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SubscribeThings work better when they work together. Collaboration and teamwork have, time and again, proven to be essential in workplaces.
However, it’s not just the collaboration between a particular team’s members that is essential. There needs to be harmony in the inter-team network too.
The need for this harmony has been seen heavily between two teams – customer success and sales. When these two teams are put together, their closely connected nature enhances each other’s progress.
Today, the success of any business drills down to customer experience. From increased customer satisfaction to higher rates of retention to better revenue, customer success and sales team collaboration can work wonders for your business.
Why Do You Need Alignment Between Sales and Customer Success?
When a salesperson takes care of the bleeding pain point of a lead, the business caters better to the lead once it converts into a customer.
Additionally, with continued feedback from the customer success team about how the customer is finding the product, a business is able to retain the customer for a longer time. It is owing to this that we sometimes see lifelong customers too.
They stay because they are constantly heard.
When a piece of well-oiled machinery is put to work, the output is better and quicker. The same goes when you apply alignment between all teams in your business.
73% of sales teams find their sales process to be positively affected in a critical manner when collaborating across departments.
Instead of trying to convince you more about why it’s important, let’s list a few consequences of what happens when your customer success and sales teams do not align.
- You lose their business. Unhappy customers would stop buying from you once they’re sure you can’t cater well to them anymore. There was something that was promised to them before onboarding that made them choose your business. However, if they don’t actually get it, they wouldn’t take much time to leave you and make a switch to your competitor.
- You can’t leverage them for testimonials and case studies. You can’t even ask them for a positive review. Testimonials and positive reviews, when showcased on your brand’s website and through other resources, help build an image for your brand. When you don’t have any, your prospective customers would not have anything positive on you to choose you.
Approaches and Methodologies for Sales and Customer Success
Sales methodologies facilitate predictability and convert uncertain chaos into assured success. The challenger sales methodology is a new approach adopted by top sales performers to connect with customers.
The challenger sales agent understands the customer’s needs, has a unique view of the world, intentionally debates with the customers, and forces them to get out of their comfort zone.
While acquiring new customers is essential, retaining existing customers can augment your annual recurring revenue (ARR) significantly.
For this reason, the B2B SaaS industry encourages customer success teams to expand and retain the current customer base. That’s where the SaaS customer success framework comes in.
The customer success framework is a series of steps that motivate consumers to become advocates. It’s the foundation to build your aligned processes that provide value to customers and ensure that a great product experience is achieved.
This is a repeatable process adopted by most successful businesses that start post-sales.
Personalize Your Customer Interactions at Scale
What Happens When Your Sales and Customer Success Teams Work Together?
The simple answer? Your customer doesn’t leave you for a long time, churn reduces, and you make more money.
When a customer success team regularly provides actionable inputs to the sales team, they have some valuable substance to base their next sales pitch on.
The salesperson would know what are the major issues a customer wants to be solved, what could be their counter questions, how should they answer if they pose a concern about the product, and much more.
Moreover, with your current customer happy with being provided what was promised, they’re more likely to invest more in your product. They would likely find a use for features on your costlier plans. In a way, it becomes easy for you to upsell.
When your customer success team gets in touch with the customer and asks them if they have any new features in mind they would want, or if they’re facing an issue, they get insights on what the customer wants more.
They get to know what could be introduced into the product that would prevent the customer from leaving. When these insights are shared with the sales team, they know exactly what to pitch to the customer to get them to buy it.
Now comes the best benefit – your customers have a higher lifetime value since they stay longer, because of which your business gets more credibility and growth flourishes.
Imagine what a great testimonial you could get out of a customer who has been happily using your product for 3 years. Now imagine it to be 6 years. Now think about the impact a positive review of this quality would have on your business’s brand name.
Case Studies and Real-Life Examples
Customer success begins with the sales and marketing process, which starts way before a lead is converted into a customer. Let’s learn from the examples of 2 businesses that are pursuing customer success strategies well:
1. Achieve Test Prep
ATP is a test prep and education consultant business firm that helps students get college degrees faster and at a reasonable price.
Their sales process involves mapping a customer path as per their varied situation and goals, looking for a way to maximize test-out, and offering a plan to achieve the desired result.
The firm excels at offering great customer experiences and outcomes from start to finish, and they have the numbers to support their claim.
2. Amazon
Amazon’s customer success strategies aim to generate return visitors by making customers fall in love with shopping at every stage.
The company wins the hearts of its customers with a seamless buying and return experience, quick delivery, and exceptional customer support. Instead of simply responding to queries, Amazon follows a proactive approach to taking care of its customers.
The key takeaway from these businesses is that an impeccable customer experience before and post-sales can positively impact retention and profitability.
The existing customers of a company account for 65% of its business. Effective customer success and sales team collaboration improves customer experience and reduces customer churn, driving more revenue.
How to Bring About Customer Success and Sales Alignment?
Let’s have a look at how exactly can one bring about this association.
1. Bring your sales and customer success teams into the same room. Have them meet regularly and share their insights. Communication is key.
Both teams need to understand the processes and what is going on in each one of their teams. Clarity with processes and methods will help them suggest better directions to each other.
2. Create mini-teams. This might work for you, or it might not. You could still try it out on an experimental basis.
Divide your customers and leads amongst teams. Now here’s the catch – these teams are not exactly the entirety of your sales and customer success teams. These teams refer to a pair of one customer success and one salesperson.
You could even match each pair with one particular customer support person. This way, the pool of customers being catered to would become highly specific with these mini-teams. It would be easier to track each customer and their requests.
3. Have your customer success team share detailed insights and actionable suggestions on each insight. If your customer success person suggests a change in the salesperson’s methods, they need to provide clear evidence of why they think that would work.
People naturally don’t like to be questioned about their methods. Make sure the communication is clear and proof-based.
4. Bring in a common reporting point. When two individual teams are brought together, you need to have a common neutral point that can be accessed in case of disputes or to simply give the green signal for something.
Make sure to have a common reporting manager for both these teams. This person would make sure that both teams are constantly in harmony.
Communication and Collaboration between Sales and Customer Success Teams
All customer-facing teams must review the engagements and sales that are happening with customers. This helps evaluate if these customers are in line with your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and why they’ve been successful.
The results can be compared with another unsuccessful subset to determine what’s working and what’s not. This enables the teams to figure out the areas lacking alignment and learn from that.
Collaboration and communication across sales and customer success teams on shared goals, shared initiatives, shared tools, platforms, documentation, and performance metrics become paramount.
Best Practices for Sales and Customer Success collaboration
Wondering what makes a successful sales team? The key is to strengthen sales and customer success collaboration. Here are some best practices that bring value:
- Though NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) can help the sales team understand customers, they’re very rigid, formal metric-based feedback methods. Customer success can share customer sentiment data (received from customers informally), such as call recordings, social media feedback, customer emails, or posts, with the sales teams to give them valuable insights about customer expectations.
- Another way to make your customers’ voices be heard within your company is to share customer success stories via emails or collaboration tools like Slack or through your quarterly business updates.
The Role of Technology
While sales teams focus on customer acquisition, the customer success teams work on building valuable customer relationships.
Though CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software acquires customer information, it’s restricted to pre-sales activity and lacks a complete view of the data.
Here’s when CSM (Customer Success Management) software takes it to the next level. A CSM software imports the existing data in the tech tools and integrates them automatically to provide a 360-degree insight into customer data.
It alters all the important paths of the customers’ and buyers’ journey, right from customer onboarding to advocacy, with KPI tracking.
This helps both teams analyze customer experiences and improvise their current strategies to achieve the desired goals.
Customer Success vs Sales – Overcoming Challenges and Obstacles
Under certain circumstances, sales and customer success in SaaS may start working against each other. Here are 2 common scenarios where a conflict might arise and how you can resolve it:
1. Poor Alignment of Goals
Conflicting objectives or poorly defined functions, such as no clarity on who is responsible for management tasks, nurture, or renewal activities, can lead to conflicts between the heads of both teams.
To ensure that the customer journey remains unaffected and receives seamless delivery, success and sales leaders must regularly align and re-align in the event of any business change.
2. Skills Deficit
Spotting an underperforming sales rep (disorganized presenter missing targets) is relatively easier than measuring the skills gap in your success team.
The success team is involved in a variety of tasks – pre-sales, adoption, technical project management, retention, training, re-engagement, cross-sell, and up-sell.
Maintaining a skills matrix listing out the required skills and how every team member contributes to that list can make all the difference. You can also provide training to enhance the overall competency level.
Conclusion
When it comes to sales vs. customer success, there isn’t a better one to pick. Instead of solely focusing on one, your company must seek to pursue both simultaneously.
In the end, both teams have one motive – the company having a happy customer base. When they work together, it augments customer lifetime value, which in turn drives more revenue and attracts more customers.
It’s true that too many cooks spoil the broth. However, if you can bring control within the chaos of the entire process, too many cooks might just help your processes become quicker and easier.
