Why winning clients isn't enough: the hidden cost of misalignment.

Let me start somewhere unexpected.

Last week I spent five hours co-ordinating medical support for my husband following a long hospital stay. Multiple consultants in multiple departments, each one expert in their specialism, each one doing their best.

There was no single place where all the information lived. No complete, up-to-date picture that everyone involved could see and work from. Each consultant had their own records, their own view, and no easy way to see what the others knew.

So I became that picture. And that’s the problem.

When no one is working from the same view, someone else has to hold it all together. And it isn't just medicine, it’s everywhere.

A telecoms provider promises you certain terms, then confirmation arrives and is different than expected. A supermarket delivery turns up with items you never ordered, and the driver apologises before you've even said a word - they’ve heard it all day.

In every case, everyone is doing their best, but the picture they work from is different. And the person who pays the price is the one at the end of it all: the patient, the customer, the client.

It's exactly what I see in businesses every day. Not failure, not incompetence, just different parts of a system pulling in slightly different directions, and the gaps appearing in places the client feels, long before the business does.

Watch the video below for an overview, or read on for the full story.

What that looks like in recruitment and staffing businesses.

A recruitment business I worked with was growing well. New clients, a capable team, a strong reputation. But their clients kept coming back saying the same thing: what they'd been promised wasn't quite what they were getting, and nobody inside the business could put their finger on why.

When we looked properly, it wasn't a performance problem. The team was good and the standards existed. But the sales director had agreed additional commitments with clients that hadn't filtered through to everyone responsible for delivering them.

Nobody had done anything wrong, and nobody was being difficult. But each part of the business was working from a different version of reality.

That's what I mean by misalignment. And it's one of the most common reasons growth stalls, while from the outside, everything looks fine.

Why it's so hard to see.

When a business isn't working from one shared picture, there's no alarm. Gaps just accumulate.

Changes are made in one part of the business that never reach the others. Handovers have weaknesses nobody has noticed until they cause problems, so work gets done twice or not at all.

None of it’s dramatic, but the cost is real, and expensive. Low level friction impacts everything, that’s hard to describe, and harder to fix.

It's never just one part of the business either.

I was working with a firm where the relationship between sales and finance had got to the point where they were barely speaking.

They sat in different parts of the building, which didn't help. But the real issue was that neither side understood why the other worked the way they did. Sales couldn't understand why finance wouldn't just prioritise their requests. Finance couldn't understand why sales treated every deadline as an emergency.

They weren't being difficult. They were avoiding a conversation they didn’t know how to have.

I met with the finance director and asked one question: What part of your job absolutely has to be done on time, every time, no exceptions? They told me immediately: the statutory reporting, because late submission meant regulatory fines, potential legal exposure, serious consequences.

Then I asked: So when the sales director needs figures for a board presentation, how important is that to you compared to your top priority?

They thought about it: Not very, they replied. It’s not like we'd get fined.

We talked it through. What does it cost the business when sales can't present accurate figures to a board? What does it cost in lost revenue, in wasted time, in decisions made on incomplete information? What's the equivalent of the fine?

They didn't need telling, just needed the right question, and space to think it through.

Within a few weeks the dynamic between those two teams had shifted. Not because of a restructure or a new process, but because they finally understood what the other one was actually trying to do.

What changes when everyone is working from the same picture.

Things run better, and then the numbers prove it.

Handovers stop being a source of anxiety; people know exactly what they're passing on, who they're passing it to, and what that person needs to cover, without having to ask. And clients stop noticing inconsistency because there isn't any.

There's a standard I've applied in every business I've been involved with: if someone was absent unexpectedly tomorrow, could someone else step in and know exactly how to continue their work? Not approximately, but exactly. That level of clarity doesn't happen by accident; it's what a shared picture makes possible.

The results can be substantial.

In one business I worked with, the fill rate increased to 90% after the sales and delivery teams finally agreed on what good looked like at every stage. The team hadn't changed, neither had the market; the structure had, and the results followed.

 With a shared picture in place, everything works better. The support you bring in, the technology you adopt, the people you develop. All of it improves when the foundation is right.

Where to start.

Ask one question across every function in your business: do we all agree on what a great customer experience looks like at every stage? Not in general terms, but specifically.

If the answers vary depending on who you ask, and they almost always vary, that's where the work is.

The Growth Benchmark is designed for exactly that moment. Your whole leadership team works through it together, so you're all finally looking at the same picture at the same time.

It usually takes about an hour. And most teams come away seeing things they hadn’t spotted before.

It's free, and it's the right place to begin.