Pipelines are usually drawn with a point where a lead becomes an opportunity and changes owner. The drawing is tidy. What happens in practice is that context is summarised, the summary loses the part that mattered, and the buyer notices.
The transition is better treated as a zone with a width. Work continues on both sides of it for a period, and the handover is a gradual transfer of context rather than a moment when a record changes hands.
Who it goes to
The second half of the allocation is the part firms resist. A ready opportunity moves to appropriately scaled resourcing, which often means an outside seller, a remote rep or a junior seat. The entry sale does not require the firm’s most capable people.
Sending the most senior person to every first conversation feels like service. It is expensive, it is slow, and it produces a worse outcome later, because those people then have no capacity left for the work where their judgment actually changes the answer.
What survives the move
Whatever is written down. A buyer’s stated worry, the alternative they mentioned, the timing constraint they let slip: none of these survive a CRM field called notes. They survive a defined discovery standard that names what has to be captured, which is the same artefact that makes call review possible.