Sales-to-delivery handoff: a practical checklist

A deal can be marked won while the delivery team still lacks the scope, stakeholders, deadlines and decisions made during sales. The gap creates repeated questions and avoidable rework.

Record the client goal, agreed deliverables, exclusions, budget context, target dates and the person authorized to approve work. Separate confirmed commitments from assumptions.

Assign a delivery owner and schedule an internal review. Clarify who contacts the client, who prepares the first milestone and what happens if the brief is incomplete.

Create the project, milestones and initial tasks. Keep a link to the original deal so the team can trace a promise back to its source.

Send a short kickoff summary describing the scope, first deliverable, review process and next decision. Ask for corrections before production begins.

Pultify lets an agency create a project from a won deal and retain key CRM context. The team can then manage tasks and publish selected updates to the client portal.

Use a consistent handoff record: client and primary contact; commercial owner; delivery owner; desired outcome; included deliverables; exclusions; dependencies; target dates; approval contact; and open questions. A field should be marked “unknown” when sales has not confirmed it. Guessing creates more work than an honest gap.

For example, a three-month content engagement might include twelve posts per month, one monthly review and two revision rounds. The handoff should also say whether photography, publishing and community moderation are outside scope. Those boundaries matter as much as the list of deliverables.

Spend five minutes on the client objective, ten on scope and constraints, ten on risks and ownership, and five on the first client-facing action. The account owner should explain any unusual promises made during negotiations. The project owner should repeat the immediate next step and identify missing inputs.

Do not turn the meeting into a second sales presentation. Its output is a short list of decisions, named owners and dates.

Monday: the account manager marks the deal won and confirms the signed scope. Tuesday: the delivery lead creates the project and tasks for kickoff, content plan and first draft. Wednesday: the client receives a kickoff summary with the decision maker and review deadline. Friday: the first internal milestone is checked.

If the client requests an extra channel on Wednesday, capture it as a potential scope change rather than silently adding it to the original work.

Before starting delivery, verify that the team can answer five questions: What exactly are we delivering? What is explicitly excluded? Who can approve? What must happen first? Where is the agreed source of truth? If any answer is missing, assign a person to resolve it.

In Pultify, the deal-to-project workflow helps preserve CRM context. The checklist remains a team practice; software does not replace confirmation with the client.