Session 1 recap: Re-engineering the Handoff

The first Post-Sales Alliance live session asked a question that sounds simple: what do companies get wrong in the moment after the deal closes?

Six practitioners answered it from different sides of the handoff: Alison Bukowski (Point of Reference), Erin Felton (FeltonGTM), Anderson Campbell (Intellum), Angela Sutton (Market Fast Forward), and PSA co-founders Kristine Kukich and Jamie McDermott. Here is what was worth keeping.

What companies get wrong after the deal closes

The panel agreed on one thing quickly. Signing the contract is not the finish line.

Erin framed it as the moment a company moves out of sales risk and into delivery risk. Anderson went further: a deal is not truly closed until the first renewal, and everything before that is proof of delivery. Kristine made the same point about timing. It is not just the first 90 days that matter, it is the whole stretch to renewal.

Angela focused on the customer's experience. Right after they sign, customers feel uncertain about whether they made the right call, and internal teams rarely experience that uncertainty for themselves. Alison pointed at who is involved. Too few people take part in the handoff, and product, marketing and CS rarely share what they learn about a customer with each other. Jamie's view was that process and ownership need to be clearly defined, with metrics people understand, rather than vanity numbers that look good in a board deck.

The ICP tug of war

Bad-fit customers hurt twice. They drain delivery capacity at the start and damage retention economics later. Chasing logos at the expense of fit leaves post-sales teams in permanent firefighting mode.

Anderson described the structural cause: ICP is almost always owned purely by sales, with no input from the teams who live with the result. That creates an adversarial dynamic. His team's own down-market move failed because the product was too complex for smaller companies, and the fix was one qualifying question about program maturity rather than budget. We wrote this up in full in The ICP mistake that shows up as churn.

Alison added the incentive side. Coach reps to be comfortable walking away, and make sure leadership does not reward the wrong closes at quarter end. Kristine connected it to advocacy: bad-fit customers do not become references, and sales will be asking for references six to twelve months later. Angela's answer was to make selling to the right customer the easy path by arming the team with proof from customers who look like your ICP.

Re-engineering the handoff itself

Anderson made what became the most-quoted point of the session. Most handoffs are a data transfer: contract value, technical requirements, stakeholder names. What almost never survives is the narrative, the customer's own story of what they are trying to change. That story is the most valuable thing a sales cycle produces, and it should shape CSM goals and enablement playbooks.

Erin gave the test for whether a handoff worked. If the kickoff call turns into a second discovery call, the sales process did not travel forward.

Kristine described the best team she has worked with, which embedded a CS person inside the sales process to translate between what executives wanted and what daily users needed. Alison's ideal state includes the customer in the transition call, alongside the seller and the incoming owner, and she argued the same should happen at every key transition: renewal, add-on and account manager changes. Most customers welcome it when the reason is explained.

Jamie shared an example from a large company where the onboarding manager had no access to the teams upstream or downstream, and could only send lifecycle emails with no context. His fix was a cross-functional roundtable to map the process and surface what each team actually experiences.

If you want a practical starting point, The Handoff Record turns these ideas into five questions to answer before any kickoff is booked.

Early warning signs of churn

The panel named several signals that show up long before renewal: activity without value (Erin), a shift in tone from "how do I" to "why doesn't this" (Anderson), silence and absence (Alison), and single-user heroics, where all usage traces back to one person (Anderson). The group also agreed on a simple rule of thumb: aim for at least three contacts at every account who know what you do, a rule you can test against your own accounts with the buying committee map.

Each of these is explained in Five signals a customer is already leaving.

One first step from each panelist

We closed by asking each person for one thing a listener could do next week.

• Angela: Capture the customer's voice so your internal team experiences what customers experience.
• Anderson: Get to know your colleagues across the sales journey, and ride along on sales calls.
• Alison: Play the org chart game. For each person, ask: do I know who they are, and do they know what I do? Book 15-minute meet-and-greets, starting with engineers and professional services, who rarely get asked and often become your first champions.
• Jamie: Find your Maven, the person who connects you to everyone else. The roundtable is the goal, and the Maven is how you get there.

Frequently asked questions

What is the sales to customer success handoff?

It is the point where responsibility for a customer moves from the team that sold the deal to the teams that deliver it, such as onboarding and customer success. Our complete guide to the sales to customer success handoff covers it in depth.

What is the most common handoff mistake?

Passing on data but not the story. Deal facts travel, while the customer's own description of what they want to change usually gets lost.

Should customers join the handoff call?

The panel's view is yes, in most cases. A warm introduction with the seller present keeps continuity and shows the customer the relationship is not being dropped.

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