Ask a commercial team who owns a specific stage of the journey and you often hear several answers — or none. Marketing owns the campaign, sales owns the deal, and everything in between belongs to whoever happens to pick it up. That works while the team is small and everyone talks daily. As the organisation grows, undefined ownership becomes the quiet reason opportunities wait, accounts are contacted twice and nobody feels accountable for the customer after signature.
The gaps sit between the stages everyone recognises.
Most teams agree on who owns lead generation and who closes deals. The unclear parts are in between: nurturing accounts that are not ready yet, re-engaging stalled opportunities, expanding existing customers and learning from lost deals.
Those grey zones are exactly where commercial value is created or lost, and they rarely appear on anyone's scorecard.
Work that belongs to everyone is, in practice, owned by nobody.
Ownership means the right to decide, not just the duty to act.
Explicit ownership describes who is responsible for each stage, what outcome they are accountable for and which decisions they can take without escalation — such as disqualifying a lead, changing priority or involving a specialist.
Without decision rights, owners become coordinators. Every choice waits for a meeting, and momentum depends on the calendar.
Every transfer of responsibility should be visible.
When ownership changes, the receiving person needs context: why the account is relevant, what has been discussed and what the next step is. A handover agreement defines that evidence in advance, so no one has to reconstruct the story.
This protects the customer experience as much as internal efficiency. Buyers notice immediately when the company does not remember them.
“Clear ownership is what lets a growing team behave like one organisation.”De Grijff · Commercial operating principle
Map the journey, then name an owner for every step.
Draw the full commercial journey from first signal to expansion. For each stage, name one accountable owner, their outcome and their decision rights. Mark every handover and agree what must be true before it happens.
Then test the map against a few recent accounts. Wherever the real story deviates, you have found the part of the model that needs attention first.
References & further reading
- Where does momentum get lost between teams? — De Grijff
- Commercial Operating Model Scan — De Grijff
