Principle
Every commercial organisation has a moment where responsibility for a customer passes from one function to another, and in most organisations that moment is owned by nobody. The handoff is not a step in the process. It is the gap between two processes, and gaps do not appear on org charts, in dashboards, or in anyone's objectives.
Behaviour
Consider the transition from marketing-qualified lead to sales-accepted lead, or from SDR to account executive, or from account executive to implementation. In each case, one function's success metric is completing the handoff and the receiving function's success metric begins after it. Neither party owns the transition itself, which means neither party is accountable when something is lost in it.
What is typically lost is context. The SDR knows why the prospect responded, what problem they described, and what tone the conversation had. The AE receives a CRM record with a lead source and a phone number. The AE knows the customer's specific expectations about implementation timing, which commitments were made informally, and where the political sensitivities sit. The implementation team receives a signed contract. In each case, information that materially affects the outcome exists inside one person's head and does not survive the transition.
The organisation does not experience this as a failure because each function reports success against its own metric. Marketing hit its MQL target. The SDR hit their meeting target. The AE closed the deal. Only the customer experiences the discontinuity, and the customer's experience is not a metric anyone owns either.
The handoff is not a step in the process. It is the gap between two processes, and gaps do not appear on anyone's objectives.
Evidence
Map every functional handoff in the commercial process and, for each one, identify the individual whose objectives are affected by the quality of that transition. In most organisations there is at least one handoff for which the answer is nobody.
Then measure conversion and cycle time across each handoff, not within each function. A handoff where conversion drops materially or where cycle time inflates without explanation is a handoff where information is being lost. Compare against handoffs where a single individual carries responsibility across both sides, which typically show visibly better throughput.
The most direct evidence is to interview the receiving party. Ask an AE what they wish they knew when a lead arrived, and ask an implementation lead what they wish they knew when a contract landed. The answers are usually specific, consistent, and describe information that existed in the organisation and simply did not travel.
Psychology
Handoffs are unowned because ownership of an interface is structurally awkward. A metric that spans two functions cannot be assigned cleanly to either leader, and any attempt to do so generates a boundary dispute about accountability that most organisations avoid rather than resolve. It is easier to give each function a metric that terminates at its own boundary and assume the transitions take care of themselves.
Individuals, meanwhile, are rationally uninterested in the quality of a handoff they are sending rather than receiving. The SDR is measured on meetings booked, not on whether the AE succeeds. Time spent enriching the context that travels with the lead is time not spent booking the next meeting. The incentive to do the handoff well sits entirely with the receiving party, who has no control over it.
Commercial Risk
Handoff losses are systematically invisible in functional reporting, which means an investor examining marketing performance, sales performance, and implementation performance separately can find each of them adequate while the end-to-end system performs poorly. The aggregate underperformance is real and is often attributed to the weakest-looking function rather than to the transitions between them.
This misattribution is expensive. A post-acquisition plan that responds by replacing the head of the function with the worst-looking metrics addresses a symptom while leaving the structural gap intact, and the replacement inherits the same unowned interface. The durable fix, assigning explicit ownership to the transition itself, is cheap, uncomfortable, and almost never on the plan.
Investment Committee Note