Our customer onboarding process requires input from both sales and operations. Since both departments impact the onboarding timeline, how do we assign single-point ownership of this metric on our Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A core rule of the EOS® Scorecard is that every single metric must have exactly one owner. When two people own a number, nobody owns it. If you try to make your Sales Director and your Operations Director share the onboarding timeline metric, they will inevitably point fingers when the number goes red.

To resolve this, you must look at your Accountability Chart and determine who has ultimate accountability for the customer experience during this transition phase. Typically, this falls under operations or a dedicated customer success seat.

The owner of that seat is responsible for the overall onboarding timeline metric, even though they rely on sales to hand over the clean data.

The operations leader must then define and track upstream metrics that sales owns. For example, the sales team must own the measurable sales-to-ops handoff accuracy. If sales hands over incomplete client files, that metric goes red.

This structures the relationship cleanly. Operations owns the total onboarding days metric, but they hold sales accountable for the handoff quality. If the onboarding timeline goes red because sales is slow to deliver the paperwork, the operations leader brings this to the Level 10 Meeting™ as an issue.

During IDS®, the two leaders can address the root cause, which is the sales handoff, not the operations execution. This maintains the integrity of single-point accountability while recognizing the collaborative nature of the work. It allows both seats to perform their functions with clear expectations.