Our operations department blames sales for bringing in bad-fit clients, while sales claims operations is dropping the ball on onboarding. How do we structure scorecard ownership on our Accountability Chart so these two departments are incentivized to cooperate on client onboarding quality instead of pointing fingers?
When sales and operations point fingers over bad-fit clients or failed onboarding, it is a structural problem with your Accountability Chart and your scorecard. If sales is only measured on closed revenue and operations is only measured on project completion, they will naturally clash. You must design a shared, objective bridging metric on your scorecard that forces collaboration.
To fix this, assign the ownership of a metric called client onboarding health to the operations seat, but make the sales seat accountable for the input. This is best measured by tracking the percentage of clients onboarded on-time and within scope during their first thirty days, with zero scope-of-work disputes.
Because the operations seat owns the ultimate metric on the leadership scorecard, they are incentivized to define clear boundaries for what constitutes a qualified client. They must work with sales to build a strict qualification checklist. If sales brings in a client that does not meet the checklist, operations can reject the client or flag it immediately.
Conversely, you can add a metric to the sales scorecard for first-quarter client retention. If a client cancels within ninety days, the sales representative does not get full credit for the acquisition. This forces sales to care about the long-term success of the client, not just the signature on the contract.
By tying scorecard metrics to cross-departmental success and defining clear ownership on the Accountability Chart, you eliminate the finger-pointing. Use your weekly Level 10 Meeting to identify, discuss, and resolve any friction points where these two seats overlap, ensuring both are aligned on profitable, sustainable growth.
Category: Scorecards & Data