A deal closes in the last week of January. Kickoff happens in the second week of March. Nobody on either side of the firm is tracking the gap. Sales has moved on to the next opportunity. Delivery is still finishing the project that was supposed to finish in December. The buyer, who was told this would start in February, is quietly annoyed.
That gap has a name in almost no technology solution provider I have looked at. Which is strange, because it is where a surprising amount of the firm's margin disappears.
The gap nobody owns
Signed-to-started is the interval between the contract signature and the first day real delivery happens. Not the internal kickoff slide. Not the welcome email. The first day a paid body-of-work role does paid body-of-work.
In a healthy deal this is a week, maybe two. In a lot of firms it is four to eight weeks. At the scale-stage firms I have worked with, I have seen it stretch past ten.
The reason nobody owns it is structural. Sales owns everything up to signature and gets paid for that. Delivery owns everything from kickoff and gets measured on that. The gap sits between two ownership boundaries and belongs to neither, so it drifts. When it drifts, nobody is accountable. When nothing is accountable, nothing improves.
Finance feels it. The revenue the deal represents is not recognisable yet, and in many project contracts the first invoice is gated on kickoff or a first milestone. The CEO feels it, because the pipeline-to-revenue cycle looks slow and the reason is not in the CRM. Everyone else experiences it as an ambient background cost of doing business, which is exactly how costs stay in a business.
What actually lives in the gap
If you look at a set of real deals and ask what filled their signed-to-started weeks, you find a handful of recurring activities. None of them need to take as long as they do.
Rescoping for reality. The scope sold was the scope the buyer was willing to sign for. The scope deliverable with the actual team available is not quite the same thing. Delivery spends the first two weeks negotiating a quieter version of the scope with the account lead, who negotiates a quieter version with the buyer.
Staffing confirmation. The rate-carded quote assumed a role mix that made the commercials work. The delivery team available does not quite match that role mix. A practice lead is reassigning people, swapping a senior for two mids, or trying to bring a contractor in. Kickoff waits on staffing.
Paperwork. Purchase orders, supplier setup, MSAs, data protection agreements, security reviews. None of this should be news to either side. Often half of it is.
Buyer-side readiness. The buyer commits to access, data, decision-makers, and sign-off authority. Then at kickoff one of those is not ready. The deal waits for the thing that should have been named in the contract.
Handover archaeology. Sales knows things about the deal that delivery needs. Those things are in an inbox, a call recording, or one person's head. Someone spends a week reconstructing what was agreed and why.
None of these activities is unreasonable. All of them compress substantially when a firm decides they should, and the fact that most firms do not decide is what makes the gap as long as it is.
Why sales and delivery both underweight it
Sales underweights the gap because the metric they are paid on does not extend past signature. The gap does not show up in pipeline, does not show up in commission, does not show up in forecast accuracy, does not show up in most CRM reports. What does not show up does not get optimised.
Delivery underweights it because the metric they are paid on starts at kickoff. On-time delivery is measured from day one of the project. Utilisation kicks in the same day. Everything before that is a pre-game that nobody grades.
The result is a polite mutual shrug. Sales thinks delivery is slow to start. Delivery thinks sales oversold the start date. Both are right, and both are solving for incentives that ignore the gap.
CEOs see it as soon as they look. Book-to-bill looks fine. Revenue per head looks flat or declining. The sales team is hitting quota, the delivery team is hitting utilisation, and the firm is running slower than the sum of its parts. The signed-to-started gap is where a surprising amount of that slowness lives.
How to compress it
The compression moves are boring. That is why they work.
Measure the gap. The most important move, and the one almost nobody does. Every deal that closes gets a signed-to-started number attached to it when kickoff happens. Track it by practice, by deal size, by month. Look at it every quarter. The average and the tail are the two numbers that matter: average signed-to-started across the firm, and the 90th percentile (the deals that drag).
Move rescoping upstream. If delivery rescopes the deal in the first two weeks post-close, the rescope should have happened pre-close. A late-stage sales review that pulls delivery into the final scope shape costs a hour and saves six weeks. For the shape of that review, see sales to delivery handover.
Name the kickoff readiness criteria in the SOW. What does the buyer need to have in place for kickoff to happen? Access, data sources, decision-makers, review cadence. Name them in the statement of work, not in a welcome email two weeks later. For a starting checklist, see what belongs in a statement of work.
Staff deals at 70%, not at signature. If a practice lead waits until signature to commit staff, signature is already late. Weighted-pipeline capacity views let practice leads hold soft allocations against deals that are 60%+ likely, so the "who is on this" conversation starts weeks earlier.
Kill rework by freezing the shape. The deal shape at signature should be deliverable. If delivery has to renegotiate it to make the commercials work, the commercials were wrong at signature. A scope and schedule that delivery can defend before the buyer signs is cheap. A rescope after signature is not.
The metric CEOs should watch
Book-to-bill is the ratio of bookings to billings in a period, and most CEOs of services firms already track it. Signed-to-started is the leading indicator book-to-bill is lagging.
If signed-to-started is creeping up quarter over quarter, book-to-bill will deteriorate in the quarter after next. If signed-to-started is holding while bookings are rising, the firm has real velocity, not just sales velocity. If signed-to-started is shrinking while bookings hold, the firm has found margin without cutting cost, because every week compressed is revenue that was already sold, arriving earlier.
Put it on the CEO dashboard next to win rate, average deal size, and gross margin. If you want one number that tells you whether the firm is running well across sales, delivery, and finance, this is a strong candidate. It is also one of the few numbers on that dashboard that the team has direct control over.
Wrapping up
The gap between signing a deal and actually starting it is not glamorous. It does not appear in board decks, does not feature in product demos, does not come up in customer conversations. It quietly drains four to eight weeks of revenue recognition, delivery confidence, and buyer trust out of every meaningful deal, and it does so in a part of the operating model nobody is paid to look at.
Measuring it is cheap. Compressing it is mostly discipline. The firms that take both seriously tend to look, from the outside, like they have more capacity than their headcount suggests. They do not. They just waste less of it in the gap.
If you want the sales-side habit that keeps the gap from opening in the first place, see capacity-aware selling. For the sales-to-delivery handover shape that lives in the middle of the gap, sales to delivery handover covers the practical checklist. Estii carries the contract-to-kickoff shape in the same model as the proposal, so the deal versions that sales signed and the scope delivery is working against are the same artefact, not a handover reconciliation.
