The Sales-to-Success handoff is one of the most important processes for an organization to get right. At first glance, it might seem simple, doesn’t an Account Executive (AE) just send a Slack message to a Customer Success Manager (CSM) after closing a deal and the customer could be considered ‘transitioned’? Not quite. This process is one of the most important steps for a company to set their customer relationships up for healthy outcomes and it’s actually much harder to get right than it seems.

This short guide will show how you can set up Relay to manage the Sales-to-Success handoff more effectively. Watch the demo video to see how it works, and try out the template to get up and running!

• Start your Relay playbook manually when you are ready to onboard a new customer. Advanced Tip: Connect Relay to your CRM or sales platform (Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.) and have it trigger automatically when a company moves into the contract sent stage.
• Have Relay remind the correct team members to prepare for onboarding with key steps like ensuring the contract is signed, enabling access to the product, updating accounting models, etc. Advanced Tip: Assign team members to each role (finance, legal, etc.) so that the right person from each team can be tagged in.

• Use Relay to remind the AE to add all of the important information like success criteria, customer context, key relationships, etc. into the CRM so the CSM will have context.
• Have Relay automatically schedule a meeting for the AE and the CSM to meet to do the handoff to ensure this important step isn’t forgotten.
• Share all of the deal materials, key information, context, etc. so the CSM is ready to go. Advanced Tip: Use a Slack integration to automatically send this before the meeting for more context.

• Relay can automatically create a copy of your customer onboarding template deck. Advanced Tip: Use a Relay form to automatically add key information like the customer’s name to the template deck.
• Remind the CSM to add key personalization details to the customer onboarding deck. Then, conduct the meeting with the customer.
• Send the customer a follow up email with the onboarding materials and next steps. Advanced Tip: Require review so that the CSM can personalize the message for the specific customer.

If you’re ready to use Relay for the sales-to-success handoff, get started with the playbook here.

It will only take 5 minutes to set up and save you much more than that every time you need to do a sales to CS handoff to onboard a new customer. Once you import the template, here’s what you’ll need to do to get it running:

1. Connect your CRM or sales tool (if you have one) to trigger new runs when a deal reaches the contract sent stage.
2. Link your own template deck for the kickoff meeting with the customer.
3. Customize communication messages like the welcome email and post-onboarding meeting email that go to the customer.
4. Test out the playbook with a demo account as an example customer.

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Use Relay for processes like candidate outreach, interviewing candidates, closing candidates, onboarding employees, and offboarding employees.