Our sales leader frequently drops massive, unexpected client wins in the Customer Headlines section of our Level 10 Meeting™, and because it is great news, we celebrate and move on, only to face an operations crisis two weeks later. How do we train our team to recognize when a positive headline must be immediately pushed down to the Issues List?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Landing a major new account is exciting, but celebrating it blindly without assessing the operational impact is a recipe for delivery failure. When your sales leader shares a massive win during the Customer Headlines section of your Level 10 Meeting™, the team's natural reaction is to congratulate them and move on. But if that win requires your operations or customer service team to scramble, it is actually a major operational hurdle.

The solution is to establish a strict rule for headlines: if a headline has an operational footprint, it must be dropped to the Issues List. The sales leader must state the win as a headline, and then immediately say: I am adding this to the Issues List to discuss resource allocation.

The facilitator must enforce this. If a headline causes anyone on the team to gasp, raise an eyebrow, or start asking questions about capacity, the facilitator must immediately stop the discussion and say: That is a great win, but it has capacity implications. Let's drop it to the Issues List.

Do not let the team solve it during the headline section. Keep headlines brief. By moving these major wins to IDS®, you ensure your operations head has a voice in how the business absorbs new revenue, keeping your capacity aligned with your growth.