Pre to post-sales handoff, a key moment in the customer journey

Why is this a key moment?

In all sales cycles, there is always a pre and post-sales phase regardless of how big or small the engagement is. In pre-sales, sales and tech partners will perform the initial tech scoping, requirement identification, and solution ideation that the post-sales delivery teams will build upon. This is why the transition of deals and projects from pre to post-sales is such a critical part of the customer journey to set the delivery for success. In my experience kicking off and onboarding dozens of customer projects, establishing a common set of expectations and duties that each team should follow during this critical stage has yielded amazing results.

Recommendations to improve the pre to post-sales handoff

Pre-sales call notes

Define note templates for tech scoping and technical requirement identification calls for Solution/Sales Architects/Engineers with required and optional sections that ensure that individuals record critical information to be passed to the post-sales teams.
This will reduce the time needed to digest and extract the most crucial bits of information gathered during pre-sales calls. The post-sales teams will know what to expect and where to find crucial info.

Handoff preparation

Create a pre to post-sales handoff document template and make the Solution/Sales Architect/Engineer responsible for preparing this doc at least 14 days before the project is set to kickoff. This doc should cover information such as:

1. Customer stakeholder contacts involved so far in the customer journey and sales cycle.
   Record their titles, and their role (budget owner, technical decision maker, product/project owner, legal/procurement, IC, etc) and place them in an org chart.
2. Customer business objectives for the project and success metrics.
   What is the customer trying to solve and how are we going to prove that we are solving it efficiently and delivering business impact? This is a good time to start drafting a value realization proposal.
3. Define a tentative kickoff date and propose what will be the main milestones for onboarding.
4. List the status of the contracts (NDA, MSA, SOW). What is done and what is pending?
5. Call out any foreseeable risks, impacts, and possible mitigation strategies.

Handoff call: Confirmation, alignment, and preparing kickoff

Have a synchronous call to review the pre-to-post sales handoff doc with the pre and post-sales teams. Define an owner for this call to schedule the call, invite the relevant internal partners, and run the call; this should be a delivery, engineering, solutions, consulting, customer success, or project manager.

The main goal of the call is to:

1. Confirm the information recorded in the pre-to-post sales handoff doc to make sure it's updated with any recent progress in the sales cycle.
2. Align the pre and post-sales teams around the project priorities, goals, and objectives.
3. Arm the post-sales teams with all the available info gathered during pre-sales to have the best project kickoff and customer onboarding possible.
4. Bonus: Give the post-sales team a chance to challenge some of the assumptions defined during pre-sales. This is a great forum to polish the delivery proposal to better meet the customer's business objectives.

Kickoff and onboarding preparation

As the post-sales owner compiles all the necessary resources for doing a project kickoff call with the customer and defining the onboarding milestones, they can start sharing drafts and progress of the materials that will be used for the kickoff call with the pre-sales teams so they can provide feedback. This will make sure there is better alignment and the post-sales team is best prepared to kick off the project.

Measure improvements and success

It's worth adding some metrics to measure how much the activities above are improving the customer journey and streamlining the sales cycle. Make sure you measure and establish a baseline before introducing any of the metrics and measure progressive improvements regularly.

1. Time to first contribution: Measure how fast the delivery teams can ship/commit their first contribution to the project to production or test environments.
2. Onboarding completion: See if the overall onboarding time decreases. Make sure to set clear and commonly agreed exit criteria with the customer.
3. Onboarding CSAT: Send satisfaction surveys to the customer no more than 14 days after onboarding has been completed.
4. Customer business objective fulfillment and value realization: See if the success metrics and value realization are realized faster.
5. Decrease in support tickets submitted: Better understanding and alignment of the customer's business objectives might decrease the number of support tickets and bug reports filed by the customer that are related to deviation from design, product, and feature specs.