Nailing the Handoff

Highlights:

· Hot handoffs lead to more engagement than warm or cold handoffs

· Early customer engagement results in higher adoption, retention, and expansion

· Enable sales reps to book calls directly with the customer success team to increase successful handoffs

· Create urgency for the handoff by providing value to the customer during the handoff event

· Measure handoff engagement and success rates

Onboarding can make or break a customer. Nailing the handoff from the sales rep to the customer success team is crucial to ensure post-sale adoption and growth. A “hot” handoff from a sales rep produces better engagment between customers and customer success managers (CSM) than any other method.

What is a hot handoff?

A hot handoff is a call scheduled by the sales rep to officially introduce the customer to their CSM.

What other handoff’s are there?

Warm: The sales rep provides an intro via email, and the CSM follow’s up with the customer.

Cold: No intro is made via the sales rep. After the deal closes the CSM reaches out via phone/email to contact the customer.

How do they compare?

I’ve worked in customer success at a few different SaaS companies, and these are the rough percentages I’ve seen with successful engagement between a CSM and the customer given the handoff type:

· Cold: 8%

· Warm: 47%

· Hot: 92%

Why do handoff’s matter?

The sooner you can make effective engagement with the customer the more likely a customer will adopt, retain, and expand.

Tips to make handoffs work

Give sales reps access to the CSM’s calendar: The best time to schedule an intro call with the CSM is when the sales rep is closing the deal. They already have the customer on the phone and you don’t want to create any friction by having the sales rep wait to hear back from the CSM on a good time to have a call. Provide sales reps with blocks of times to schedule calls and access to the CSM’s calendars so that the sales rep can book the call right on the CSM’s calendar.

Create urgency and value for the call: The customer needs to see what is in it for them. The intro call should also be an onboarding/set up call that will help the customer to get rolling. This creates urgency for the customer to get the most value out of their recent purchase/upgrade.

Measure handoffs, engagement, and success rates: Actions need results. Carefully track the number of customers who need to be handed off, the number of customers who are engaged, and what kind of success your customers experience in terms of adoption and upgrades.

What do you think?

What have you found works with handoffs from sales to CSMs? I’d appreciate hearing your comments and questions.

Thanks for reading.