Say you've accepted that the introduction should come from the person who sold the deal. There's still a way to get it wrong, and it's the common way.
You send an introduction that introduces.
Hi both. Meet Sarah, she'll be looking after you from here. Sarah, meet the customer. You're in good hands.
Warm, professional, and it accomplishes nothing, because nothing in it asks anybody to do anything or tells the customer what they're about to get.
The Version That Works
It names the next real thing.
Sarah is going to be working with you on getting your data across, and she's going to make sure you're scheduled for the build session before the end of the month. Customer, this is Sarah. Sarah, this is the customer. I'll let you two take it from here.
Same length. Completely different object.
The customer now knows what happens next, that a specific person owns it, and that it's already in motion. The new owner arrives holding something rather than asking for a call.
An introduction that carries only a name is an announcement. Announcements don't produce anything, which is why so many handoffs are followed by a week of silence and then a chase.
The Test
Here's how you find out whether it worked, and it's unusually crisp for something people treat as a soft skill.
The new owner doesn't chase them. They reach out to the new owner.
That's the whole check. The trust was already there with the seller, the seller has just vouched and said what's about to happen, and the customer has a concrete reason to respond. So they respond.
If your account owner is chasing every single account they inherit, the introduction didn't do its job. That isn't a hustle problem and it isn't fixed by a better follow-up sequence. It's a signal about the handoff, and it's measurable this quarter without instrumenting anything.
Which Means You Have to Know the Next Step First
This is the part that turns a nice idea into work, and it's worth doing.
You cannot write that introduction until you know what the next real thing is for that specific customer. Not "they need to log in." Not "onboarding kickoff." The next substantive thing that moves them forward, in their terms.
For a deal closing tomorrow that's easy, because the sales conversation just happened and somebody heard it.
For the accounts you already have, it's an afternoon of work, and it's the same afternoon whether you like it or not.
The Ones Who Signed Months Ago
Every company has these. Signed, technically handed over, never really. Somewhere in the middle of a process nobody wrote down, being worked by somebody they don't feel any particular loyalty to.
The instinct is to treat them as a lost cause and fix it for new deals. That's wrong, and the reason is that trust transfer still works late.
The relationship the seller built didn't expire because a few months passed. You can run the introduction now. It reads slightly differently and it works the same way.
What it takes is the thing above. Go through them one at a time, and for each one establish where they actually are and what the next real step is. That's the input the introduction needs.
It sounds like a lot until you count them. It's a finite list and it's an afternoon. Compare that to the standing cost of a book of accounts where nobody has a relationship with anybody.
Then Do the Kickoff Properly
The call that follows does three things, and most companies do one of them.
Level-set. What happens, in what order, roughly when.
Say who they'll be working with. Not an org chart. Closer to: I'm your point of contact and I'm overseeing this whole thing. There will be moments where you're working with other people to get specific pieces done. You always come back to me, and I'm making sure it keeps moving even when somebody else is doing the work. That answers the question customers actually have, which isn't who reports to whom, it's who do I call.
More discovery. The one that gets skipped, because a kickoff feels like a briefing. It's also the first chance to learn what's changed since the sales conversation, and on an account that signed months ago, plenty has. The transcript tells you what was true at signature. The kickoff tells you what's true now.
And where it fits naturally, name what comes later and what earns it. You're already in the conversation, they're already paying attention, and that's the cheapest orchestration you will ever do.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.