Marketing gets judged on reviews, referrals, case studies and renewals.
All four of those are produced in the first two months of delivery, by people marketing has no authority over, in meetings marketing is not invited to.
That is the whole argument, and once you see it the usual remedies look absurd. When renewals soften, somebody asks marketing to build a nurture sequence. When reviews dry up, somebody asks marketing to send more review requests. Both are treating a handoff failure as a communications deficit.
You cannot campaign your way out of a customer who is confused about what they bought.
So the boundary is drawn in the wrong place. Marketing’s remit ends at the signature and its accountability starts about forty days later, which is a structural problem rather than an effort problem, and it has a specific mechanism underneath it.
Two correct descriptions of the same deal
Go and ask your newest customer what they bought. Then ask whoever is delivering it what they are building.
You will get two answers. Both will be accurate.
The customer bought a change. They said they keep losing leads and somebody told them that would stop. The delivery team received a deliverable. A ticket, a scope, a three week implementation with named milestones.
Both describe the same contract. Only one of them is what the customer will measure you against at renewal, and it is not the one in the project plan.
There is a detail that makes this worse and almost nobody designs around it. The people who signed the deal are frequently not the people who turn up to onboarding. The economic buyer approves and delegates. So the room where delivery begins contains the operational team, who were handed a scope, and does not contain the person who bought the change.
The change cannot cross the seam, because nobody in the room is carrying it.
Why this lands on marketing specifically
Look at what marketing is actually asked to produce in a given year.
Case studies with real numbers in them. Reviews on the platforms that matter. Referrals and reference calls. Permission to use a logo. Renewal rates, in most companies where marketing owns lifecycle.
Every one of those is an output of a successful first sixty days. Not of a campaign. You cannot write a case study about an engagement where the client is not sure what improved, and no amount of asking will get a review out of somebody who feels the thing they bought was quietly substituted.
Which is why I think the handoff is a marketing problem even though it is not marketing’s process. Marketing is the department that pays for it going wrong.
What delivery teams are right about
Before the fix, the fair version of the other side, because this argument is usually made badly by people in my function.
Delivery teams have a real complaint. Sales and marketing do sell things that are not deliverable, at timelines nobody checked, to customers who were told what they wanted to hear. A handoff document, dropped in after the contract is signed, becomes a mechanism for passing unrealistic promises downstream with a paper trail attached. That is worse than no document, because now the promise is written down and the person who has to honor it never agreed to it.
So the sequencing is the whole thing.
The document gets written before the deal closes, and delivery has the right to say no to what is in it. If it is written after signature, it is not a handoff, it is a confession.
The document
Six lines. It is not a process, it is a page.
What the customer said was wrong, in their own words rather than your category for it.
What they will be able to do at day thirty that they cannot do today.
Who said yes, and separately, who will actually be in the room.
What was explicitly promised, including anything said out loud on a call that is not in the contract.
What was explicitly ruled out, which is the line that saves the most arguments.
And the one number the customer will privately judge this by, even if they never said it.
Here is the test that makes it useful rather than administrative. If whoever sold it cannot fill in the second line and the sixth line, the deal is not understood well enough to deliver. That is worth knowing before the kickoff rather than in month three, and it is a far more useful conversation than asking for marketing to be added to the invite list, which reads to everybody else as marketing wanting more meetings.
A document asks nobody to concede territory. That is why it works and a culture conversation does not.
About the numbers
You will see a figure for how much churn happens in the first ninety days. I looked into it and the honest answer is that nobody knows.
The estimates run from 30% to about 70% depending on whose survey you read. The most widely quoted 2026 number comes from a vendor report based on a survey of 161 customer success leaders, cited second hand by everybody including people who clearly have not read it.
A spread that wide means the thing has not been measured consistently. What is worth taking from it is that every estimate, from every direction, puts the number high. The magnitude is unknown and the direction is unanimous, which is enough to act on and not enough to put in a board deck.
The test that costs nothing
Two things to watch, and the second is better than the first.
Days from signature to the first thing the customer would describe as value. Not to kickoff, not to project start, to the first moment something is better than it was. Most companies have never measured this and are surprised by it.
Then, at day thirty, ask the customer to tell you in their own words what has changed.
Listen to whether they describe your activity or their outcome. “You’ve built the dashboards and we’ve had the training sessions” is a description of your project plan. “We know within a day when a lead goes cold” is a description of the change they bought. If you consistently get the first kind of answer, the handoff is losing the thing that was sold, and that is where your missing reviews and referrals went.
It takes one question and you can start on Monday.
Where I come out
The handoff is the least glamorous document in a company and it decides more marketing outcomes than most campaigns do.
If you are in marketing and you are accountable for renewals, go and read the last three handoffs. If there are none, that is the finding, and it explains more about your retention numbers than your email open rates ever will.
If you’d like to think through where your own handoff is losing the promise, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp, phone or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat, and my notes on getting marketing and sales pointed the same way cover the seam before this one. I’m taking on a small number of contracts at the moment, so I’ll tell you straight whether it’s something I could help with.