The sales to account management handoff is our most critical process to the success of the work that we do with our customers. It is so critical that you cannot achieve your maximum commision on any given deal unless you’ve completed it and it has been certified in a signed document by the Account Manager, the Director of Revenue and yourself via the Hand Off Certification Process
Here is a link to the Certification Document
This document is set up as a Template in HubSpot and the Director of Revenue will work with the AE and the AM to make sure that it is completed correctly.
Throughout the sales process there are a variety of expectations that are set and, potentially, considerations that were promised that deviate from our standard operating procedure.
Oftentimes the customer experiences trepidation when entering into a new agency relationship due to the fact that the salesperson and the account manager are two very different entities with different styles and different levels of understanding of what we do. To account for that, the salesperson and the account manager need to discuss in detail what was promised to ensure parity in delivery and set us up to deliver a superior customer experience.
- Schedule meeting between the AE and AM – The expectation is that Account Executives will schedule time to walk through the deals they are closing. This is to be a formal meeting with an agenda and meeting minutes pursuant to our standard operating procedure.
- Prospect context review – The Account Executive and Account Manager discuss the expectations that have been set and whatever client context is required for the team to understand in order to execute the work.
- Statement of Work and Master Services Agreement review – The AE walks the AM through the paperwork to indicate how the project differs from other projects.
- Upsell opportunity review – The AE informs the AM up front where they believe there are opportunities to sell beyond what was initially sold
- Strategic Brief development – The AE and AM work together to prepare the Strategic Brief to explicitly document the expectations and goals of the client for circulation to the account team.
- Place the Meeting minutes into the opportunity/client folder in Dropbox which has been moved to the Client folder from the → Proposal Archive folder
- NOTE: Every Company Record and Deal Record in HubSpot will have a PINNED Note that will either have all of the project notes OR a link to the project notes on Google Drive
- Call notes should include: Date, contact spoken with, elements of MEDDIC, key takeaways
- Place the Strategic Brief into the client folder Dropbox
- Request, Fill Out and Sign the Client Handoff Certification
Why the Strategic Brief is Important
The Strategic Brief acts as a document to exhaustively memorialize all expectations that a new client has coming into an engagement with iPullRank. It acts as a guiding document for any person contributing to the account and gives a high level roadmap for where the upsell and renewal opportunities lie based on the experience of the Account Executive filtered through the more in-depth understanding of an Account Manager. Simply put, it is an artifact that drives consistency across the team’s efforts despite any changes in personnel on either side of the engagement.
The Account Executive and Account Manager work together to memorialize the following elements of the relationship:
- Client Background - An overview of who the customer is, who the key people on their side are, where the company stands in the market, any environmental factors that are relevant to the engagement, and why they chose us.
- Client Business Goals and Objectives - A discussion of what they are looking to accomplish as a business and what they want to accomplish through their engagement with us.
- Target Audience - Details on the segments of that market that they are targeting and separately who they are actually capturing.
- Technology Stack - An overview of what technology platforms are in use across their marketing setup. If a migration is in the works, what technology they are looking to migrate to.
- Our Solution - A review of the deliverables that we are engaged to deliver to the customer.
- Deviations from Standing Operating Procedure - If we’ve committed to do anything different than our standard processes, this needs to be detailed in exhaustively so people doing the work have an understanding of what they need to do differently.
- Timeline - The communicated timeline of delivery.
- Budget - Any understanding that we have of their budgets, their fiscal close, and renewal timelines.
Other Requirements - Anything else we need to know that doesn’t fit into these buckets.