Kick off a successful sales-to-onboarding handoff in HubSpot

Reducing the time between deal closed and onboarding kicked off builds momentum with customers and helps validate their purchase decision.

We can use a workflow to make sure we have everything we need for a successful onboarding (and future renewal) without doing any manual lifting.

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Here’s how it works:

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PRE-WORK:

Add a new number property to our deal records named “Renewal Year”.

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1. Trigger the workflow when a deal is moved to “closed won” in your sales pipeline

→ Pro Tip: Use required properties to ensure all the information needed for onboarding is on the record.

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2. Use an IF/THEN action to check all the critical data we want to copy over to our new records is available (and make sure the workflow doesn’t fail if not)

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3. IF we have all the data we need THEN create a new deal in the renewal pipeline with the following details

• Name: Renewal for { deal name } - Year 1
• Close date 365 days out (assuming an annual contract) and the appropriate renewal amount.
• Copy critical information about the account to the new deal. Eg Amount, Success Metrics, Persona, etc
• Set the value of the “Renewal Year” property to 1

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4a. IF all the data is set: create a new ticket in our onboarding pipeline with no owner (we’ll set the owner in a separate workflow)

• Why a separate pipeline? A dedicated pipeline makes it easier to optimize and report on performance.
• Should you use deals or tickets for onboarding? It depends. If you have access to Service Hub use tickets to create more separation and allow association with deals - otherwise, deals will work just fine.

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4b. Copy each property to the newly created onboarding deal/ticket (shown in the sidebar)

• Sales owner: Who closed this deal? We want this to report on onboarding performance by rep.
• Migration required: Does this customer have additional implementation requirements?
• Persona: Which type of company is this? Use it to segment the onboarding plan or assign the correct team.
• Success Metrics: How will the customer define success with our product, so we know where to focus our initial use cases and onboarding efforts.

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5. IF all the data is set: send a Slack notification to our team to celebrate the new deal closing AND share some context on what this customer is hoping to achieve

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6. BUT if we are missing any of the information required for a successful onboarding then create a task for the sales rep to update the record

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Building a repeatable process for handoffs lays the foundation for a connected customer experience, and helps set the flywheel in motion that drives customer expansion.