Decide what delivery needs
Delivery needs to start work without calling the customer to ask what was agreed. List what they need, in order of importance:
- The signed scope: deliverables, quantities and quality standards.
- What is out of scope, written as plainly as what is in scope.
- Assumptions you priced on, such as the customer's data being clean or their team being available for two hours a week.
- Customer dependencies: access, assets, approvals and decision makers, each with a date.
- Dates: start, milestones and any fixed external deadline.
- Promises made in conversation that are not in the contract.
- People: who the customer wants to hear from and who they do not.
Keep this to one page. If delivery cannot read it in five minutes, it will not be read.
Capture it in the deal, not in your head
Add the fields to the deal record in your CRM, for example HubSpot or Pipedrive. Make three of them required before the deal can move to closed won: scope summary, out of scope and customer dependencies. Link the signed proposal from PandaDoc or DocuSign so nobody searches an inbox.
A required field is annoying for ten minutes and saves hours of rework later. It is the cheapest control you can add.
Involve delivery before the proposal goes out
For anything outside your standard offer, ask the delivery lead to read the proposal before the customer sees it. Ask one question: "Can we deliver this by this date with this team?"
It takes ten minutes. It catches the promise you cannot keep, which is far cheaper than finding it after signature.
Hold a 30-minute internal meeting
Within two working days of signature, the seller and the delivery lead meet. Use this order:
- Five minutes: the seller tells the story of the customer and why they bought.
- Ten minutes: walk through scope, assumptions and dependencies.
- Ten minutes: the delivery lead asks questions and challenges anything unclear.
- Five minutes: agree who sends the first message to the customer, and when.
End with the question "What would surprise you if you read it in a customer email next week?" It surfaces what the page missed. Write the answers into the record.
Run a customer kickoff that repeats the agreement
The first customer meeting should say, in plain words, what you will deliver, by when, what you need from them and who does what. Use the handoff page as your agenda. If the customer corrects something, you want to know now, before work starts.
Follow it with a short written summary the same day. A recording of the call, for example in Loom, helps people who could not attend.
Keep the seller involved for two weeks
The seller remains available to answer questions during the first two weeks, but does not manage the customer. After that, ownership of the ongoing relationship moves according to your sales to customer success handover. Delivery owns the work and the customer owns their dependencies.
Close the loop with feedback
At the end of the first milestone, the delivery lead rates the handoff from one to five and notes what was missing. Review these every month. If the same item shows up three times, it becomes a required field.
Common mistakes
- Treating the contract as the handoff. Contracts are written for lawyers, and they miss the context.
- Letting sales describe the work as simpler than it is to close the deal. Delivery then inherits an impossible promise.
- Handing over by email only. A conversation catches what a document hides.
- Forgetting the customer's own tasks. Delays often come from missing access or assets, not from your team.
- Skipping the feedback step, so the same gaps repeat.
How you know it works
Delivery starts work within a few days of signature and does not need to ask the customer anything basic. The number of scope disputes after kickoff falls. Customers describe the transition as smooth without being asked. Handoff ratings average four or higher, and you can point to the fields you added because of earlier gaps.