Setting Up Your Post-Sales Team For Success

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As a Customer Success Manager at HubSpot, customers often ask me “how do we keep the positive momentum going for the new customer that has just signed?”. 

A poor handover between your sales team and post-sales team (customer success team, onboarding team etc.) can lead to a negative customer experience. It extends your customer’s time-to-value, creates a fractured customer journey, and puts long-term retention at risk. To ensure your post-sales journey is both scalable and seamless, here are 3 recommendations:

(1) Customer notes should be stored on your HubSpot CRM

To maintain a single source of truth, all customer insights should be recorded directly within HubSpot rather than shared through private messages. 

Centralizing data—such as business goals, challenges, and expectations—ensures that critical information remains accessible to the entire team, preventing bottlenecks when colleagues are out of office.

To operationalise this handover and storage of information, consider:

• Using Playbooks to create standardized handover templates to ensure sales captures and relays specific business goals and expectations
• Using properties (both default and custom) to store information in dedicated fields that can also be used for reporting
• Uploading and attaching relevant files to your records

(2) Monitor your new customer’s progress in a dedicated onboarding pipeline

Managing your onboarding process through a pipeline provides a clear visual of customer progress. This enables you to measure onboarding velocity at every stage, trigger automated alerts for stalled customers, and deliver automated yet targeted educational content based on real-time milestones.

To maintain data integrity, avoid appending onboarding stages to the end of your sales pipeline. Instead, utilize a dedicated onboarding pipeline (such as on the Projects object) . This separation ensures that data reporting for both the sales cycle and the onboarding journey remains distinct and accurate.

Tip: Use a Workflow to automate the handoff by triggering the creation of a new onboarding project record immediately upon a closed-won sales deal. By auto-populating the onboarding project record with notes and property values from the sales deal, you ensure a frictionless transition. Your onboarding team can then start work instantly without waiting for manual notifications from sales.

(3) Automate education and nurturing

One of the most powerful advantages of using a dedicated onboarding pipeline is the ability to trigger automated marketing emails based on specific project stage movements. Instead of manually sending "Getting Started" guides, you can build a Workflow that automatically sends an email outlining this guide to contacts associated with a project that just entered your “Kickoff Meeting” stage. This ensures that customers receive the right educational content exactly when they need it, without your team having to do any manual work. This "just-in-time" education not only accelerates the customer’s time-to-value but also frees up your team to focus on higher-value tasks.

With these additions, you can set your post-sales team up for success and deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale while building on the momentum from a newly acquired customer.

If you need any guidance in setting these up, do reach out to our Support Team!