Onboarding Tips - Week 39

Week 39 | Idea 39 | The Hand-off Call

As an customer success or implementation manager, have you ever been introduced to the customer over an email, gotten the time blocked with them, and struggled to get the right inputs from the sales and SE team till an hour before your first kick-off or intro call with the customer? Or ever struggled to get the hand-off document filled with quality inputs from sales / SE team to the implementation team?

When this happens, often you may miss out on an important detail, or go semi-prepared for your first customer call, and may have a surprise waiting for you at this call. It never helps to find an important detail or goal that you hadn't planned for while on call. Also, it never helps to have to ask customers questions that they've already answered through the sales cycle.

It makes your team look less professional, and you can of course imagine a much better start to the relationship with the customer when you go in fully prepared and demonstrate that you are on top of things to help them with their goals. We all know first impressions matter.

One way to create a forcing function for this hand-off to happen well, is to create a 15-minute "hand-off call" - where you get together with sales, solution engineers, and get all the info you need from them right on this call. Go synchronous rather than asynchronous since it is critical you do get as much details ahead of time and get to prepare for your first call with that customer. Make it part of your process till those documents start getting much better!

Even if you have the notes from the sales calls and the sales team has filled out some details on your hand-off document or form, it helps to do this call just so that you can ask all your level 2 questions to your team first. If they already have answers for them, you avoid asking customers the same questions again! And over time the team will start adding those details into the document as well.

Here's how an internal hand-off call helps:

• You get to clarify any doubts you had around what was indicated in the hand-off document or form
• You get to ask more questions and learn specific things about the customers' needs that may not have come out in the hand-off document. This may help you refine the hand-off questionnaire for the future.
• Sales and SEs can give you a little more color on specific people, their concerns and priorities, etc. if they aren't yet covered in your hand-off documents.

Note: If your company is extremely process driven and mature, you can add more questions and do all of this asynchronously through a more comprehensive form too. But when you can't make that work well, set up the hand-off call and make that part of your own process :).

Let us know if you have any feedback. Share your comments or DM me!