Design Effective Sales to CS Handoffs in HubSpot

Your sales team has just closed a new customer and everyone's excited! But now comes the crucial question: how smooth is the transition from sales to your post-sales teams? If you've ever been part of a rocky handoff, you know it's a common issue.

A GREAT handoff amplifies customer excitement, while a BAD one can deflate it just as quickly.

The solution lies in building effective systems. They ensure your onboarding and customer success teams have all they need to keep growing the customer relationship and helping customers maintain their momentum to achieve their goals.

This sales to customer success handoff is the first step to connecting your customer experiences in HubSpot.

Follow the full playbook below, or watch our video walkthrough to make sure you're nailing the setup.

3 Basic Principles for Successful Sales Handoffs in HubSpot

Before we dive into all the tactical tips for automating your sales handoff process in HubSpot, let's make sure we're on the same page about the importance of a GREAT sales to customer success handoff.

If your handoffs are leaving customers in the dark, they're much more likely to deprioritize your solution and ultimately churn.

Streamlining the process to remove tedious tasks not only keeps your team focused on building valuable relationships, but also helps customers maintain their momentum.

Define the required properties that are needed for your sales handoffs

To make sure your onboarding and success teams have all the information they need, it's important to set required properties for your sales teams to fill out when deals get moved to “closed won”.

This setup streamlines the handoff process, ensuring every essential detail is readily available for a smooth and efficient start to the customer journey.

Kick off your internal handoff process when new deals are closed won

A key aspect of successful sales handoffs involves ensuring that your customers feel heard during the sales process and don't have to repeat themselves again during onboarding.

You can set up a HubSpot workflow to make sure you have everything you need to kick off your onboarding process and make sure you don't have to ask your customer the same questions twice.

In this workflow, we're also setting up a piece of our renewal process, but we'll get into that more in part 4.

Automate your onboarding setup and get the process started with your customers

If you create a clear process that removes the tedious tasks, you’ll remove unnecessary delays and help customers build momentum in their journey.

Engaging customers quickly once the sales deal is won is critical to accelerate their progress and maintain their momentum.

Using a HubSpot workflow to automatically create an onboarding plan for every new customer, you can keep your customer engaged and also significantly reduces the risk of them disengaging or churning before they fully experience the benefits of your product.

Note: we'll go over the specifics about running your customer onboarding process in HubSpot next in part 3.

Report on your team's handoff velocity in HubSpot

Customers that engage quickly are less likely to ghost, more likely to build momentum, and ultimately less likely to churn.

Actively reporting on how quickly customers are booking kickoff calls after they close, is a great way to align on the metrics that matter in your sales to onboarding handoffs.