The challenge of fostering strong collaboration between Sales and Customer Success (CS) remains a pressing topic, gaining increasing attention as the CS profession evolves.
Why is this important?
Customer Success must demonstrate its ability to drive revenue and contribute to business growth.
Many CS departments now report to the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), emphasizing their role in revenue generation.
Disruptive technology continuously creates new business opportunities, necessitating alignment between Sales and CS to leverage existing customer relationships for sustainable growth.
Collaboration isn’t just about optimizing the customer experience or preventing missed opportunities. It’s about learning from each other, strengthening professional capabilities, and collectively driving business expansion.
A structured collaboration model can align efforts to improve customer retention, expansion, and revenue.
How Can This Partnership Be Built?
While every team is focused on their targets, moving towards closer collaboration benefits both Sales and CS.
➡️ “CS farmers and sales hunters” — it’s time for farmers to develop basic hunting skills.
Not to replace hunters but to proactively identify new opportunities, expand engagements, and drive long-term growth.
This article explores a phased approach to successfully collaborating between CS and Sales.
Phase 1: Information Sharing & Alignment
Objective: Establish essential communication and shared visibility.
At the foundational level, both teams must have access to critical customer insights. From structured handovers for new customers to maintaining a unified source of truth for tracking risks and opportunities, transparency reduces inefficiencies and ensures a cohesive customer experience.
Key Tactics:
Shared CRM & Notes: CS should access Sales’ pre-sale materials, while Sales should review CS data such as onboarding progress, QBR notes, risks, and health scores.
Business Review Insights: CS can share usage trends, success factors, and renewal risks with Sales before or after QBRs.
Win/Loss Debriefs: Joint reviews of won and lost deals help both teams understand key success factors, objections, and customer challenges.
Phase 2: Mutual Support on Expansion & Renewals
Objective: Collaborate to ensure successful renewals and increased customer growth.
Once alignment is established, CS and Sales can strategically plan expansions and renewals. CS identifies opportunities, while Sales executes them with better win rates.
Key Tactics:
Joint Customer Planning: This involves annual planning for renewals and expansion, with regular account reviews to identify upsell potential.
Renewal Forecasting Meetings: Regular CS-Sales discussions to assess renewal risks and plan retention efforts.
Stakeholder Coverage Planning: Aligning outreach efforts to key decision-makers, such as inviting executives to events or coordinating on-site visits.
Phase 3: Professional Growth & Skill Exchange
Objective: Enhance skills by learning from each other.
At this stage, CS and Sales are ready to adopt each other’s best practices, fostering a mindset of continuous learning.
Key Tactics:
Alignment on Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): both teams agree on the ideal customer profile and how to conduct adequate discovery to uncover client needs.
Customer Goals: Aligning pre-and post-sales activities to deliver expected results while ensuring a seamless customer journey.
Managing Expectations: Customers (and CS) benefit when Sales sets realistic expectations regarding outcomes and timelines in an earlier pre-sale stage. The feedback shared between the teams is an effective learning exercise and will keep customer engagement on a positive track.
Handling Difficult Discussions: Sales manages objections around pricing and product differentiation, while CS handles scope, quality, and risk. Sharing insights improves both teams’ ability to navigate challenging conversations.
Phase 4: Strategic & Executive-Level Collaboration
Objective: Align leadership efforts to drive customer-centric strategies.
At the highest level, Sales and CS leaders collaborate on broader business strategies, influencing product roadmaps, pricing models, and market positioning.
Key Tactics:
Go-to-Market Alignment: Monthly executive meetings to review customer challenges, market trends, and feedback from both teams.
Maximizing Lifetime Value: Longer-term activities such as multi-year agreements and expanded 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 Strategies: A strong sales-CS partnership enhances partner enablement and retention efforts, creating a parallel revenue engine that the teams can jointly groom.
Conclusion
From basic information sharing to executive-level strategy alignment, Sales and Customer Success collaboration can drive exceptional customer experiences and business growth.
This evolution doesn’t happen overnight—it requires a professional growth mindset, mutual trust, and a commitment to shared success.
Leadership plays a crucial role in fostering this partnership. When Sales and CS executives respect and value each other’s contributions, it sends a clear message to their teams:
➡️ Pre-to-post sales handovers are outdated practices.
➡️ Seamless customer experience is the future.
Where does your team stand on this journey? What steps will you take to enhance collaboration?
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