Every artifact in the Voicify "Competitor A or Competitor B" battlecard library is built for the AE — the discovery brief, the demo script, the objection map, the pricing math, the slot decision tree, the rep certification, the AE coaching scorecard, the win-loss debrief. The CSM inherits the deal at close-won and inherits none of the AE's working interpretation of what was actually sold. That is the gap that costs dental AI vendors the first thirty days post-close: the slot-thesis the rep used to win the deal is the same slot-thesis the CSM has to defend through deployment, and nobody writes it down. The nine-field sales-to-CSM handoff template is the single-page artifact that closes that gap. The AE completes it within forty-eight hours of contract execution; the CSM reads it before opening the CRM record on the new account.
TL;DR
Nine fields. One page. Completed by the AE within forty-eight hours of close-won. Read by the CSM before the kickoff call. Final slot with reason code, slot-flip history, buyer's stated success criteria, named champion and opponent, hard-fact signals at close, pricing structure, rep-side promises beyond scope, next-step the buyer expects, open unresolved objections. The handoff translates the AE's slot-thesis into the CSM's defense plan. A ninety-day CSM addendum closes the loop back to the win-loss debrief and the battlecard library — the field correcting the card with what actually deployed.
Why the Battlecard Library Needs a Handoff at All
The Voicify A-or-B framing is built on a slot-thesis: the rep decides early in discovery whether the deal is an A-slot displacement of an incumbent dental AI vendor or a B-slot deployment alongside Voicify, frames the conversation accordingly, and closes against that slot. Every downstream artifact in the library — the discovery brief, the objection map, the CSM B-slot defense framing — assumes the rep and the CSM are working from the same slot-thesis. They almost never are by default. The CRM record captures what the deal closed for, not what the rep believed about the deal. The handoff is the artifact that moves that belief across the line.
The cost of skipping it is concrete. A buyer who closed as an A-slot displacement expects migration value within thirty days and concludes the rep oversold if they do not see it. A buyer who closed as a B-slot deployment expects integration with their existing Voicify deployment and concludes the rep oversold if the integration story collapses under the Voicify CSM's probing. Both failures look the same to the buyer — the rep promised something that did not happen — but the corrective action is opposite. The handoff is what lets the CSM tell which one is happening before the buyer escalates.
The Nine Fields
One page. Nine fields. The AE completes it within forty-eight hours of contract execution, before the deal-closed notification triggers the CSM assignment in the system. The CSM is assigned at the close-won event, reads the handoff first, the slot decision log and discovery brief second, and only then opens the CRM. Order matters: the handoff is the AE's interpretation of the deal; the CRM is the system's record. The CSM defends the interpretation, not the record.
| Field | What the AE writes |
|---|---|
| 1. Final slot at close | A or B, with a one-line reason code from the slot decision tree (e.g., "A — buyer confirmed incumbent vendor displacement in stage 3") |
| 2. Slot-flip history | Any mid-cycle slot flips, the trigger that caused each flip, and the date — pulled from the slot-flip log |
| 3. Buyer's stated success criteria | In the buyer's own words, not the AE's paraphrase — three to five criteria the buyer named during the discovery cycle |
| 4. Named champion and opponent | Champion (person who drove the buy internally) and opponent (named non-Voicify dental AI vendor most often referenced, or "none" if the deal had no opponent) |
| 5. Hard-fact signals at close | The five hard-fact signals from the discovery brief and how each was satisfied at close — location count, current dental AI deployment, integration system, decision timeline, budget |
| 6. Pricing structure at close | The pricing the deal closed at, including per-location math, any discounts applied, and the contract length |
| 7. Rep-side promises beyond scope | Anything the AE committed to that is not in the standard scope of work — implementation timelines, custom integrations, specific outcomes, executive sponsorship |
| 8. Next-step the buyer expects | What the buyer told the AE they expected in the first ten days post-close — kickoff call, implementation start date, named contact for handoff |
| 9. Open unresolved objections | Objections the buyer surfaced during the cycle that the AE did not fully resolve, deferred, or finessed past — the ones most likely to resurface in deployment |
Nine fields is the ceiling, not the floor. The temptation is to add a tenth ("technical environment notes," "competitive dynamics," "expansion potential") and a tenth always turns into a twelfth. The discipline is that fields ten through twelve already exist as other artifacts — the IT integration due-diligence battlecard, the primary battlecard, the discovery brief itself — and the CSM picks those up after the handoff, not embedded in it. The handoff is the lens, not the file cabinet.
The Field That Reps Skip Most
Field seven — rep-side promises beyond scope — is the field AEs skip or fudge most often, and it is also the field that costs CSMs the most in the first thirty days. The AE who said "we can probably get implementation done in three weeks" on a deal where the standard timeline is six weeks has just made a promise the CSM does not know about, against a deadline the CSM cannot hit. The buyer interprets the silence as confirmation. The CSM walks into the kickoff call expecting six weeks; the buyer walks in expecting three. The fight is over before the CSM speaks.
The handoff template forces the AE to write field seven by structuring it as the only field with a required value — even if the answer is "none, nothing beyond standard scope." A blank field seven is the manager's signal that the AE did not actually answer the question. The manager coaching cadence reviews a random sample of handoffs each week and field seven is the one the manager challenges hardest. The reason is asymmetric: a missed promise the CSM finds out about late is worth ten missed promises the CSM finds out about up front.
The CSM Kickoff Call Format
The CSM kickoff call is the moment the handoff becomes useful. The format is forty-five minutes, scheduled within seven days of close. The CSM opens by reading back the buyer's stated success criteria from field three — in the buyer's own words, not paraphrased — which serves two purposes. First, it confirms the AE captured them correctly and the buyer agrees with the capture. Second, it surfaces any drift between what the buyer thought they were buying and what the AE wrote down. Drift on the first call is fixable; drift discovered in week four is a near-loss.
The CSM then walks the buyer through the first-ten-days plan, which maps directly to field eight (the next-step the buyer expects). If the buyer expected an implementation start date the CSM cannot hit, that gets surfaced and renegotiated on the kickoff, not in week three. The CSM does not re-sell the slot framing on the kickoff — the slot framing is internal between AE and CSM, not buyer-facing. The kickoff is execution alignment, not sales framing. That distinction is what keeps the CSM from accidentally re-opening the sales conversation.
The Ninety-Day CSM Addendum
Ninety days post-close, the CSM completes a short addendum to the AE's handoff. Three fields, one paragraph each. First, which AE-stated success criteria the deployment actually delivered against — green, yellow, or red per criterion. Second, which rep-side promises (field seven) had to be re-negotiated in deployment and how. Third, whether the slot held or had to be re-framed for the buyer in the first ninety days. The addendum is the CSM's view of the AE's deal, written from the deployment side of the line.
The addendum feeds two systems. It feeds the win-loss debrief's post-close section, where patterns across reps become coaching signals — an AE whose handoffs consistently overpromise field seven gets coached differently than one whose handoffs consistently miscapture field three. It also feeds the quarterly refresh's slot-framing validation: if half the deals that closed as A-slot displacements had to be re-framed in deployment, the A-slot framing in the card is wrong and the refresh adjusts it. Handoff to addendum to library is how the field corrects the card.
Three Failure Modes
First, the AE writes the handoff as marketing copy. Field three becomes "buyer is excited about transformational outcomes" instead of three sentences in the buyer's own words. The fix is the manager review — managers reject handoffs where field three reads like a marketing one-pager and send them back for rewrite. Reps learn quickly. The handoff is a working document for the CSM, not a closing-day victory lap for the AE.
Second, the CSM treats the handoff as informational and not directional. The CSM reads it, files it, and runs the kickoff from the standard template. The handoff becomes paperwork. The fix is structural: the CSM's kickoff template explicitly references handoff field numbers in the agenda, so a kickoff without the handoff is mechanically incomplete. CSMs who skip the handoff get caught by the agenda, not by audit.
Third, the addendum never gets completed. The CSM is busy at day ninety, the deal is in deployment, the addendum is the thing that slides. The fix is to make the ninety-day addendum the gate that releases the AE's commission accelerator on the deal — the AE has skin in the game on the addendum getting completed because the AE's pay depends on it. Aligning the AE's incentive with the CSM's documentation is the only mechanism that survives quarter-end pressure.
What the Handoff Is Not
The handoff is not a sales-to-CS service-level agreement. SLAs are about response times and escalation paths and live in the CSM playbook. The handoff is about the deal's slot-thesis and what was promised to win it. The handoff is also not a substitute for the discovery brief or the slot-flip log — both are richer artifacts that the CSM reads in addition to the handoff. The handoff is a one-page lens that says "here is what you need to know first, before you open anything else." Confusing the handoff for a complete record of the deal is how the artifact becomes ten pages, gets skipped, and the gap reopens.