A contract is signed on a Thursday. Everybody is pleased and the account moves from sales to delivery.
Nothing happens for eleven days. When the kick off meeting finally occurs, it is attended by four people who were not part of the evaluation, and the first half is spent re-explaining what was bought and why.
By the time anything is working, the champion who bought it has spent six weeks defending a decision that has produced nothing visible, and the renewal conversation in eleven months is already harder than it needed to be.
Step 1: start the day the contract is signed
The gap between signature and first contact is the most damaging part of most implementations and the easiest to remove.
Step 2: carry the sales conversation across
Everything established during the evaluation should reach whoever delivers, so nobody asks the customer the same questions twice.
Step 3: identify who is actually involved now
Administrators, technical staff and end users who were not in the evaluation, each with different questions and no context at all.
Step 4: publish a timeline with named stages
What happens, when, and who does what. A customer who can see the shape of the implementation stops worrying about whether it is progressing.
Step 5: state clearly what the customer must provide
Data, access, decisions and people's time, with dates. This is where most implementations actually slip, and it is knowable in advance.
Step 6: answer the technical setup questions immediately
Which arrive from people who were never in a sales meeting, and which are the same questions as in technical pre sales questions that stall b2b deals.
Step 7: handle the access and permission requests early
Internal approvals take longer than anybody plans, and starting them before day one saves weeks.
Step 8: give the champion something to show
An early visible result, however small, so the person who bought it has evidence during the weeks before full value arrives.
Step 9: train the users separately from the administrators
They need different things, and combining them produces a session that serves neither well.
Step 10: answer the questions that arrive between sessions
Which is most of them, and which currently go into an inbox and wait until the next scheduled call.
Step 11: onboard the people who arrive later
New starters six months in inherit a tool nobody explains, and they become the sceptics at renewal.
Step 12: define what a successful implementation looks like
Agreed with the customer at the start, so both sides can say whether it happened rather than arguing about it later.
Step 13: hand over to support deliberately
With the implementation history attached, so the first support conversation does not begin from nothing.
Step 14: keep the salesperson involved briefly
A complete handover on the day of signature is a discontinuity the customer feels. Keeping whoever sold it present for the first few weeks costs very little and prevents the impression that attention ended with the signature.
Step 15: answer the onboarding questions as they arrive
An assistant carrying the setup guidance, the timeline, the technical answers and the user questions means the eleven day gap disappears and the people who join later get the same explanation as everybody else. The procurement stage sits in enterprise procurement questions on a b2b website, the timeline detail in implementation timeline and onboarding questions, and the long cycle in ai assistant b2b long sales cycle. See features, start at try, and the sector view sits under b2b.