What a Broken Handoff Between Sales and Delivery Actually Costs Per Month
The gap between the person who sells the work and the people who deliver it is where margin quietly disappears. Here's how to put a monthly number on it.
Cerno Team
Operations
Every company with a separate sales function and a separate delivery function has a seam between them. Work crosses that seam as a set of assumptions: what was promised, at what price, by when, and with what exceptions. When the seam is tight, delivery starts on the day it was supposed to. When it isn't, the cost shows up somewhere other than the line item that caused it — usually in overtime, in a discount at invoicing, or in a client who doesn't come back.
The reason this stays invisible is that no one owns the number. Sales measures closed deals. Delivery measures utilisation. The loss lives in between.
The four leaks
1. Re-discovery
Delivery re-asks the client questions sales already asked. The client answers again, slightly differently, and now there are two versions of the requirement. Every re-asked question also spends a small amount of the client's confidence — they assume you have one system, and you have just shown them you have two.
2. Scope drift between the promise and the plan
Something was said in the sales conversation that never made it into the scope. It is usually small and specific: a report format, an integration, a training session. Delivery either absorbs it (margin) or refuses it (relationship). Both cost, and neither gets recorded as a handoff failure.
3. Dead time at the start
The deal closes on a Tuesday and real work starts eleven days later because the kickoff needs information nobody collected during the sale. The client is paying attention during exactly this window, which is when your responsiveness is being judged.
4. Rework from stale context
Delivery builds against what was in the file rather than what the client actually needs today, because the file was written six weeks earlier during the sale and nothing updated it.
Putting a number on it
You do not need a study. Take your last ten projects and fill in four rows.
| Leak | What to measure | Typical range |
|---|---|---|
| Re-discovery | Hours spent re-collecting known information | 2–6 h per project |
| Scope drift | Value of unbilled work absorbed | 3–8% of project value |
| Dead time | Days between signature and real start | 5–15 days |
| Rework | Hours redone after a context correction | 4–12 h per project |
Then convert. If you run twelve projects a month at an average of €8,000, and scope drift alone is 5%, that is €4,800 a month leaving without an invoice line. Add eight hours of re-discovery and rework per project at a €60 internal cost and you are at roughly €10,500 a month. The number is usually larger than the cost of fixing it, which is the point of measuring it.
Why it is a systems problem and not a people problem
The instinct is to say sales should write better notes. That instruction has been given in every company that has this problem, and it does not hold, because the note format is a matter of individual discipline rather than a property of the system.
What holds is making the handoff a structured object rather than a conversation. That means:
- A fixed set of fields that must be complete before a deal can be marked won — not a free-text summary
- One record, visible to both functions, that is the only place scope lives
- Any commitment made during the sale recorded as a line item, including the small verbal ones
- A kickoff that cannot be scheduled until the record is complete
- A named owner for the seam, because a process owned by two functions is owned by neither
The structural version of this fix is that sales cannot close what delivery cannot start. Once the system enforces that, the leaks close as a side effect.
How to tell whether you have this
You have it if any of these are true: delivery routinely asks the client something the client already told sales; your average gap between signature and kickoff is over a week; someone reconciles what was sold against what is being built, by hand, more than once a month; or the phrase "that's what they were told during the sale" appears in your internal conversations.
If you recognise more than one, the cost is already in your P&L. It is just recorded under a different name.
Related reading: How to Turn a Manual Business Process Into a Competitive Advantage and When Your Business Has Outgrown Off-the-Shelf Software.
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That floor is what lets the work be done properly — diagnosis, build and handoff — without cutting corners. If that is where you are, the next step is a short application.
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