Rethinking revenue infrastructure: How to improve the post-sale handoff

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How’s your infrastructure? It’s pretty tough to have a successful handoff when you don’t have consistent, quality data in presale. Outreach helps revenue teams access insights across every sales activity. Use the data in your onboarding, adoption, and more. Start here.

The sales handoff in B2B is a lot like a baton handoff in a track relay race—it does a lot to set the pace of what’s ahead.

There are hard numbers to back this up. A November 2025 study from McKinsey found that out of 100 B2B sales organizations surveyed, the top influencers of net revenue retention were investments in onboarding, adoption, and value realization journeys.

Revenue Brew’s Siri Cosper sat down with Outreach’s Claire Kolumban to discuss how internal teams can improve communication before, during, and after the sales handoff. Here’s what you missed.

Getting on the same page

Kolumban started her talk with some myth-busting.

“A lot of people have a misconception that service teams are not sellers at all,” Kolumban said. “And there’s an inaccuracy in that. Depending on what company you’re working with and where you’re currently at, your service team might actually have a number attached.”

Kolumban said she herself has a number. Her professional services team at Outreach supports mid-market enterprise and global strategic customers with their onboarding journeys. She said they “act as an overlay to our account executive practice.”

The typical process when an account lands on Kolumban’s desk? The solution engineer, who’s been in lockstep with the seller for the majority of the sales journey, collates the information that was gathered throughout the process.

“We provide a handoff packet to the delivery side and the sales side of the house that works to make sure information is provided in advance,” Kolumban said. “It’s not a checkbox exercise about how many seats a customer wants to implement or where their company is based. It sets the stage for the delivery team to get the information they need and have a strategic conversation.”

Service partners are told so much throughout the implementation journey. Customers directly tell them about the tools, features, and business problems they’re focused on.

“That information is untapped potential and revenue,” Kolumban pointed out. “It can make a huge difference, so it’s important to bring both the delivery and sales sides together to sure up that handoff.”

Maneuvering manual hurdles

A key part of the handoff that often fails is the manual requirement. Cosper noted that there’s not a ton of incentive for sellers to put in the work to ensure the handoff is done correctly. Oftentimes, it’s simply seen as a box that needs to be checked.

However, there’s a lot that can go wrong, and risk mitigation is crucially important in handoff. Kolumban used the example of promises that aren’t kept.

“That’s where you start to fracture the customer relationship,” she said. “During the sales cycle, you don’t always have the luxury of doing the diligence of triple-checking what technically can or can’t be done based on a customer’s scenario. So sometimes, we have to be really mindful and intentional about how we’re level-setting. That’s why the handoff conversations are really important. It’s a space to identify and mitigate risks, and then create pathways forward.”

When it comes to leveraging AI in the process, Kolumban offered some pointers: “AI gives you the ability to be objective by removing some components of bias. There’s a double-edged sword to it, though. We can’t rely on Claude to determine the temperature of a room or whether a person understood something.”

Kolumban noted that tools like Outreach give revenue teams insights and data points throughout the buyer journey. Those can then be used during the pre- and post-sale processes.

“We created a skill within Claude that outlines the critical path questions and creates a handoff packet with that information in it,” she said. “It gives a business overview of your customer and the technical validation components of the deal. It’s all collated, so it saves folks from that manual process.”

Importantly, this Claude skill also accounts for the way information is presented. “Who has time to read 20 pages of fragmented, jumbled information?” Kolumban said. “It’s important that AI is used to not only gather the information but also consolidate and organize it in a way that is manageable.”

Embrace experimentation

The one idea Kolumban wants customer success, account managers, and professional services leaders to take with them? Experiment.

“Don’t be afraid to play outside the bounds,” she said. “You know your onboarding process like the back of your hand. It’s up to you to break apart that process end-to-end and identify the repeatable areas where you can create skills within AI. Those repeatable skills will help you expedite your process to find time savings and improved time-to-value realization.”

In this AI era, customers are entering the buying process more prepared than ever. They know what they want to buy and what outcome they need.

“It’s our responsibility to deliver against those outcomes,” Kolumban said. “We’re going to see customers asking deeper questions about those outcomes, the ROI, and the time-to-value. Because of that, we need to feel comfortable with experimentation to deliver against outcomes, not just deliverables.”