Whenever a customer's main contact changes there's a risk of miscommunication, overlooking important information, or having things fall through the cracks. When that happens, you've entered the danger zone.

The people involved (or priorities) can change

It's easy for people to forget projects terms, scopes, and what success looks like when they've been defined by someone else. While nobody would ever want to put their customer success into the danger zone, it happens all the time. Usually, it's due to lack of knowledge transfer between outgoing and incoming team members (I.e. Marketing to Sales or Sales to Service). But just as often, it's due to lack of expectation setting for all the people involved.

Customers and providers can be affected

The Danger Zone can happen for customers and agency. For example, one of our long-time customers recently changed staff between two phases of a project. The outgoing customer diligently adhered to the scope and timelines of the project, even briefed the incoming person on the work in progress. The incoming person was excited to get going, and began executing updates, changes, and completing the project without having gone through the original training, obtaining a full briefing, or reviewing the engagement contract. You can imagine the chaos that caused, even though all parties had very good intentions.

Time to value drops like a rock

With completely good intentions, tasks and briefings must be repeated, strategies need revisiting, assignments reassigning, and much more. It can feel like two steps forward, one step back (or two). When there are deadlines involved, avoiding the danger zone and managing the transition becomes even more critical.

A few ways to avoid the danger zone

• Document your project scope.
• Share that scope with all members of the team.
• Keep activities and updates transparent.
• Brief all team members throughout the project lifetime.

By taking proactive steps, you can navigate transitions smoothly and maintain the momentum towards achieving project success and ensuring your customer sees a positive time-to-value for the project and not succumb to buyer's-remorse.

What a seamless Sales to Service handoff might look like

1. Consider creating a Handoff Blueprint that maps the assets, strategies, and buyer's journey to those responsible for them.
2. Create a Playbook that walks all team members through "the plan" that ensures all parties know what's involved and include Goals, Buddy System (participants from each team), Notes templates (include relevant info on all notes, reusable clips, recaps, etc), actionable Feedback (situation, behaviour, impact), and Resources (list who's who, responsibilities, specialties, etc). And set out measurement metrics for both Sales and Service teams such as retention, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
3. Move projects through stages, and communicate the movement with all affected parties.