BACK TO BLOG

Are your Sales and Customer Success on the same page?

Shankar Ganapathy
January 17, 2022
sales and customer success hero image

Throughout the pandemic, B2B companies have needed to adapt to changing customer needs and preferences continuously. But a quick change is difficult when the company lacks alignment between the departments that most frequently speak to customers: sales and customer success.

When sales and customer success aren’t aligned, both suffer. This misalignment can lead to a lack of trust between the two departments, which makes delivering a compelling customer experience and value more difficult.

When companies need to quickly adapt their sales or customer success efforts, misalignment that can cost the company a few days can mean big changes to business outcomes, like lost or delayed sales and revenues. 

Identify Misalignment

We all see lots of symptoms of misalignment on a day-to-day basis. Here are a few examples of common scenarios that illustrate this Sales-CS misalignment. You could think of many more in your business context.

1) The selling team is expected to condense and summarize 6+ months of sales interactions and customer insights into a 2-page handover document, forcing a significant loss of information and breakdown of trust between these functions.

2) The CS team makes another discovery call from scratch causing customers to see the Sales-CS misalignment, which hurts the organizational credibility created by the selling team.

3) CSM spots an upsell opportunity and does a lot of the initial discovery and scoping without involving the sales team. This causes internal friction and a lack of clarity for customers on their respective roles.

4) And so many more…..

All these individual stakeholders across sales and customer success teams could be doing near-perfect work in their respective lanes, but lack of communication and an effective feedback loop is causing both teams to lose opportunities — leading to lost/delayed sales and revenue opportunities for the company.

The business impact of fixing sales-cs misalignment

When Sales and Customer Success teams have proper alignment, the company will see the following benefits:

1) Accelerated account growth: Customer success and sales teams will have a shared understanding of customer context, needs, and expectations and are working together as one unit to help customers achieve their goals. This means upsell opportunities arrive faster and lead to improved customer advocacy. 

2) Improved customer satisfaction: When Sales and Customer Success teams work hand in hand, customer experience is significantly improved - no repetitive questions, high-value inputs, recommendations for customer pain points, faster time to value, etc. This means a happier customer and hopefully a vocal one.

3) Increased operational efficiency: Information flows between the two teams smoothly, meaning massive amounts of time and effort saved. On average, you could see a 20-25% increase in productivity per employee

4) Higher employee satisfaction: When the classic sales and customer success conflict no longer exists, they are happier and are able to achieve more in less time. There is a culture of trust and transparency, leading to higher employee satisfaction and retention. 

Get CS onboarding datasheet Now!

Solving Alignment

There are four dimensions of alignment for sales and customer success teams - roles & responsibilities, customer context, execution playbook, and culture. 

1) Clearly defining roles and responsibilities

The pandemic has changed the B2B buyer. They prefer not to talk with your account executives and want to do more things via self-service. To top this all, more things are getting done remotely, and this new behavior is here to stay. 

In the pre-pandemic world, loosely defined boundaries between sales and customer success were sustainable since there were more face-to-face meetings both internally and with the customer. But the post-pandemic world calls for all things to be done virtually. This means your sales and customer success manager for a particular account may not even meet each other face to face; more importantly, they may not face-to-face meet your customer while they are in the current job. This is a mind-boggling change and calls for a digital-first approach to defining roles and responsibilities. 

This clear definition has two aspects:

(i) Sales and customer success teams operate from a shared playbook for customer value discovery and delivery.  

(ii) your customers have a clear perspective on who is who on your team

To achieve this, you need to create an infrastructure to have a shared view of context for both internal and external stakeholders. 

This infrastructure should let you define best practices at a framework level and enable your frontline team to customize it at an account level. This means everyone has unparalleled and asynchronous access to clearly defined roles and responsibilities to make the customer successful. 

2) A shared understanding of Customer Context

Sales create multiple presentations during the sales cycle, they also fill out CRM systems, sales to customer success handoff documents. Similarly, customer success teams take care of new customer implementations, QBRs/MBRs, health checks, etc. All of these are shared via emails with customers, and some high-level summary is updated in CRM systems. However, there is no single view of all the customer contexts shared with the customer. The post-pandemic world has become digital-first. Having a shared understanding of customer context both internally and externally will be fundamental to your ability to closely collaborate to grow customers. 

To achieve this, you need to equip your revenue teams with predefined and integrated playbooks and enable them to personalize them based on individual customer context. Also, a feedback loop gets built to keep updating your revenue operations playbook. 

In a world where information changes quickly, the shared context helps your frontline teams hold everyone accountable on the customer context and how it changes over time. 

3) Execution playbook built around customer value

If you are like most companies, you have a sales playbook and a customer success playbook. The problem is that they are built in silos and not much thought is given to the interplay/overlap between these two playbooks. 

The common factor that ties all of these together is the customer value and your desire to deliver it. We have always had sales teams focus on value selling and post-sales to focus on value delivery. The revenue engine in the Saas world has changed from a funnel to a cyclical approach to revenue growth. 

discover buyer engagement
Discover Value

Enables your sales team with a systematic approach to understand buyers’ context.

  • Outcome alignment
  • Dynamic buying journey builder
  • Co-create Mutual Success Plan
prove buyer engagement
Prove Value

BuyerAssist empowers you to deliver the most differentiated digital buyer experience.

measure buyer engagement
Measure Value

BuyerAssist helps you understand how your customers buy and realize value from you

  • Forward-looking forecast intelligence
  • Buying behavior intelligence
  • Win-Loss analysis automation
deliver buyer engagement
Deliver Value

BuyerAssist helps you accelerate value realization for your customers.

  • Shared view of success
  • Deployment management
  • QBR and EBR automation

This calls for a more integrated approach of revenue generation and value delivery and one that puts the customer at the center of your revenue playbook. 

4) Customer Success culture

In most companies, customer success and sales are considered to be on two different sides of the company, always at odds. But the best companies have customer success as their Operating Philosophy that connects marketing, sales, and customer success as one integrated unit. I’ve written extensively about how to make this transition previously.

Conclusion

Ultimately, getting sales and customer success to stay aligned starts with creating a culture of cooperation and transparency by creating processes that remind the teams of their shared objectives and encourage customer-centric collaboration. By doing this, you can avoid the sales-customer success misalignment that plagues so many companies and forces them to leave a lot of money on the table.

Get started with your personalized demo

CONTENTS

Join the community

Get the latest updates straight to your inbox.

More Blogs

Relationship Maps for Enterprise Deals
February 23, 2023
Why Use Relationship Maps in Your Enterprise Deals

Relationship Maps
February 1, 2023
How relationship maps help you close more deals? 

January 23, 2023
Five Things to Do to Win Deals in the Current Market Conditions

Components of a Successful Sale
January 11, 2023
7 Key Components of a Successful Sale

December 27, 2022
Everything you need to know about the Challenger Sales Methodology 

December 5, 2022
5 steps to Implementing a Sales Playbook

November 28, 2022
Know your Buyers: How Relationship Maps set your Sellers up for Enterprise Sales Success? 

Top 7 Sales Practices for 2023 and Beyond
November 21, 2022
Top 7 Sales Practices for 2023 and Beyond

November 11, 2022
How to Drive an Effective Sales Process to win Buyer Trust?

3 Reasons Why Your Sales Enablement Strategy Needs A Facelift
July 18, 2022
Uplift your Sales Enablement with Close Plans

Mutual success plans
July 5, 2022
Mutual Success Plans are not for Customer Success, but for the Success of the Customers

June 13, 2022
Market dynamics today and Mutual Success Plans

Mutual Action Plan
June 6, 2022
Modern Buyer Preferences: Using  Mutual Action Plans to drive customer-centricity

May 30, 2022
Mastering Value-based Selling

BuyerAssist Integration
May 25, 2022
BuyerAssist Gets Enterprise Ready

Customer Success Tech Stack feature image
May 9, 2022
How to build a Customer-Centric CS tech stack in 2022?

sales playbook
April 4, 2022
How to Adapt Your Sales Playbook to Cater to Modern Buyer Preferences?

March 21, 2022
Brandintellé Success Story 

digital sales room
March 10, 2022
Your customers hate digital sales rooms

customer success featured image
March 9, 2022
Use Mutual Success Plans to maximize Up-Sells, Cross-Sells, and Renewals

Company wide success
March 2, 2022
Get company-wide customer success by using Mutual Success Plans

SOC 2
February 24, 2022
BuyerAssist is now SOC 2 certified

January 24, 2022
Your new world with digitized buyer journey engagement platform

buyer engagement platform image
January 24, 2022
Sales Leader's Guide to Buyer Engagement Platform

internal collaboration in b2b selling featured image
January 5, 2022
Internal collaboration in B2B Selling

customer success featured image
December 28, 2021
Future of B2B Customer Experience: Unify sales and post-sales

December 9, 2021
Transform MEDDIC with Mutual Success Plans

December 7, 2021
Building your sales team identity

Meddic sales methodology blog creative
December 1, 2021
Meddic: A sales methodology that wins more deals

mutual action plan challenges featured image
November 11, 2021
Can tech solve all the Mutual Action Plans challenges?

buyerenablement
October 11, 2021
Being obsessively buyer-centric: 3 ways to use buyer enablement to win buyer's trust

introduce mutual succes plan
September 27, 2021
How to introduce Mutual Success Plans to get buyer engagement?

September 20, 2021
Know your Buyers: Buyer Role Mapping

buying experience in b2b buying
August 16, 2021
Elevating buying experience for the modern B2B Buyer

mutual success plans win buyer trust image
August 2, 2021
How to use Mutual Success Plans to win buyer trust

buyer enablement cocreation
July 27, 2021
Buyers Sellers
co-create

June 8, 2021
Announcing our seed funding and launching BuyerAssist.io beta product

b2b buying in digital buying experience
June 8, 2021
6 trends in B2B buying that you should care about

mutual success plan blog featured image
May 31, 2021
Why Mutual Success Plans are core to winning customers

b2b buying blog creative
May 24, 2021
Why every sales leader needs to care about what's changing in the world of B2B buying

b2b sales blog creative
May 24, 2021
The value imperative in B2B sales

Deal Reviews
February 21, 2023
Losing Enterprise Deals?
Three Reasons Why

February 10, 2023
Are You Doing Value Selling Right?

Sales Methodology Adoption
October 28, 2022
6 Steps to Sales Methodology Adoption

September 30, 2022
Sales Symbiosis: Implementing Mutual Success Plans

Adopt or Die
August 30, 2022
Adapt or Die- How to Adapt to the 2022 Buyer?

Everything you need to know about Mutual Action Plans
June 22, 2022
Everything that you need to know about Mutual Action Plans

Customer Lifetime Value
March 23, 2022
Top 3 Initiatives to increase Customer Lifetime Value

mutual success plans
March 10, 2022
How to use Mutual Success Plans in the post-go-live phase?

mutual success plan for customer success
February 9, 2022
Why do you need Mutual Success Plans for Customer Success?

slack and buyerassist integrated featured image
January 24, 2022
Introducing BuyerAssist Bot for Slack

B2b customer engagement blog featured image
January 11, 2022
B2B Customer Engagement strategy to win customer loyalty in 2022

Sales to customer success handoff featured image
December 20, 2021
4 ways to make sales to customer success handoff more effective

Deal reviews
October 14, 2021
Deal Reviews: Set your teams for success

#1 blog on the internet to understand modern trends in B2B buying
Subscribe now to receive monthly newsletters
manage cookies