Customer Success
Create a Sales-to-Customer-Success Handoff Brief
Customer Success begins onboarding with verified outcomes, promises, stakeholders, risks, and next steps instead of rediscovering the deal.
The process
Work it in this order.
- Trigger the handoff before kickoff and gather the signed scope, commercial terms relevant to delivery, CRM notes, and key communications.
- Summarize the customer's desired business outcomes, use cases, success measures, and target timeline in the customer's own terms where possible.
- List stakeholders, roles, decision history, champion, executive sponsor, technical contacts, and communication preferences, marking unknowns explicitly.
- Record commitments, nonstandard promises, exclusions, dependencies, integrations, security constraints, and open questions with source links.
- Identify adoption or relationship risks and separate observed facts from seller hypotheses.
- Hold a brief internal review between the seller, implementation or CS owner, and relevant specialists to resolve contradictions.
- Share a customer-safe version at kickoff for confirmation, then update the system of record with corrections.
Bring this
Inputs the cat will ask for.
- Signed order and scope
- CRM opportunity history
- Relevant customer communications
- Assigned CS or implementation owner
Router + one playbook
Route first. Choose one.
Cat Paw loads one playbook per task rather than merging several. Start with this router; the remaining paths are workflow-specific candidates it can inspect.
- Router:
customer-success-pack skills/customer-success/handoff/SKILL.md
Guardrails
The boundaries travel with the prompt.
- Do not present inferred goals or risks as customer-confirmed facts.
- Do not expose internal pricing strategy or sensitive rep notes in the customer-facing version.
- Highlight unsupported promises for explicit resolution.
- Keep the handoff in approved systems with role-based access.
Done means
A checkable finish.
The CS owner accepts the handoff, all required fields and source links are present, contradictions have owners, and the customer confirms or corrects the customer-safe summary at kickoff.
Sources
Where this process came from.
- www.gainsight.com/blog/5-step-playbook-for-nailing-pre-to-post-sales-outcomes-handoff/
- www.reddit.com/r/CustomerSuccess/comments/1sx31eb/we_fixed_our_onboarding_churn_by_changing_one/
Sources establish the workflow pattern. Reddit and community posts, where present, are treated as practitioner anecdotes rather than universal facts.