clients just completely ignore them. Like, those are the main objections I could see around A consultant or a freelancer saying, like, oh, welcome packet’s not really for me. But I think a lot of that falls on the client side. You might land on four bad clients in a row who just ignore the welcome packet or shit all over it. That sucks. That doesn’t mean welcome packets or your welcome packet is terrible. It might just mean you’ve had a string of terrible clients. Likewise, you might be saying, dear listener, hey, I’m not sure what steps to take to create a welcome packet. Like Nick outlined at the start of the call, you explain what the service is, you explain pricing is going to happen on the call or somewhere else, you explain frequently asked questions, you explain objections, and you have a link to move forward in the process. You could bank that out in pages, Word. Markdown, Google Docs, pick your text editing tool of choice and export it as a PDF, and you don’t have a welcome packet.
Notes
- Why use a welcome packet?
- What's included in a welcome packet?
- When do you send a prospect a welcome packet?
- How do you update your welcome packet?
- When shouldn't you use a welcome packet?
- How do you get started?
- What tools do you use to create a welcome packet?