If you’ve worked in sales or customer success for more than a week, you know handoffs can be a mess. Deals close, but the transition to the next team is bumpy, things fall through the cracks, and customers notice. If you want to stop important details from slipping and actually make your handoff process smoother, this guide is for you.
I’ll walk you through how to use Troops—a tool that connects your CRM with Slack or Teams—to actually fix sales handoff headaches. We’ll skip the fluff and get into what works, what doesn’t, and what to focus on if you want results (not just more notifications).
Why Sales Handoffs Are So Painful
Before we dive into the how-to, let’s call out the usual problems:
- Lost context: Notes get buried in the CRM or stuck in someone’s head.
- Missed follow-ups: No one’s sure who owns the next step.
- Slow response: The customer’s excited, but your team’s still figuring out what happened.
- Blame game: When things go sideways, it’s never clear whose job it was.
Most teams try to fix this with meetings, emails, or spreadsheets. Honestly? That’s usually more work than it’s worth. What you want is a handoff that’s automatic, visible, and actually helps people do their jobs.
That’s where Troops comes in.
What Troops Actually Does (And What It Doesn’t)
Troops connects your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot) to your messaging platform (Slack or Teams). It pushes updates, reminders, and workflows into your team’s chat so nobody has to dig through records or rely on memory.
What Troops is good at: - Notifying the right people, right when something changes. - Triggering workflows when deals hit certain stages. - Keeping all the important info in one thread, so people can ask questions or add context.
What Troops won’t do for you: - It doesn’t fix bad sales data. - It can’t force people to use the CRM correctly. - It won’t magically make teams collaborate if they don’t want to.
So, if your CRM is a dumpster fire, fix that first. But if you’ve got decent data and just want a smoother handoff, Troops is actually useful.
Step 1: Map Your Handoff Process—For Real
Don’t skip this. Troops can automate a process, but it can’t fix a broken one.
Here’s what you need to know: - When does the handoff happen? (E.g., Opportunity Closed-Won) - Who needs to know? (CSM, onboarding, finance, etc.) - What info do they need? - What are the next steps, and who owns them?
Draw it out on paper or a whiteboard first. If you can’t explain your handoff in a sentence, you’re not ready to automate it.
Pro tip: Talk to the people who actually do the work. They know where things get stuck.
Step 2: Connect Troops to Your CRM and Chat
Assuming you’ve already got Troops set up with your CRM and Slack/Teams, you’re ready to go. If not, their setup docs are decent—just follow them. Don’t overcomplicate it.
- Make sure Troops has access to the fields and objects you care about (like Opportunities, Accounts, or custom fields).
- Double-check permissions. You don’t want sensitive info blasted to the wrong channel.
If you’re paranoid about privacy, start with a test workspace or channel.
Step 3: Build Your Handoff Alert
This is where Troops shines. You can build a workflow that says, “When a deal is Closed-Won, notify the right team with all the context.”
How to set it up: 1. Trigger: Set the trigger as the opportunity moving to Closed-Won (or whatever your handoff point is). 2. Recipients: Choose the Slack/Teams channel, group, or person who should get the alert. 3. Message content: Pull in key fields from the CRM: - Customer name and contact info - Deal size - Products/services sold - Close notes - Special requirements or promises made
Don’t overdo it. If your alert turns into a wall of text, nobody will read it. Focus on what someone actually needs to start the next step.
Example alert:
🚨 New Customer Handoff
Account: Acme Corp
Deal Size: $32,000
CSM: @jane
Notes: Needs expedited onboarding, promised white-glove setup by EOM.
What to watch out for: - Some CRMs have weird field names or missing data. Test your workflow with real deals. - If you have custom fields or processes, make sure Troops can see them.
Step 4: Create a Handoff Checklist or Form (Optional, but Smart)
Troops can prompt the sales rep (or whoever owns the handoff) to fill out a quick checklist before the notification goes out. This cuts down on missing info.
Example checklist: - Did you update the main contact? - Are all products/services correct? - Any special terms or promises? - Next call scheduled?
You can do this with Troops forms or by linking to an internal doc. Up to you.
This step is worth it if your handoffs are messy because of missing details. If your team hates checklists, keep it simple—just the stuff that always gets missed.
Step 5: Enable Follow-Ups and Ownership
The best handoff in the world fails if nobody knows who’s supposed to do what next. Use Troops to assign clear ownership.
- Tag the person responsible for the next step (CSM, onboarding, etc.) in the alert.
- If there’s a time-sensitive action (like “Kickoff call within 2 days”), have Troops send a reminder or escalate if nothing happens.
Don’t go nuts with reminders—too many, and people ignore them. But one well-timed nudge is gold.
Step 6: Make the Handoff Collaborative
Here’s something teams often overlook: Troops can keep the handoff thread open for questions, status updates, or adding notes.
- Encourage the sales rep to stay in the thread for a week or so, in case onboarding has questions.
- Use threaded replies to keep the context. Don’t start a new channel for every deal (unless you’re doing huge enterprise handoffs).
This is way better than chasing each other in DMs or emails.
Step 7: Review and Tweak—Don’t “Set and Forget”
Your first workflow will probably be too noisy or miss something important. That’s normal.
- Check a few handoffs each week. Did anyone ignore the alert? Was info missing?
- Adjust the fields, timing, or recipients as you go.
What NOT to do: - Don’t automate every little thing. Too many alerts = nobody pays attention. - Don’t use Troops to replace actually talking to each other when stuff is unclear.
What Works, What Doesn’t, and What to Ignore
What works: - Pushing key info to the right place so nobody has to dig for it. - Making ownership and next steps obvious. - Using reminders sparingly for true “drop-dead” tasks.
What doesn’t: - Spamming everyone with every deal. - Overloading alerts with every field from your CRM. - Trying to fix process problems with more tools.
Ignore the hype about “automating collaboration.” Troops is a tool, not a magic wand.
Keep It Simple, Iterate, and Don’t Overthink It
Sales handoffs will never be perfect, but you can make them a lot less painful. Start with what your team actually needs, automate the obvious stuff, and keep asking, “Is this helping, or just making more noise?”
Set up Troops to do the boring parts, stay human for the rest, and tweak the process until it just works. That’s about as good as it gets.