Every commercial organisation moves work between people: business development hands an account to sales, sales hands a signed deal to delivery, an account manager returns a dormant relationship to business development. Each of those moments is where the customer experiences whether the company is one organisation or a collection of individuals. Yet handovers are rarely designed; they happen through hallway conversations and forwarded emails.
Preserve the reasoning, not just the facts.
The obvious handover content — contact details, deal size, product scope — is the easiest to transfer and the least valuable on its own. What the next person actually needs is the reasoning behind the relationship: why this account was prioritised, what the buyer values beyond the specification, which objection almost ended the conversation and why it was overcome.
Without that reasoning, the receiving colleague restarts the relationship from zero: re-asking questions the buyer has already answered, re-explaining things that were settled and unknowingly undoing positions that took months to establish. Buyers notice immediately when the organisation has not remembered its own conversations.
If the reason behind a decision does not survive the handover, the next conversation starts from zero.
Make ownership explicit at every stage.
Most handover friction is ownership friction. Two people both 'sort of' follow an account, so nobody prepares properly; or the opposite, where the account silently falls between two roles because each assumed the other had it. The operating model should state, for every stage of the commercial journey, exactly who owns the relationship and who supports it.
Ownership also has a time dimension. During a handover week, who answers the buyer's call? Until the transfer is confirmed, the previous owner remains responsible — and the new owner starts shadowing, not substituting. Small rules like these prevent the quiet gaps where customers feel abandoned.
Carry the people map, not only the account record.
Commercial relationships are built between people. A useful handover preserves who was involved on the buyer's side: the technical evaluator who liked the demonstration, the procurement manager who needs a different kind of proof, the director whose priority shifted the timeline. Losing that map means the next colleague builds influence from scratch in an account where it already existed.
Recording stakeholder roles and sentiments is not administrative overhead; it is the accumulated value of every conversation so far. In systems built as commercial memory, this history is structured enough to be found and rich enough to be believed.
“The stakeholder map is the asset. The deal record is only its snapshot.”De Grijff · Commercial operating principle
Define the minimum handover and make it habitual.
For each handover type in your organisation, define the minimum that must be true before work moves: context written, ownership transferred, stakeholder map current, next step agreed with the customer. Keep it short enough that people actually do it — five well-chosen items beat a checklist nobody opens.
Then make the handover a conversation, not a document drop. Fifteen minutes between the two colleagues transfers nuance no field can capture, and it signals to the buyer that they are being handed to someone who already understands them. Designing these routines — together with the roles and systems behind them — is a central part of a Commercial Operating Model engagement.
References & further reading
- Where does momentum get lost between teams? — De Grijff
- What should the organisation learn from each interaction? — De Grijff
- Commercial Operating Model — De Grijff
