You’ve just signed a new client. Things are going well until someone asks for a file you thought someone else had. A kickoff gets delayed. A key question goes unanswered for a week.
And suddenly, that smooth onboarding you promised seems like a false promise. 🫤
A reliable client onboarding template can prevent this butterfly effect. It helps you stay organized, sets expectations early, and keeps both sides on the same page from day one.
In this blog, we’ll explore free client onboarding templates to help bring consistency, clarity, and much-needed calm to your onboarding process. 🧰
Free Client Onboarding Templates to Streamline New Client Experiences
What Are Client Onboarding Templates?
Client onboarding templates are structured frameworks that help businesses introduce new clients to their processes, workflows, and deliverables. They help you set clear expectations from day one, avoid miscommunication and missed steps, and save time with repeatable processes.
With checklists, timelines, welcome packets, and instructional guides, these templates ensure a smooth client onboarding process.
What Makes a Good Client Onboarding Template?
The best client onboarding templates set the tone for the entire client relationship. They simplify your process, reduce back-and-forth, and help clients feel informed, reassured, and set up for success.
👀 Here’s what a reliable client onboarding template does:
- Clear structure: Outlines each step of the onboarding flow, from welcome emails to kickoff calls and deliverables, to ensure everyone knows what’s happening and when
- Flexibility: Adapts to suit different types of clients, industries, or services without rebuilding your entire process every time
- Integrated communication tools: Includes welcome packets, intake forms, and email templates to help set expectations and answer FAQs upfront
- Built-in automation: Syncs with your project management tools to assign tasks, send reminders, and trigger updates automatically
- Self-serve resources: Links to helpful guides, walkthrough videos, and documentation so clients can find answers fast without waiting on your team
- Feedback collection: Gathers client input mid-or post-onboarding to catch red flags early and improve processes
🧠 Fun Fact: The idea of tracking customers is ancient. Over 20,000 years ago, traders used basic record-keeping (and memory) to manage buyer relationships. Early ledgers even included notes on debts and goods, an early version of customer segmentation.
13 Client Onboarding Templates
No two clients are the same. That’s why having the right onboarding template can make all the difference. If you’re working solo or with a team, you can find one to match your style.
And if you want to go a step further, CRM Project Management Software brings it all together. From tracking deals and tasks to managing relationships and follow-ups, everything is organized, customizable, and built to scale with your business.
These plug-and-play templates help you deliver a smooth, consistent onboarding experience, no matter your industry or team size.
Browse this list, pick what fits, and make onboarding one less thing to stress about! 🎯
1. Customer Onboarding Template
The Customer Onboarding Template acts as your behind-the-scenes coordinator to make a great first impression with every new client.
Custom Fields like Customer Type, Service Package, and Onboarding Call Date allow you to personalize each client’s onboarding journey while maintaining efficiency. For example, you can tag a ‘Startup’ for a lean, self-service onboarding, or an ‘Enterprise’ for a tailored, high-touch experience.
The Service Package field auto-triggers relevant onboarding playbooks, such as additional support for Pro clients or a quick-start checklist for Basic users. Onboarding Call Date helps your team stay organized by tracking schedules and ensuring no calls are missed.
These fields centralize client context, keeping your customer service, sales, and product teams aligned.
📌 Ideal For: Service-based teams managing multiple client segments who need a centralized, automated system to personalize all the onboarding tasks, track progress, and scale efficiently
🔍 Did You Know? The revenue for the customer relationship management software market is expected to grow at an annual rate of 10.17%, reaching a market volume of $145.61 billion in the near future.
2. Customer Onboarding Board Template
Imagine a new client signs up for your mid-tier subscription, requesting white-labeled documents, a dedicated point of contact, and monthly invoicing. With ’s Customer Onboarding Board Template, you can capture this information up front using fields like Customer Requests, POC, Subscription Value, and Payment Method, so your team can get started immediately.
For example, tagging a Subscription Value of $2,500 and logging “custom branding” as a Customer Request instantly tailors the onboarding process. If extra review cycles or design resources are needed, your team knows what to prioritize. The POC field ensures clear communication, and the Payment Method allows your finance team to prepare accurate invoices.
Need contract approvals? The Signature field tracks whether agreements are signed. Want feedback? Record customer sentiment with the Customer Feedback field. With the Onboarding Stage field, you always know the customer’s progress, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
📌 Ideal For: Visual thinkers who prefer managing client progress through a Kanban-style board with drag-and-drop ease.
💡 Pro Tip: Gamify onboarding tasks for your customers! Add elements like badges or rewards for completing tasks to keep clients engaged.
3. New User Onboarding Template
Introducing new users to your product or platform is a key moment that shapes their experience, confidence, and long-term engagement. The New User Onboarding Template ensures this journey is seamless and consistent, providing a clear, structured path to help users feel comfortable, discover value quickly, and stay engaged.
With this template, you can automatically walk them through a series of tailored tasks: exploring the Workspace layout, reviewing their task assignments, understanding how to comment or tag teammates, and learning how to track deliverables.
Each step is pre-built, intuitive, and guides them to value without a support ticket. Structure the journey into clear stages like “Welcome Tour,” “First Task,” and “Team Collaboration 101.”
Add Docs with embedded tutorials, assign checklist-style tasks, and set automations to follow up if someone stalls.
📌 Ideal For: SaaS companies or platforms welcoming new users and helping them quickly learn key features and workflows.
4. Onboarding Checklist Template
The Onboarding Checklist Template gives you a repeatable, organized system to ensure every new employee hits the ground running from day one
Let’s say you’re onboarding a new employee in Customer Support. With this template, you can instantly customize the experience using fields like Job Title, Department, and Start Date. Once you enter their Work Email, the template auto-triggers tasks like sending a welcome email, provisioning support tools, and scheduling a 1:1 with their manager.
Tasks like product training, system access, and policy acknowledgments are already pre-built, assigned, and trackable, so nothing gets missed.
📌 Ideal For: People Ops, HR, and team leads at fast-growing companies who need to onboard new hires quickly within their client onboarding software.
🤝 Friendly Reminder: Once your clients sign up, kick off with a friendly welcome email. Include the basics, like contact info, contract copies, and the next steps. You can also include helpful resources like tutorials, FAQs, or walkthroughs.
5. HubSpot Onboarding Template
HubSpot Onboarding Template delivers a smooth, personalized onboarding experience for each client. From CRM setup to marketing automation, you can map key topics, milestones, and tasks into a clear, trackable plan for faster adoption.
With this, you can:
- Customize onboarding by client type: A startup might just need CRM setup and a landing page guide. An enterprise rollout? That could include data migration, integration with existing tools, and team-wide onboarding sessions
- Track every step across functions: Use custom views to monitor task progress across sales, marketing, IT, and customer success teams
- Centralize everything in one place: Attach SOPs, walkthrough docs, and training videos directly to tasks. No more chasing links or files across tools
- Create role-based onboarding paths: Train a sales rep on pipeline stages while onboarding a marketing manager on campaign workflows and lead scoring—each with their own tasks, owners, and deadlines
📌 Ideal For: Agencies or teams transitioning clients onto HubSpot tools and services, with steps tailored to that ecosystem.
6. Intake Form Template
The Intake Form Template provides a clear format for gathering exactly what you need from clients, teammates, or stakeholders without unnecessary discussions. You can tailor it to suit your workflow for collecting client briefs, service requests, internal feedback, and new project details.
With built-in fields like Budget, Preferred Contact Method, Company Name, and Additional Notes, you can gather all the context you need. Everything submitted gets turned into Tasks or items in the workspace so that follow-ups can happen automatically.
This intake form template also lets you route responses, assign team members, and even automate parts of the process to speed things up.
📌 Ideal For: Service-based businesses collecting initial client information before kickoff calls or proposals.
📮 Insight: About 43% of workers send 0-10 messages daily. While this suggests more focused or deliberate conversations, it could also indicate a lack of seamless collaboration, with important discussions happening elsewhere (like email).
To prevent unnecessary platform hopping and context switching, you need an everything app for work, like , that combines projects, knowledge, and chat in one place—all powered by AI that helps you work more efficiently.
7. CRM Template
Managing customer relationships keeps deals moving and clients happy. The CRM Template helps you manage multiple leads, conversations, follow-ups, and tasks tied to every sales and customer journey stage.
Designed to bring structure to relationships and client management, the template lets you map your pipeline, monitor each lead’s progress, and prioritize actions based on sales stages. It also helps you maintain a clean, searchable customer database. You can store key information like industry, job title, and contact details, and quickly sort or filter based on your needs.
For each lead, you can set up tasks like Initial Outreach, Follow-up Email, and Demo Scheduling, ensuring clear accountability for every step. As your sales team progresses through the pipeline, they can use ’s Gantt Chart View to visualize task timelines and automate reminders for follow-ups or notifications when milestones are reached.
Ideal For: Sales and account management teams looking to streamline lead management, client communication, and task prioritization using CRM in .
🔍 Did You Know? Before digital tools, businesses used Rolodexes in the 1950s to manually manage customer contacts, swiveling through cards instead of scrolling through dashboards.
8. Customer Contact Form Template
The Customer Contact Form Template gives you a convenient way to track customer feedback, collect data for research, surveys, and customer service, and organize contact information for marketing campaigns or follow-ups.
The Customer Contact Form View captures and organizes all submitted forms making it easy to access contact details, feedback, and issues. The Contact Summary View gives you a snapshot of ongoing requests, helping you identify trends or urgent concerns.
You can even automate follow-ups and analyze request data to boost support efficiency and ensure timely responses.
📌 Ideal For: Customer support teams, service managers, and businesses that want to improve customer communication and ensure every request is handled efficiently.
9. Client Success Collaboration Template
Client success relies on building strong, ongoing relationships to help clients reach their goals. The Client Success Collaboration Template supports this partnership by giving client success teams a much-needed structure to communicate, plan, and collaborate with clients in a shared workspace so everyone stays focused on outcomes.
With this template, you can create a unified hub for client engagement. From kickoff to milestone tracking, it keeps key tasks, notes, and updates in one place. Use it to build client onboarding checklists, log feedback, track KPIs, or plan regular check-ins. You can also assign responsibilities, set timelines, and track progress in real time.
📌 Ideal For: Customer success teams and managers working across departments to ensure onboarding, engagement, and customer retention rates are aligned and proactive.
10. Customer Onboarding Template by HubSpot
HubSpot’s Customer Onboarding Template is like a starter kit for businesses that want to make a great first impression with new customers. It’s designed to serve both sides of the onboarding journey. Customers get a clear roadmap and all the info they need upfront, while your internal team gets tools to stay organized behind the scenes.
Use the New Customer Internal Onboarding Checklist to align your team on key steps before client kickoff and send a Customizable Welcome Packet to give clients the clarity they need on who to contact, how support works, and what’s next.
Collect all critical details up front with the Customer Intake Form, so your team can personalize the onboarding journey.
📌 Ideal For: Marketing and sales teams using HubSpot who want a plug-and-play process for onboarding new customers.
🔍 Did You Know? CRM took off in the ’90s, with Siebel Systems launching in 1993. It brought sales, marketing, and support together into one platform. This was also the era of Sales Force Automation, a more innovative way to manage the sales process.
11. Customer Onboarding Template by Pipefy
Pipefy’s Customer Onboarding Template includes an editable onboarding funnel and customizable forms to capture data upfront, like client goals, technical preferences, and decision-makers.
As clients move through onboarding stages—welcome, setup, training, go-live—the template automatically sends reminders, assigns tasks, and updates statuses. The Shared Inbox feature keeps communication organized by saving all messages on the platform and assigning them to team members, helping your team respond faster and more efficiently.
📌 Ideal For: Operations and process-driven teams who want a structured, trackable workflow that can scale across larger teams or departments.
🤝 Friendly Reminder: Start communicating early and consistently, always focusing on value-driven messages. Your language must be simple and clear, with no jargon when explaining processes or addressing questions.
12. Client Onboarding Form Template by Template.Net
Template.Net’s Client Onboarding Form Template starts by capturing Client Information (company name, address, and primary contact), ensuring your team has accurate records to avoid any confusion later on.
The template includes a space for clients to share what kind of services they’re looking for, like consulting, project work, or design/ development. This allows clients to describe their goals in their own words.
The Legal Agreements section confirms that the client is informed about your terms and privacy policies, providing legal clarity for both parties.
📌 Ideal For: Small businesses or solo professionals who want a clean, straightforward form to collect client details and service needs.
💡 Pro Tip: Use interactive walkthroughs, checklists, or progress bars to guide clients through each essential step. Pair these tools with detailed guidance and progress indicators to keep clients engaged and on track.
13. Sales Client Onboarding Presentation Template by Template.Net
Template.Net’s Sales Client Onboarding Presentation Template is built to make your post-sale handoff as smooth as possible. Add payment schedules, accepted methods, and even late fee policies to avoid awkward surprises down the line.
Timelines, deliverables, and KPIs are all laid out upfront, so there’s no second-guessing about what success looks like or when key milestones should be hit. It also covers how and how often you’ll be in touch, which helps build a smoother working rhythm from day one.
📌 Ideal For: Sales reps or account managers who present onboarding info to new clients visually, covering key details like timelines, KPIs, and deliverables for a good customer onboarding process.
🔍 Did You Know? One of the first modern contact management tools was ACT (Automated Contact Tracking), launched in 1986. Built by Pat Sullivan and Mike Muhney, it helped salespeople track conversations and leads before ‘CRM’ was even a buzzword.
You’ve got new clients rolling in, which is great, until you struggle to find that intake form, wonder if you sent follow-up emails, or dig through email threads.
, the everything app for work, offers ready-to-go onboarding templates that are clean, customizable, and built for real teams.
If you’re a solo consultant or part of a growing agency, these templates give you structure without rigidity.
Operate like a pro and sign up to for free today! ✅
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