Humans enjoy shared growth. Sports teams grow together through victories and losses, friendships develop through coming-of-age lessons and shared passions, and even relationships with our co-workers strengthen through big business wins and culture-building events. But when that growth is no longer mutual or symbiotic, people and teams tend to grow apart.
So when it comes to scaling companies, how do leaders prevent their customer-facing employees from getting lost in the bustle of rapid expansion?
It starts by uniting teams internally.
Customer success and sales teams typically exist as the lifeblood of an organization at first launch, connecting customers to valuable services and building ongoing relationships that evolve over time. In order for the customer experience to feel authentic and beneficial working with their go-to points of contact, the seamless collaboration between the CS and sales departments is vital to future success as the company grows.
“When organizations align sales and customer success departments, you get to see how good ideas are created,” said Queenie Lin, customer value senior manager at Celonis. “While the CS team can quickly know if a client is a good fit or not, sales can provide a lens into how tough it is to acquire customers.”
As the tech industry shows no signs of slowing down heading into 2022, Built In NYC caught up with four customer success leaders to get a better understanding of the current landscape for any company looking to scale, and the best practices of uniting their CS and sales teams to bring that small-startup sense of team collaboration along with them.
What are some strategies you’ve developed to create alignment between your customer success and sales teams?
A strong relationship between sales and customer success (CS) is the foundation for a successful customer experience. Establishing a consistent knowledge-sharing process between the sales and the post-sales teams — as well as providing regular feedback of observations and lessons learned — will ensure the customer success team has the best platform and resources to drive clients to renew and expand.
Describe the challenges that can arise in this relationship as a company scales, and how your customer success and sales teams have been able to manage them.
First, strike and maintain the right balance between sales and customer success targets. While sales focus primarily on the conversion aspect, customer success deems the customer experience as the priority. It is crucial to find a balance between the goals and objectives of both teams to ensure a successful customer journey and experience.
Next, align on a defined customer journey upfront. Getting sales and CS teams on the same page is a valuable framework, and both parties can track an overview of past actions, account history and live customer health. Having a unified system for record and planning goals moving forward puts everyone on the same page. This framework will also lead to accountability to each other in pushing the agenda forward for each account. When grouped together, both of them can boost up the company’s growth and quality.
Lastly, identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Create a success plan to capture target objectives, expected outcomes and desired timelines for each customer. Expansion is a joint effort between sales and customer success, and it is possible to identify opportunities for upselling by maintaining regular plans between the two teams.
Encouraging collaboration early in the sales cycle can allow customer success teams to help frame opportunities and value.”
When customer success and sales teams are aligned at scale, how does it affect the business overall?
When organizations align sales and customer success departments, you get to see how good ideas are created. While the CS team can quickly know if a client is a good fit or not, sales can provide a lens into how tough it is to acquire customers. Encouraging collaboration early in the sales cycle can allow customer success teams to help frame opportunities and value.
What are some strategies you’ve developed to create alignment between your customer success and sales teams?
One of the most important strategies I’ve shared with my team is the importance of internal relationship management.
Of late, I’m taking much of my inspiration from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s mantra: “Careers are not a ladder; they’re a jungle gym. Look for opportunities, look for growth, look for impact, look for mission.” I apply this mantra toward my partnership strategy. As an external-facing team, many of the problems we have to solve or issues we have to address in customer success requires internal collaboration and identifying opportunities to grow and make an impact. The relationships we have with other groups in the organization are the foundation of our success, and the sales team specifically is critical.
It is important to develop a level of trust that creates an environment that facilitates collaboration and results in shared goals. Once these bonds are built, there is no issue or challenge the teams can’t tackle together and learn from.
Describe the challenges that can arise in this relationship as a company scales, and how your customer success and sales teams have been able to manage them.
Two of the biggest challenges with rapidly growing teams are onboarding and educating new hires. A comprehensive onboarding and training program is essential for arming all new team members with the tools they need to succeed in these customer-facing roles.
When you are at a young startup, these types of processes are less of a priority because there are fewer people involved and the amount of knowledge needed to succeed can be minimal. As you grow, proper onboarding processes and procedures are critical for enabling sales and customer success relationships. Even more importantly is the ability to provide in-depth training both quickly and thoughtfully as a part of your strategy.
Another significant challenge is managing the relationships of larger customer organizations with various departmental stakeholders and growing needs. At this point, information sharing — including lessons learned — is pivotal to ensuring future challenges are handled thoughtfully and repeated mistakes are avoided.
Finally, as your customer base continues to grow and becomes more complex over time, the challenge becomes hiring staff to meet the diverse needs of your expanding portfolios.
A comprehensive onboarding and training program is essential for arming all new team members with the tools they need to succeed.”
When customer success and sales teams are aligned at scale, how does it affect the business overall?
That’s when the magic happens! When customer success and sales teams are fully in sync and prepared to collaborate, the pathway to happy customers is inevitable. I’ve witnessed this firsthand and watched many challenges get solved when this conscious relationship between customer success and sales is formed.
This doesn’t just happen overnight: It takes hard work and commitment to drive toward a common goal on both sides. Challenges will certainly arise along the way to reaching this status, but once you achieve it, then issues become preventable at best and manageable at worst. It’s all blue skies ahead.
What are some strategies you’ve developed to create alignment between your customer success and sales teams?
At Actuate, customer success and sales closely collaborate at all stages of the sales process. The most important change we’ve made to drive better alignment is to involve customer success in the pre-sales process. As part of this collaboration, we built a live demo system that helps us shorten the sales cycles by showing our prospects our main capabilities through onboarding them into our system. We also made the onboarding process more efficient and streamlined so customers can have a better experience once they join us.
Providing internal and client training also helps us show our capabilities and make sure our sales team have a better quality of life. These strategies create a better customer experience because there isn’t a transition between sales and customer success once the contract is signed.
Describe the challenges that can arise in this relationship as a company scales, and how your customer success and sales teams have been able to manage them.
The main challenge we’re currently facing is the volume of work that both our CS team and the sales team face. As a fast-growing startup, we’re always adding customers — and because our team is a tightly-integrated part of the sales process we cover more stages of the customer journey than many other customer success teams. This means that we’re constantly hiring customer success managers so we can keep working on both onboarding and sales engineering.
The key way we’ve managed this challenge is by collaborating closely with engineering to mature our product platform and UI. This is so customer success can operate independently of sales and engineering while also leaning on our agile engineering team when needed, allowing us to onboard customers faster and more efficiently.
The most important change we’ve made to drive better alignment is to involve customer success in the pre-sales process.”
When customer success and sales teams are aligned at scale, how does it affect the business overall?
The customer success and sales collaboration directly impacts revenue growth. The fact that customer success supports the sales team on pre-sale calls allows us to be ready for any upcoming challenge before a contract is even signed. Once signed, we can quickly onboard our customer’s IT systems since we already have a good relationship with the new client, which eliminates any friction from an account management transition.
This full life cycle approach to customer success allows the company to scale quickly, and add new products while running the sales cycle and having happy clients. Everybody wins.
What are some strategies you’ve developed to create alignment between your customer success and sales teams?
It’s important for customer success and sales to view each other as partners. To achieve this, we’ve focused on highlighting the areas in which our goals overlap and encouraging cross-functional knowledge sharing.
The efforts of CS and sales teams directly contribute to overall business growth. We’ve found success in reminding ourselves of how our individual goals stack up to this overarching mission. When members of the team can see how they’re working toward a common goal, it becomes much easier to work collaboratively. Under these circumstances, I think the natural tension between CS and sales teams can push each team to be more successful.
While CS and sales collaboration can take many forms, the key theme for Radar has been creating the space for effective knowledge sharing. Facilitating and rewarding cross-functional learning has been a core focus.
Describe the challenges that can arise in this relationship as a company scales, and how your customer success and sales teams have been able to manage them.
Unsurprisingly, growth can make knowledge sharing more challenging. As our team has grown, we’ve needed to evolve our methods for fostering cross-functional learning in order for them to scale.
For example, we recently adjusted our sales handover process to increase the accessibility of data collected pre-sales in our CRM for CS. Our goal was to empower CS with the information required to set our customer relationships up for success, while minimizing overhead for sales. We’ve also created dedicated forums for CS to share new learnings, insights and customer feedback with a broad audience.
So far, I think our most important takeaway has been the increasing importance of communicating our company-wide goals and how each team contributes to our success.
When members of the team can see how they’re working toward a common goal, it becomes much easier to work collaboratively.”
When customer success and sales teams are aligned at scale, how does it affect the business overall?
Alignment between sales and customer success is a key growth driver. When sales and CS teams are aligned, their efforts create a positive feedback loop that results in better business outcomes.
Earlier this afternoon, a member of our sales team shared how a customer case study helped to accelerate his conversations with a prospect. Customer stories are some of the most important pieces of collateral for generating new business and are a good example of this positive feedback loop.
When sales signs customers that are a good fit, customer success helps these customers achieve their goals more quickly. These customers renew and become advocates, sales signs more good-fit customers, and the cycle repeats.
