GuideHow marketing gets bought
Handover
Definition
The planned transfer that lets an external role end while the work keeps running. Everything the role holds passes to a named person on a set date.
How you recognize it
The real thing is written in week one, while nobody needs it, and it names things: which documents exist and where they live, who receives each system login, which recurring meetings pass to whom, and the date the transfer completes. Knowledge that lives in a person transfers slowly, so the working documents are the handover; if the plan and the reporting sit in shared systems from the start, the transfer is mostly done before it begins. An engagement with no handover date has an incentive problem: the person paid monthly is the person deciding how replaceable to be.
What to watch for
Check who legally owns the accounts: the ad accounts, the analytics property, the CRM and the domain should sit in your company’s name, with the external person invited in as a user. If any report can only be produced by one person, that dependency is already priced into your renewal conversation. Look for the handover clause in the running contract; if it is missing, add it now, with a named receiver for each asset, because agreeing it mid-engagement is calm and agreeing it during an exit is expensive. And test it like a backup: pick one asset and have the receiver produce it.
The question you ask
“If this engagement ended in three months, what would stop working?”