SALES-CS Collaboration - One Step at a Time

Sales and Customer Success - Working in Harmony or operating in silos?

The challenge of forming and maintaining solid team collaboration between the groups remains and is receiving more attention these days.

The reasons are:

1. The Customer Success profession is evolving. It must prove that it can drive revenue and contribute to the financial success of its parent organization.
2. In many organizations, the CS department reports to the CRO.
3. Disrupting technology changes creates business opportunities that both teams must address. Leveraging the relationship and trust with the existing customer base can lead to faster and more consistent growth vs. selling newly released tools to prospects.

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Partnerships between teams do not only mean streamlining customer experience and avoiding missed opportunities. They are also about learning the best parts of each role to become better professionals and jointly support business growth. By establishing structured collaboration models, the teams can align their efforts to drive customer growth, retention, and expansion.

But how easy is it to build this partnership?

Everyone is busy chasing their targets and speaking on behalf of CSMs; it may not even be convenient.

??“CS farmers and sales hunters “—now is the time for farmers to learn basic hunting skills.

Not to become hunters but to excel and develop new capabilities so there will be enough engagements to farm.

This article explores a gradual collaboration framework, starting with basic coordination and evolving into a fully integrated partnership.

Phase 1: Information Sharing & Alignment

Objective: Establish essential communication and visibility across teams.

At the foundational level, CS and Sales should have a common understanding of critical customer insights, from the structured handover of a new customer engagement to maintaining a single source of truth for accurate risk and opportunity reporting. Information sharing will keep Sales up-to-speed and reduce time and effort while communicating consistently with customers.

In addition, the flow of information from CS about successful engagements, references, and case studies can help the sales team provide real-life examples when engaging new prospects.

Tactics:

• Shared CRM & Notes: CS should access Sales’ pre-sale and sales material, while Sales should be able to review, for example, onboarding progress, QBR notes, risks, and health scores.
• Business Review Insights: CS can share usage trends, key success factors, and renewal risks with sales before or after QBRs.
• Win/Loss Debriefs: Conduct joint lesson-learned reviews of growing engagements and churned customers to understand key success factors, objections, and unmet customer challenges.? Sales can also debrief sales when losing leading prospects, sharing insights that may be useful for existing engagements.

Phase 2: Mutual Support on Expansion & Renewals

Objective: Collaboration to ensure seamless renewals and drive customer growth.

With initial alignment in place, CS and Sales can better plan their efforts on expansions and renewals. This can be modeled to a structured process where CS identifies opportunities and Sales executes them with a higher win rate.

Tactics:

• Joint Customer Planning: This can be part of the annual renewal and growth planning with sales, followed by account reviews and ongoing identification of customers with upsell potential. Sales should endorse having qualified CS opportunities to increase their pipeline and hit their annual targets.??
• Renewal Forecasting Meetings: Regular discussions between CS and Sales to review renewal risks and agree on retention efforts. ??
• Planning Stakeholder coverage: Coordinating the approach and activities with stakeholders and executives will streamline communication and ensure the seller or CSM has the appropriate access to cover the respective stakeholders. Examples: inviting executives to a trade show/event the company sponsors; scheduling on-site visits and the respective agenda.

Phase 3: Professional Growth ??

Objective: Develop additional skills and share the best practices

At this stage, CS and Sales are exposed to their “trade secrets” and develop additional capabilities based on the experience of the other team. This requires a mindset change in which the teams accept the mutual benefits, which ultimately contribute to their success and company growth. ?

It is not a formal training but a bi-directional initiative based on trust and open communication.

I experienced this level of collaboration on top of a few exceptional customer growth scenarios, which drew the interest of my sales colleagues. This led to a winning analysis being presented to both teams and from there, we kept each other aware of best practices, which proved effective for all of us.

Tactics:

• Alignment on ICP: both teams agreed on the ideal customer profile and how to conduct adequate discovery to uncover client needs. ??
• Client goals: A solid understanding of customer business and operation objectives helped to fine-tune the pre-and post-sales activities, consolidating them into one coherent journey. ??
• Managing client Expectations: It is much easier for CS to manage more realistic expectations Sales set regarding outcomes and timelines. This usually accompanies the previous points about ICP and client goals.
• Difficult discussions: We know this is the least favorable aspect of client-facing activities, and not everyone feels comfortable and capable of handling these objections. ??Sales handle objections about product differentiation, pricing, and T&Cs. CS teams handle objections about quality, timelines, scope, and risks. ??Combine this “rich” knowledge repository, and both teams improve their capabilities of handling these circumstances.

Phase 4: Strategic & Executive-Level Collaboration

Objective: Form partnerships at the highest levels to drive customer-centric growth strategies.

The final stage involves the CS and Sales leaders working together to influence product roadmaps, service offerings, pricing models, and overall go-to-market strategies.

Tactics:

• Go-to-market alignment: Monthly executive syncs to review customer challenges and trends. The meeting should allow the teams to keep up with the market changes and customer needs derived from prospects and existing clients. ?Consequently, the teams can manage a prioritized and up-to-date list of product improvements and enhancements, balancing acquisition and retention needs.
• Life-time value: Increasing client lifetime value is a characteristic of successful vendors with exceptional growth rates. Longer-term activities such as multi-year agreements coupled with expensed scope require planning. ??Both teams leverage their experience, product know-how, and roadmap to design a path for growth, pending customer size and needs. ??This strategy should be supported by the appropriate compensation models to incentivize Sales and CS to operate in line with this plan.
• Partner Success: A solid Sales/CS team relationship can translate to a successful partner journey. ?All partners will require sales and product enablement to hunt new prospects and later expand. ?A Few of them, such as System integrators, will also manage the customers directly and be responsible for retaining and growing them. Established communication with proven sales/CS best practices will empower partners and create a parallel revenue engine that the teams can jointly groom.

Conclusion

Customer Success and Sales teams can drive superior customer experience and business growth by evolving from simple information sharing to complete strategic alignment. ?This will not happen overnight, and a professional growth mindset is required to gradually build trust by sharing information, lessons learned, and winning strategies.

In addition to the framework outlined in this article, the human factor will play a pivotal role in making this parentship happen.

The executives and leaders will be the driving force. Their mutual respect and acknowledgment of each team’s value will send a clear signal to their teams:

Pre-To-Post sales is old news.

Make way for a streamlined and more seamless customer experience

Where does your team stand in this journey, and what steps will you take to enhance collaboration?