The contract is signed. The champagne cork pops in the sales department. Another big project closed.
Meanwhile, in the delivery department, the Project Manager gets a Slack notification: “New project starting Monday. Here is the link to the Drive folder. Good luck!”
The PM opens the folder. They find a messy spreadsheet with a list of features and a total price. They have zero context. They don’t know why certain decisions were made, what risks were discussed, or what the client’s underlying business goals are.
The project is doomed before it even begins.
This scenario plays out in agencies every day. A solid estimate, created over weeks of discussions, turns into a chaotic project because the transition from the people who sold it to the people who have to build it is broken.
This is known as the handoff problem.
This article moves away from client-facing topics to look inside your agency’s operations. We will explain why this gap exists, what critical information gets lost, and how to implement a structured process to ensure a successful handover between your teams.
Table of Contents
- The “Throw It Over the Wall” mentality
- The 3 things that get lost in translation
- The consequences of a bad handoff
- The solution: The Internal Handoff Meeting agenda
- The need for a “Single Source of Truth”
- How devtimate bridges the gap between teams
- Checklist
- FAQ
The “Throw It Over the Wall” mentality
The root cause of handoff failure is siloed departments with different incentives.
- The Sales Team’s Goal: Get the signature. They focus on building relationships, managing client emotions, and navigating budget constraints.
- The Delivery Team’s Goal: Ship working software on time. They focus on technical details, acceptance criteria, and resource management.
In many agencies, once the contract is signed, the salesperson feels their job is done. They mentally “throw the project over the wall” to the delivery team and move on to the next lead.
They assume that the estimate document (usually a spreadsheet or PDF) contains everything the delivery team needs.
This is a fatal mistake. A spreadsheet contains numbers, but it does not contain context. The estimate is just the final output of weeks of conversation. The conversation is what the delivery team needs, but they were not in the room.
The 3 things that get lost in translation
When a project is transferred via email instead of a structured process, three critical types of information evaporate.
1. The Business “Why” (Context)
The salesperson knows why the client needs this software.
- “They need this new checkout flow because their current cart abandonment rate is 60% and investors are angry.”
The developer only sees a Jira ticket:
- “Build checkout flow. Est: 40 hours.”
Without the “why,” the developer might build a technically perfect checkout that fails to solve the business problem. They lack the context needed to make smart micro-decisions during development.
2. The “Soft Promises”
During the sales process, the client likely asked for things that didn’t explicitly make it into the contract scope.
- Client: “Can we also have a dark mode?”
- Salesperson: “We can probably squeeze that in later if things go well.”
The contract doesn’t mention dark mode. The PM assumes it is out of scope. Two months later, the client asks, “Where is the dark mode you promised?” The PM is blindsided, and trust is broken. These “soft promises” must be communicated during the handoff.
3. The Risk Assumptions
Why did you estimate the payment integration at 80 hours instead of the usual 40?
- Salesperson knows: “Because the client wants to use a very obscure payment gateway in Southeast Asia with terrible documentation.”
- The estimate says: “Payment Integration: 80h.”
If the PM doesn’t know the reason for the high estimate, they might assign a junior developer to it, thinking it’s a standard task. The junior developer will immediately get stuck. The delivery team needs to know where the bodies are buried.
The consequences of a bad handoff
When the handover fails, the pain is felt immediately on “Day 1” of the project.
1. The Client Repeats Themselves The project kickoff meeting with the client becomes painful. The PM asks basic questions that the client already answered three times during the sales process.
- Client thinks: “Don’t these people talk to each other? Do I have to explain my business from scratch again?”
2. Immediate Friction The delivery team looks at the estimate and immediately finds holes in it. They feel like Sales “oversold” something impossible just to get the commission. The relationship between the two departments turns toxic.
3. Instant Scope Creep Because the “soft promises” weren’t documented, the client expects things the PM didn’t plan for. The project is over budget before the first line of code is written.
The solution: The Internal Handoff Meeting agenda
You cannot fix this with a better spreadsheet. You fix it with a better process.
Every project must have a mandatory Internal Handoff Meeting.
- Timing: After the contract is signed, but before the client kickoff meeting.
- Attendees: The Salesperson who sold the deal, the Project Manager, and the Lead Developer/Architect assigned to the project.
- Duration: 60-90 minutes.
The Agenda:
1. The Business Narrative (15 mins) The salesperson tells the story. Who is the client? What is their biggest pain? Who are the key stakeholders (and who is the difficult one)? What does “success” look like for them?
2. The Scope Walkthrough (30 mins) Open the detailed estimate. Go line by line through the major modules. The salesperson explains what was sold. The Tech Lead asks clarifying questions. This is where the “soft promises” must be revealed.
3. The Risk Review (15 mins) Review the assumptions made during estimation. Why did we pad certain features? What are the biggest technical unknowns? What are we most worried about?
4. Next Steps (10 mins) Define the agenda for the Client Kickoff meeting. The PM takes ownership of the project from this moment on.
The need for a “Single Source of Truth”
The meeting is crucial, but the data needs a home.
The biggest operational mistake agencies make is having the “Sales Estimate” live in one place (e.g., a salesperson’s Excel file on their desktop) and the “Project Scope” live in another place (e.g., Jira backlog).
When scope changes happen—and they always happen—the two documents drift apart. Nobody knows what the current plan is.
You need a Single Source of Truth. The document that was used to sell the project must be the exact same document used to manage the delivery.
How devtimate bridges the gap between teams
We built devtimate to be that single source of truth. It is designed to break down the wall between sales and delivery.
Instead of sales happening in a spreadsheet and delivery happening in Jira, the entire lifecycle of the scope lives in devtimate.
- Sales Creates the Scope: The sales team builds the estimate in devtimate, adding notes, assumptions, and risk buffers to specific features.
- Seamless Handoff: When the deal is won, there is no file to transfer. The Project Manager and Tech Lead are simply given access to the project in devtimate.
- Context Preserved: The delivery team sees not just the hours, but all the context notes the salesperson added during the estimation phase. They see the “why” next to the “what.”
- Living Document: As the project evolves, the scope is updated in devtimate. It remains the central reference point for what is in and out of scope, preventing disputes.
By using devtimate, the handover isn’t a meeting where you hope you remembered everything; it’s a seamless transfer of a rich, contextual database.
Improve your internal team alignment with devtimate.
Checklist
✅ Schedule a mandatory Internal Handoff Meeting before the client kickoff.
✅ Ensure Sales, PM, and Tech Lead are all present at this meeting.
✅ The salesperson must explicitly list any “soft promises” made outside the contract.
✅ Review the assumptions and risks behind the estimate, not just the final numbers.
✅ Stop using disconnected spreadsheets for estimation.
✅ Use a single system like devtimate to ensure the sales scope becomes the delivery scope without manual copying.
FAQ
1. Should the client be present at the handoff meeting?
No. This is an internal “warts and all” discussion. You need to be able to talk freely about client personalities, internal risks, and sales strategies without the client present. The output of this meeting prepares you for the client kickoff.
2. What if the delivery team finds a massive hole in the estimate during the handoff?
This is actually good news. It is much better to find it now than in the middle of development. If a major error is found, the Salesperson and PM must go back to the client immediately, apologize, and renegotiate the scope or price before work begins.
3. My sales team is too busy to attend these meetings for every project.
If they are too busy to ensure the project they sold actually succeeds, they are too busy to be effective salespeople. A failed project damages the agency’s reputation and kills future referrals. The handoff is a critical part of the sales cycle, not an optional extra.
4. Can’t we just record a Loom video instead of a meeting?
A video is better than just an email, but a live meeting is required for Q&A. The delivery team needs to be able to challenge assumptions and ask “what if” questions in real-time to truly grasp the project’s nuances.
5. How does devtimate help if scope changes later?
devtimate handles change requests. If new scope is added later, it is added to the same project structure in devtimate. This ensures you always have a clear comparison between the original “sold scope” and the current “delivered scope.”
A great estimate is wasted if the context behind it dies in a salesperson’s inbox.
The success of a project is often determined in the critical few days between signing the contract and writing the first line of code.
Bridge the gap. Institute a formal handoff process. And use a tool like devtimate to ensure your entire agency is working from the same playbook.
