Your sales team is smart, engaging, helpful, and informed. The folks working on delivery are enthusiastic, capable, and experts in their fields. These two teams should empower each other, but in many professional services firms, the Sales-to-Delivery handoff process is fraught with disagreements and inefficiencies.
Why does this happen?
The problem isn’t that your Sales doesn’t want Delivery to succeed (or that Delivery doesn’t want to make sales). But fundamental misalignments between teams will almost always spiral. Your team members might disagree about who you should be selling to, or even what services should be prioritized. As a result, you wind up in a situation where everyone thinks they understand the assignment, but no one can agree on what’s most important.
It is completely possible to build a sales process that sets the foundation for a seamless delivery. Let’s take a look at how top firms create a smoother Sales-to-Delivery flow.
Steps to a Successful Sales-to-Delivery Handoff Process
1. Build team knowledge
Sales can be in a funny position. They might not be the ones delivering services or deciding on global business directive, but they’re tasked with constantly representing the firm. Because of this, they often become unofficial experts in areas that don’t technically fall under their purview.
It’s a common but unfair expectation that Sales should be able to do their jobs without being fully trained on client industries or evolving services. And when Sales has knowledge gaps, it’s more likely deals will go through with misaligned expectations.
To prevent this, prioritize ongoing training for the whole team. Make sure that Sales is looped in whenever services evolve, even in seemingly minor ways. Consider quarterly services training and annual industry training to keep your teams aligned.
2. Standardize how you evaluate prospects
Clearing up any questions about your ideal customer profile (ICP) makes things much easier when it comes to prospecting. With fewer subjective questions to answer, Sales can more quickly identify the right prospects—and the wrong ones.
If you’re just getting started defining your ICP (or need a refresher), here are a few questions to ask yourself:
- What common pain points are your services best equipped to solve?
- Based on existing sales, retention, and revenue data, which types of clients bring the greatest long-term value?
- What is their company size?
- Their sub-industry?
- Their annual revenue?
- Which roles are most likely to buy your services?
3. Collaborate on sales enablement
Sales enablement is infamously difficult to keep centralized and updated. Sales folks often make their own tweaks, saving and updating the versions that work for them. There’s nothing wrong with this (in fact, many companies require Sales to tailor their slide decks), but it does mean there can be dozens of versions of every asset floating around.
Getting out of sync with sales enablement can be a roadblock to firm-wide alignment. If possible, get your whole team involved when you roll out a new one pager or presentation template. That way, Sales has a chance to speak up if the templates don’t suit their needs, and Delivery can understand what’s happening in early client conversations. With more understanding across the board, you can avoid surprises during the Sales-to-Delivery handoff process.
4. Set up guardrails during pitching, negotiation, and objection handling
While staying aligned during prospecting is important, the most common culprit of Sales-to-Delivery handoff breakdowns comes later. Specifically, it comes during negotiation.
When the client comes back with objections or concerns, Sales starts looking for ways to sweeten the deal. For Sales, this can be a very creative, challenging, and invigorating process. For Delivery, it can be pretty anxiety-inducing, as they wait to find out if an engagement is going out of scope.
Sales folks aren’t machines, and they shouldn’t be. It’s their ability to think expansively and problem-solve on the fly that makes them so invaluable. But without strong guardrails in place, it’s easy to accidentally overpromise or misrepresent what your firm can deliver.
The easiest way to keep Sales on track is by giving them instant and automated approvals. BigTime’s quoting tools manage this with pre-set templates, rate cards, and guardrails. These tools preserve Sales’ flexibility but also ensure that what they’re selling is approved and profitable—even in the case of complex configurations.
5. Coordinate approval workflows
Getting a project approved should be your best defense against out-of-scope sales. But for that to work, the approval process has to be effective and manageable.
Too often, this process breaks down when your team most needs it. Approvals come down to email threads and frantic messages, and it’s unclear who is ultimately responsible if the resource needs are mistranslated or not approved.
Luckily, this is one of the most automation-friendly stages of securing new projects. If you’re looking for opportunities to speed up SOW creation, automating approvals is a great place to start. Approval workflows are a core component of BigTime’s quoting tools—so if you manage sales through BigTime Quotes or BigTime Services CPQ, you can push the final sale and approve through in one unbroken flow.
Ensure your projects succeed with BigTime’s quoting tools
BigTime Quotes
If you’re ready to uplevel your Sales-to-Delivery handoff process, consider a dedicated solution like BigTime Quotes. With intelligent SOW generation, approval workflows, and full template libraries, BigTime Quotes can shave days off your overall sales cycle. BigTime Quotes balances power with accessibility, ensuring you have the tools you need to win deals quickly, without lengthy implementation or training timelines.
BigTime Services CPQ
While BigTime Quotes is quick to adopt and easy to put to immediate use, it’s not the right choice for every firm. For teams that need a highly configurable sales platform, BigTime Services CPQ may be a better fit. BigTime Services CPQ helps firms manage highly complex engagements with completely custom guidelines, powerful workflows, and eCommerce-style services catalogs.
Not sure which solution is right for you? Schedule a free 20-minute consultation and we’ll walk through your current process, your firm’s priorities, and what quoting products are best for your team.
