Sales Handoff

Reach for Sales Handoff once a deal is signed or about to be, and before anyone promises the customer a go-live date.

• The deal is closed won, or close to it, and the implementation lead needs a plan. The three dates give that lead something to staff against.
• The customer was promised a timeline during the sale. The readiness score shows whether the promise matches the evidence.
• The IT owner, the data export or the sponsor is still unknown. Each gap shows up as a scored dimension and a named risk.
• A deal carries an open HOLD or DOWNGRADE call. The check runs as a preview, and no handoff is issued until the signature, whatever the stage call.

The skill writes the handoff. It never sends anything to the customer and never writes to the CRM.

A signed deal reaches implementation with its dates in the rep's head and its risks in the sales notes. The implementation lead then finds the missing IT owner or the untested export in the first week, after the customer was promised a go-live. This skill runs the sales to implementation handoff check before kickoff, so each gap is scored, named and given a mitigation while there is still time to close it.

Six Readiness Dimensions

Six dimensions are scored from 1 to 5, each with its own weight. Stakeholder is 20%, Workflow 20%, Technical 20%, Data 15%, Resource 15% and Change Management 10%. Each score follows a rubric written for that dimension, and it moves only on evidence. A rep's statement that the customer is ready is a claim, and it scores only when a dated record supports it. The composite is the weighted sum divided by five and multiplied by 100. Green is 80 to 100 and ready, Yellow is 60 to 79 and ready with conditions, Orange is 40 to 59 and at risk, and Red is 0 to 39 and not ready. A dimension scored 2 or lower is critical.

The Three Dates And Their Arithmetic

The three dates are kickoff, go-live and Full Adoption Date, and each one shows its arithmetic. Kickoff depends on the readiness level, and a Yellow check adds a two to four week buffer from the check date. When no IT owner is named on the check date, the profile's IT lead time is added on top of that buffer. Go-live is kickoff plus the typical days from the client profile's Implementation Profile. If the profile holds no value, go-live is written as RECORD and the skill does not estimate it. Full Adoption Date is kickoff plus two months by default, adjusted for each extra source system, the export format and any phased rollout. A weekend result rolls to the next Monday, and each adjustment appears on its own line.

Risks And Quick Wins

Risks come from seven categories, which are technical, adoption, resource, data, expectation, vendor transition and stakeholder. The top three each get a severity, a likelihood and a mitigation written for this customer, not a generic one. Quick wins are two or three items the customer can see working in week one or month one, drawn from four starting types: automate the highest-volume segment, enable self-service for top customers, run a risk audit of open items and remove one manual step.

Core Workflow

Read the account's notes first, then offer the CRM read and ask before it runs. Pull the deal basics, the contracted modules and the discovery context, marking blanks Unknown. Map every contact to an implementation role and flag any role nobody fills. Capture the workflow baselines and score the technical rows. Score the six dimensions and compute the composite. Set the three dates with their arithmetic, name the top three risks and two or three quick wins, and write the nine-section report. The report comes back inline, and a file is written only when you ask.

What It Reads

This skill reads the Company, Core Pain Points, Product Modules and Implementation Profile sections of the client profile. The Implementation Profile supplies the timing values for the three dates. From the Context OS knowledge base it opens the account's folder for its notes, calls and decisions. A CRM read is offered, asked for and read only, and nothing is written back. Pasted deal notes and contact lists work the same way.

Where It Fits

Sales Handoff sits in the Close And Hand Off chain, after MEDDPICC Analysis and before Wrap-Up. It reads the MEDDPICC fields by name, and a HOLD or DOWNGRADE stage call turns the check into a preview with no handoff issued. Its readiness score, dimension scores, three dates, risks and quick wins pass to the implementation lead, and its next action and score pass to Wrap-Up. The Business Case & ROI Kit can read this skill's results, and this skill is free and works on its own.