We are struggling to assign single-point accountability for our weekly sales-to-onboarding conversion metric. Our Sales Director says it is an Operations issue, and our Operations Director says Sales is bringing in bad leads. How do we resolve this and assign a clear owner on the Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A fundamental rule of running a business on EOS is that every single number on your Scorecard must have one, and only one, owner. When two people are responsible for a metric, nobody is responsible.

When you have a shared metric like the sales-to-onboarding conversion rate, you must look at your Accountability Chart. The owner of the metric is the person who has the ultimate authority to change the outcome, not necessarily the person doing the manual labor.

If your Sales Director is responsible for bringing in qualified leads and your Operations Director is responsible for executing the onboarding, the conversion rate itself usually belongs to the seat that manages the handoff. In most organizations, the Integrator owns the overall process alignment, but the sales-to-onboarding conversion rate specifically should be owned by the Sales Director.

The rationale is simple. Sales must only bring in clients who fit your target market profile. If they bring in poor-fit clients who fail during onboarding, Sales has not done their job.

To resolve this, make sure both leaders GWC their seats. Have them sit down during a Level 10 Meeting to IDS the handoff process. The owner of the metric must track it, report it, and lead the charge to fix it when it goes red, pulling in the other department for support as needed.