How to nail your Sales to Customer Success hand-off.

I’m pretty sure that Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran wasn’t thinking of the handoff between Sales to Customer Success when he came up with the above quote, but I think it aptly describes its delicate nature.

Nailing this handoff sets a strong foundation for your Customer (and Customer Success team) to see (and show) quick value from the product.

But not ensuring a smooth handoff can lead to multiple problems :

1. The Customer can feel misunderstood and unappreciated when the Customer Success Manager (CSM) enters the account without proper context. The momentum built during the sales process and the excitement the customer has for using your product can dwindle rapidly.
2. Going in unprepared and asking redundant questions to the customer can severely diminish the CSM’s credibility. The CSM starts off on a completely wrong foot, and most of his time is spent firefighting and re-building trust with the customer in addition to performing the onboarding tasks.
3. Lack of accountability for the hand-off tasks can lead to confusion within the Sales and CSM teams and leads to finger pointing when things go wrong.

If you browse through Customer Success forums, the “hand-off” question pops up pretty frequently. Having tried many different handoff processes, we managed to inch closer towards an ideal one, and I wanted to share some of my learnings.

The below process is ideal for Enterprise SaaS but can be tweaked depending on your organization’s structure and the nature of your product.

Below is a guide which will help you nail your Sales to Customer Success Handoffs.

1) Pre-Sale.

Goal: To prime your prospect for the relationship handoff.

A successful Sales to CS handoff actually begins even before your customer is officially onboard.

• During the sales process, the Account Executive (AE) should prime the prospect for a relationship handoff by letting them know that a CSM will be assigned to the account to help them achieve their desired outcomes.
• It also helps to mention why a particular CSM is being assigned and highlight how he has helped other companies solve challenges similar to what the prospect is facing.

2) Contract Signed.

Goal: To give your customer visibility into the next steps and help them prepare for it.

The customer should never be left wondering “What next ?” after the contract is signed.

• AE should clearly detail out the next steps like Onboarding date, data needed from customer to set up the product etc.. in an easy to understand timeline format.
• The owners of each action items need to be clearly detailed out.

3) Internal Handoff between AE and CSM.

Goal: To share all the information about the customer with the CSM and set him up for success.

This part can be divided into 2 steps :

a) Internal handoff questionnaire.

A questionnaire should be sent to the AE by the CSM. Doing this reduces the dependency on the availability of AE and CSM and ensures a quicker hand-off.

Apart from details of the contract like the number of licenses, Account Value etc. The questionnaire should include the following questions :

1. Why did the Customer buy the product / what problem are they trying to solve?
2. What does success mean for the customer?
3. Who is the Buyer of the product?
4. Who are the Influencers, Champions, and Detractors within the account?
5. What are potential roadblocks one may face in making the customer successful?

b) An internal meeting between AE and CSM.

The CSM and AE can meet internally once the handoff questionnaire has been filled.

Armed with context about the customer, the CSM can ask further questions and understand more about the Account and Buyer from the AE in this meeting.

4) CSM introduced to the customer.

Goal: To help the CSM set the right expectations with the customer, and hand over the relationship.

The AE should set up time with the customer to introduce the CSM and help set the right expectations with the customer and kickstart the On-boarding.

The expectation setting meeting is probably one of the most important meetings you will have with your Customer and it always helps if the AE and CSM are totally aligned and prepared for pushbacks before the meeting (roleplaying different scenarios is very helpful here)

If the AE isn’t going to be involved in the account going forward it is recommended that AE introduce the CSM to all the key people he interacted with during the sales process. This relationship transfer helps the CSM during renewal, especially in large enterprises.

Few tips for implementing and driving this process :

1) Build Playbooks: A playbook in its most simplistic sense is a set of tasks that need to be done when an event occurs in your Customer’s Lifecycle.

So your Hand-Off Playbook should contain a list of tasks to be completed (with due dates) before an Account is transitioned to Customer Success.

2) Clearly define the owner of each task: Assign one owner per task. In my experience having more than one owner for a task is equivalent to having no owner.

3) Track the key metrics: What gets measured gets done. The important metrics you should track here are :

• Time to Kickoff: Time between contract start date and onboarding kick-off.
• Handoff Completion %: Number of tasks successfully completed in the Handoff playbook.

As you start tracking these metrics you will be surprised to see the correlation between good handoffs and your customer’s ability to see success (and your CSM’s ability to deliver success), which directly impacts churn and upsells.

4) Use a CRM Software or other project management tools: CRM software like Gainsight, Salesforce etc can help you automate your processes, increase the visibility of the status of handoffs via reporting and document important information.

Eg: We used Gainsight to :

1) Automatically trigger handoff questionnaire and hand off playbooks when a new opportunity is won.

2) Automate some of the email tasks using pre-built templates.

3) Drive accountability by tracking the status of the handoffs and overdue tasks on report dashboards in internal meetings.

You can also start off with simple (and free) project management tools like Asana, Trello (or even excel) to drive this.

Your process will have to evolve constantly as you start segmenting your customers and gain new insights, so always revisit it once a Quarter and improve it.