How to turn the sales-to-service handoff into a touchdown

Posted:
01/27/2020
| By:
Sam Demulling

The sales process is all about building relationships and understanding a prospect’s needs. But once a deal is won, the handoff may come with challenges—like missing information or delays—that can be the difference between a first down and a touchdown. To help you avoid customer experience fumbles, ConnectWise Sell® and ConnectWise Manage® offer several unique features that ensure no information is lost once it leaves the sales team’s hands.

Remember, all your players are on the same team—so great communication and an airtight playbook are key. Here’s how you can leverage product features and execute consistent handoffs to turn every opportunity into a roaring success.

The warm-up: recognizing the importance of a smooth sales handoff

During the handoff from sales to service, any hiccups in your process—like confusion about the products sold, delays in purchasing, and limited accountability for the next steps—can seriously impact a new customer’s impression of your company. To make matters worse, simple human error and gaps in the handoff process can cause inconsistencies that leave team members waiting for the pass. The result: unhappy clients and a higher churn rate.

So how can you avoid this? The first step is recognizing that while each player has their own role to play, it’s up to your team to perform as a unit. Everyone must complete their function and keep the lines of communication going.

To encourage teamwork and increase consistency across every sales opportunity, be sure to clearly outline roles and responsibilities. Then, tighten your plays by using the features in ConnectWise Sell and ConnectWise Manage to your advantage—creating detailed quotes, performing opportunity conversion, using sales orders, and leveraging success track automation.

Let’s take a closer look at how these features can help your team avoid fumbles and secure more wins.

The play: executing a flawless sales-to-service handoff

Utilizing ConnectWise Sell and ConnectWise Manage can help your team get on the same page and play a heavy offense. With a little practice, the sales-to-service handoff will become second nature.

Here are four aspects of the sales handoff process to focus on as you refine your playbook:

1. Creating detailed quotes

Think of your sales reps as your team’s center. They know the customer well—but after they snap the ball, there’s no telling where it will go.

The service delivery team needs the same level of information to understand the sale. ConnectWise Sell facilitates that, allowing your sales team to create detailed quotes with little effort and to masterfully hand off all the nitty-gritty details, like contracts, products sold, and estimated labor.

Knowing the specifics early on is incredibly important, ensuring that if any issues pop up, it won’t be too late to resolve them. Details like recurring product costs and your estimated back-end labor will help your team shape not only pricing but also the long-term agreement with a customer.

ConnectWise Sell also enables your sales team to create standardized quote templates, allowing them to easily select the most popular product quotes. This means they’ll spend less time on administrative tasks, so they can dedicate more time and energy to communicating the next steps.

When preparing the content details, sales reps can populate every tab in ConnectWise Sell with the right information, choose the desired contract, add recurring billing information, and identify customer contacts who will interact with the quote. All of these fields are then intercepted by ConnectWise Manage, so the service team immediately knows who to talk to.

2. Opportunity conversion

Quoting one thing and offering another will earn you an instant penalty—one that causes your customer to dispute their bill. Avoid this scenario by taking advantage of the ConnectWise Sell and ConnectWise Manage opportunity conversion tools.

Which platform you use will depend on which team member is responsible for performing the conversion. If it’s a sales representative, they’ll likely use ConnectWise Sell. This solution lets your reps convert an opportunity without leaving the quote—creating a sales order, project, service ticket, and agreement.

Unique features like Smart Item Routing tools save more time by sending items straight to the record they fall under. And with the Custom Opportunity Mapping feature, sales notes always end up on the opportunity, where the wide receiver can find them. Together, these functions make for a smooth play—and eliminate the guesswork involved in the next steps.

3. Using sales orders

Think of a won deal as a field goal. There are still plenty of questions your team needs to answer and items you need to deliver on to score big points with your client.

A sales order can unify all of the moving parts of a client’s order. This comes in handy when products are sold with no labor or need to be invoiced separately, when there’s a delay in the commencement of work on a project or ticket, or when multiple players are involved in your conversions. Why? Because sales orders allow your team to capture the costs of products upfront, deliver pieces that are immediately available until the point other services can be rendered, and enable different team members to work on the products they need to.

Once a sales order is created in ConnectWise Sell, a sales representative can invoice for products, assign actions to team members by updating the status, or convert it to a service ticket, project, or agreement—putting you one step closer to a touchdown.

4. Success track automation

Admin procedures can feel like they’re slowing sales reps down—but they’re integral to achieving the end goal. ConnectWise Sell automates many of these tasks so your sales team can quickly get back to tackling new client leads.

Typically, a sales rep would manually need to update opportunities and convert and purchase products. With ConnectWise Sell, they can employ success track automation to automatically update the opportunity and quote statuses and notify the appropriate sales rep when a quote is won. And using the SuccessList dashboard, reps can track the quote lifecycle and see how many quotes are sitting in each stage untouched.

Idle opportunities can fall by the wayside. To avoid an incomplete pass, enable workflow rules in ConnectWise Sell to remind players in each opportunity stage until the proper actions have been taken for conversion. Create rules that flag delays from sales to service so that your operations get tighter and your team can bring more opportunities to conversion—and if you need to act in the interim, create sales orders. You can also ‘replay’ historical activities like significant delays to identify what went wrong and what you can do better next time.

The touchdown: bringing it in for a win

Your team has trained for the handoff. You’re ready to execute it—and win the customer with your flawless service delivery.

Create a game plan to capture sale specifics, convert opportunities from ConnectWise Sell to ConnectWise Manage, and automate your way to success. In the long run, you’ll save your team’s time, improve productivity, boost revenue, and get extra points from satisfied customers.