Sales closes the deal. The win gets celebrated. Then the customer is passed to Customer Success, where someone asks them to explain their goals all over again.
That moment is often treated as a routine transfer between two teams. In practice, it can shape the customer’s confidence before onboarding has even started. If the context disappears, the promises are unclear, or nobody owns the next step, the customer notices.
Eleni Vorvis and I first explored this topic together on my podcast, Customer Success Therapy. The conversation surfaced so many useful questions that I invited her to continue it in our webinar, How to Close the Gap Between Winning a Deal and Keeping It. Eleni has worked in both Sales and Customer Success, so she understands the pressure on each side of the handoff and why blaming either team misses the point.
Our discussion above covered the practical pieces of a strong handoff, including documentation, kickoff meetings, success metrics, and role clarity. It also covered the harder part: knowing when the process is broken and when the company’s incentives, staffing, or culture are creating the problem.
View Eleni's slides here.
TL;DR
- A strong handoff continues the customer conversation instead of forcing the customer to restart it.
- CSMs should be introduced during implementation when their role is explained clearly.
- Workflow problems need better processes, while organizational problems need leadership decisions.
- Sales should document measurable success criteria because those criteria help justify the purchase and the renewal.
- Shared accountability during the first 90 days gives Sales and CS a reason to act like one customer team.
1. A strong handoff continues the conversation instead of restarting it
Sales can spend months learning why a customer is buying, what problems they need to solve, who is involved, and what concerns could slow the deal. That context should not disappear as soon as the contract is signed.
Eleni described what happens when it does. The CSM enters the kickoff without enough information and starts asking questions the customer has already answered. There is nothing wrong with confirming a goal or asking whether something has changed. The problem is making the customer feel as if the previous conversations never reached the people now responsible for helping them.
That creates an immediate trust problem. The customer may wonder whether the company is disorganized, whether anyone listened during the sales process, or whether the promises that helped close the deal were ever shared internally.
A good handoff should give CS enough context to enter the first meeting prepared. At minimum, the team should understand why the customer bought, what they expect to achieve, who matters internally, what was promised, and which risks are already visible.
CSMs can improve the customer’s first post-sale experience by doing three things:
- Prepare for kickoff by reviewing the customer’s goals, stakeholders, purchase rationale, commitments, and known risks before the meeting.
- Confirm context by explaining what you already understand and asking the customer what has changed since the deal was signed.
- Push back on missing information by asking Sales for clarification before the kickoff, especially when success criteria or custom commitments are vague.
2. Introduce the CSM during implementation and make every role clear
One of the questions I asked Eleni during the webinar was whether introducing the CSM during implementation creates too much confusion for an enterprise customer.
Her answer was clear: the CSM should be involved.
Customers are not confused simply because several people are supporting them. They become confused when nobody explains who owns what. An implementation lead, CSM, salesperson, support contact, and technical specialist can all participate when their responsibilities are visible.
The implementation lead usually owns the project plan, meetings, deliverables, and technical progress. The CSM owns the customer’s outcomes, stakeholder relationships, adoption, value realization, and the long-term partnership. Those responsibilities begin to overlap during onboarding, so waiting until implementation ends can leave the CSM too far behind.
The CSM does not need to attend every project call. Their involvement should match the decisions and conversations that affect the customer’s success.
Teams can create clarity by setting these expectations early:
- Explain each role by showing what the salesperson, implementation lead, CSM, support team, and customer stakeholders own during onboarding.
- Include the CSM by giving them responsibility for success criteria, adoption planning, stakeholder alignment, and executive communication.
- Reduce contact confusion by naming the primary owner for the current phase and giving the customer a simple guide for where to take different questions.
3. Diagnose whether the problem is the workflow or the organization
The handoff checklist is often the first solution because it is visible and relatively easy to change. Sometimes that is exactly what the team needs.
Eleni separates handoff failures into two categories. Workflow problems include missing documentation, unclear ownership, poor visibility into deal terms, and uncertainty about who sends the welcome message or schedules the kickoff. Teams can address those problems with templates, automation, required fields, meetings, and clearer responsibilities.
Organizational problems require more than a new process. Sales may be rewarded entirely for closing while CS is responsible for retention. CS may be understaffed compared with the number of customers entering onboarding. Leaders may disagree about who owns expansion or what Customer Success is supposed to accomplish. Departments may also have priorities that pull them in different directions.
No checklist can resolve those conditions. It can make the disagreement easier to document, but leadership still has to make the decision.
Before redesigning the handoff, leaders should ask:
- Treat the issue as a workflow problem when people agree on what should happen but lack the information, owner, tool, or sequence required to do it.
- Treat the issue as an organizational problem when incentives, staffing, authority, or departmental goals discourage the behavior the company says it wants.
- Choose the fix by connecting the failure to its effect on onboarding, customer trust, team capacity, retention, or expansion instead of adding process by default.
4. Sales should document measurable success criteria during discovery
During the webinar, someone asked why Sales should be responsible for documenting success metrics. Eleni argued that the best salespeople already understand why this belongs in discovery.
The buyer needs to justify the purchase. They may need approval from a CFO, an executive team, procurement, or another decision-maker. That conversation requires more than a list of features. It requires a credible explanation of what will improve because the company is making the investment.
“Improve efficiency” sounds reasonable but leaves too much unanswered. Eleni used “reduce manual reporting time by 40 percent” as an example of a stronger outcome. It identifies a change the customer can measure and gives both teams something specific to work toward.
The same success criteria will be useful again at renewal. CS can show what changed, where progress fell short, and what the customer should prioritize next. If Sales never captures the expected result, CS has to build the value story after the deal has already closed.
Sales and CS can make success criteria more useful by following a few rules:
- Make the outcome specific by identifying what should change, how the customer will measure it, and when they expect to see progress.
- Confirm the metric during kickoff by asking whether the goal, baseline, timeline, or stakeholders have changed since discovery.
- Challenge vague criteria by requesting more detail before treating a phrase such as “improve adoption” or “increase efficiency” as a completed success metric.
5. The kickoff should prove that the company listened
The kickoff is the customer’s first chance to see whether the post-sale team understands the decision they made.
Eleni recommends bringing together the salesperson, CSM, onboarding lead, and the customer stakeholders needed for the project. That may include the executive sponsor, technical contacts, power users, and people who could struggle with the change.
The meeting should recap what the customer purchased and why, validate the success metrics, explain the onboarding roadmap, and clarify roles. It should also establish communication preferences and agree on how escalations will work.
The executive sponsor does not need to attend every implementation meeting, but the team should know how they want to receive updates and when they should be pulled into a problem. Waiting until an escalation becomes urgent is a poor time to negotiate the escalation process.
A strong kickoff gives the customer evidence that the teams talked to each other before joining the call.
Use the meeting to establish that continuity:
- Open the kickoff by recapping the purchase rationale, expected outcomes, known stakeholders, and any important commitments from the sales process.
- Align the project by reviewing milestones, responsibilities, communication preferences, risks, and the process for raising concerns.
- Leave with commitment by confirming what the vendor and customer each need to complete next, including where the executive sponsor will participate.
6. Connect onboarding milestones to the outcomes the customer bought
Customers need to complete configuration, training, integrations, data work, and other onboarding tasks. Listing those tasks tells them what to do. Connecting each important milestone to an outcome helps them understand why it deserves attention.
Eleni recommends tying adoption milestones directly to the customer’s goals. If the customer wants to reduce reporting time, the team should explain how an integration, configuration choice, or adoption target moves them closer to that result.
This also changes how a CSM handles a delay. Instead of sending another reminder that a task is overdue, the CSM can explain what capability remains unavailable and which goal may be affected. The customer can then make an informed decision about the tradeoff.
Not every project task needs a strategic explanation. Some work is simply required to complete the implementation safely. The important part is making the connection visible when the milestone affects adoption, value, or the customer’s timeline.
Make the roadmap easier for customers to act on:
- Describe meaningful milestones by explaining what the customer will be able to do after completing them and which success metric they support.
- Discuss delays by connecting the overdue task to the customer’s target, timeline, or ability to use the product as planned.
- Report progress by showing both project completion and movement toward the outcome so technical delivery is not mistaken for customer success.
7. Make the first 90 days a shared responsibility
Sales does not need to run onboarding after the deal closes. That does not mean the customer should become irrelevant to Sales the moment the contract is signed.
Eleni recommends shared accountability during the first 90 days. The company can decide which early indicators deserve joint visibility, such as onboarding completion, customer health, executive sponsor engagement, success metric confirmation, or the quality of the handoff itself.
She also recommends creating regular opportunities for the teams to review what is happening. That could include monthly handoff reviews, joint discussions about at-risk accounts, and clear escalation paths. CS should share what failed, but it should also tell Sales which handoffs worked and why.
That feedback helps Sales understand which use cases, expectations, stakeholders, and customer profiles are producing stronger starts. It also gives CS a better way to influence the sales process than contacting an AE only when something has gone wrong.
Teams can build that shared responsibility without creating another meeting nobody needs:
- Choose early measures by selecting a small number of signals that both teams can influence and that indicate whether the customer is starting well.
- Review handoffs by discussing what Sales captured, what CS learned, where expectations changed, and which patterns should affect future deals.
- Build trust by sharing successful handoffs as well as failures and by addressing recurring problems with curiosity before assuming bad intent.
The strongest point from our conversation was that a Sales-to-CS handoff is bigger than the transfer of account information. It shows whether the company agrees on what success means and whether each team understands its part in delivering it.
Start with the process. Make the information visible, define the roles, and prepare the kickoff properly. If the same failures continue, look beyond the checklist. The incentives, capacity, or culture may be telling the teams to behave in a completely different way.
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