Skip to main content
ServiceXRG
  • Your Challenges
    • Overview
    • Self-Assessment
  • Our Solution
    • Overview
    • Achieving Service Success
    • Our Process
    • Service Success Framework
    • Membership
  • Why ServiceXRG
    • Overview
    • Capabilities
    • Clients
    • Team
  • Resources
    • Resource Library
    • Blog
  • Let’s Talk
  • Member Login
ServiceXRG
  • Member Login
  • Your Challenges
    • Overview
    • Self-Assessment
  • Our Solution
    • Overview
    • Achieving Service Success
    • Our Process
    • Service Success Framework
    • Membership
  • Why ServiceXRG
    • Overview
    • Capabilities
    • Clients
    • Team
  • Resources
    • Resource Library
    • Blog
  • Let’s Talk

Blog : Seven Engagement Practices for a Successful Sales-to-Service Handoff

  • Previous Post
  • All Posts
  • Next Post

Seven Engagement Practices for a Successful Sales-to-Service Handoff

By Tom Sweeny June 15, 2021

Whether Sales in your organization is the responsibility of partners or a direct sales team, those responsible for selling and closing new business create the first impression of your product or service. A successful sales-to-service handoff is essential to maintaining that positive impression and promoting long-term customer success. To accelerate time-to-value, sustain customer relationships, and lay the groundwork for recurring revenue, leverage these seven proven practices for sales-to-service handoffs.

Effective customer engagement begins with the Sales process. This is when your organization identifies each customer’s desired outcomes and aligns its product and available services to them. In a successful sales-to-service handoff, Sales and Service need to collaborate so they can ensure that customers can successfully onboard, adopt, and realize the value of their purchase.

During the pre-sale process Sales should invite Service to collaborate to help identify needs and formulate the right solution for the customer. However, Sales does not typically invite Services into the Sales process and in this case, Services needs to advocate for being part of the pre-sales process. Through this collaboration there is higher probability that customers will get what they need to be successful.

The collaboration and information transfer should be complete and seamless—during the pre-sale process the Service team should know everything about the customer that the Sales Team knows.  And customer should not be expected to provide Service with information they’ve already given to Sales.

 

These 7 practices are proven to ensure successful Sales-to-Service handoffs:

  1. Establish clear expectations for the roles of new-sales and post-sales teams. Ensure that motivations and incentives are equally focused on closing new business and retaining existing customers.
  2. Provide information to Sales teams about service programs available to help customers adopt and use products.
  3. Help Sales teams understand pricing and discounting policies, prerequisites, and any other considerations for frictionless service sales.
  4. Create Customer Success-focused engagement teams and resources to help customers understand not only the product features but how they can apply products to achieve their business objectives.
  5. Involve the Service team during the Sales process to help understand and validate that customer expected outcomes can be delivered post-sales.
  6. Formally transition newly acquired customers from Sales to designated Support or Customer Success resources.
  7. Begin a formal onboarding process based on expectations set in during the Sales process.

Ensuring a Successful Journey to Customer Success

Milestones For a Successful Journey to Customer Success

In this whitepaper, we will:
  • Define the scope and intent of Customer Success
  • Introduce and explain in detail five key milestones for the successful journey to Customer Success
  • Define Customer Success practices and metrics
  • Establish a framework to build on Customer Success to retain and expand customer relationship value
Download Now

Be successful with your services

We help companies effectively use services to deliver the maximum benefit possible from customer relationships. We call this Service Success. Learn how.

Our Solution
  • Previous Post
  • All Posts
  • Next Post

Is Your Team Organized to Deliver Success?

Take the Assessment

Subscribe for even more resources and the latest in your inbox.

"*" indicates required fields

Name*

By clicking the "Submit" button you accept and agree to be bound by the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Related Posts

  • 8.1.22 Read Time: 2 Mins

    Onboarding by the Numbers

    Onboarding is a critical practice and when done correctly is proven to help customers adopt products and achieve value. See our other onboarding articles including For customers that do receive …

  • 7.20.22 Read Time: 2 Mins

    Three Applications for Scaling Support with Chatbots

    Leverage the power and potential of today’s chatbots to scale support delivery capability.

  • 7.12.22 Read Time: 2 Mins

    Are Your Services Optimized to Drive Business Outcomes?

    Your efforts to deliver service quickly and completely, provide great experiences, and satisfy customers are important, but consider – Service delivery performance it is not the end goal, it’s a …

ServiceXRG

© Service Excellence Research Group, LLC 2022. All Rights Reserved.

Website by Imagebox

Contact Info
  • Email: info@servicexrg.com
  • Phone: 800-475-0089
Quick Links
  • Your Challenges
    • Overview
    • Self-Assessment
  • Our Solution
    • Overview
    • Achieving Service Success
    • Our Process
    • Service Success Framework
    • Membership
  • Why ServiceXRG
    • Overview
    • Capabilities
    • Clients
    • Team
  • Resources
  • Let’s Talk
Social Media
  • LinkedIn
  • Newsletter
  • Twitter