How can customer success and sales work together?
The traditional relationship between sales and CS is characterized by a gap between the two teams: sales focuses on new customers while CS focuses on existing customers. However, this split creates challenges because it creates silos between people who are trying to achieve more unified goals.
See also
For the past few years, customer success has emerged as a key component of SaaS growth. In fact, according to Forrester Research, on average, when companies deliver a good service experience, their customers are 2.4x more likely to stay with them, 2.7x more likely to spend more with them, and 10x more likely to recommend them.
But how can customer success teams help sales teams deliver better customer experiences? And how can they work together to drive higher adoption rates and faster expansion across accounts?
The traditional relationship between sales and CS is characterized by a gap between the two teams: sales focuses on new customers while CS focuses on existing customers. However, this split creates challenges because it creates silos between people who are trying to achieve more unified goals.
Customer success has become an increasingly important part of SaaS companies’ growth engines
Customer success has become an increasingly important part of SaaS companies’ growth engines.
Companies with strong customer success programs are seeing more revenue, customer satisfaction, and product adoption than their peers. That’s because customer success is a critical part of the customer lifecycle: it helps convert free trial users into paying customers; it helps increase renewal rates; it ensures that users remain happy with your product even after they start using it; and ultimately, it helps reduce churn (or customer attrition) and increase customer´s lifetime value.
Customer success can be defined as any activity that contributes to an improved experience for customers who have already purchased your product—including things like onboarding new users to your platform as well as providing support when necessary.
The traditional relationship between sales and customer success is characterized by a gap between the two teams
Sales and customer success are typically siloed from one another, which means that their work and processes may not be easily connected. The traditional relationship between sales and customer success is characterized by a gap between the two teams. While this arrangement can work well for some companies, it doesn’t allow for alignment around shared goals or metrics.
Both teams have separate goals: sales focuses on acquiring customers, while customer success focuses on helping customers stay engaged with your product over a longer period of time (leading to higher lifetime value).
If you let these two functions operate independently, they’ll do so at cross-purposes—and will probably end up doing more harm than good!
The solution? To bridge this gap in understanding is simple: get both teams working together in as close proximity as possible so they can collaborate on each other’s projects directly—and take advantage of each other’s skill sets.
The focus on a new customer’s first 90 days presents a unique opportunity for sales and customer success to work together
When you’re focused on helping customers succeed with your product, there are several opportunities to work together with sales.
Customer success should be involved in onboarding, which includes implementation and training for new clients. These activities allow customer success to gain insight into what a customer is doing with the product and how they’re using it—and these insights can help inform what your sales team should focus on when selling the product.
Customer success can also help by providing feedback about whether or not a prospect is likely to be successful with your product during their first 90 days of use. If a prospect isn’t going to be successful, it may not make sense for sales to continue working with them—or even spending time talking about pricing or marketing tactics! But if there are signs that the prospect will benefit from additional training or support after their trial ends, it makes sense for sales teams to continue pursuing that opportunity until they can determine otherwise.
Sales teams can also work closely with customer success teams when developing new features or marketing campaigns that target specific types of prospects and potential buyers (for example small businesses that have been in business for less than 5 years).
By collaborating early on in this process, both departments will have more confidence in their ability to identify relevant needs; create messaging that resonates well with those audiences, and ultimately bring in more high-quality leads who are interested in buying from them immediately after signing up online.
A collaborative approach to onboarding boosts engagement, product adoption, and long-term relationships
Customer success and sales should work together to ensure product adoption and long-term relationships.
Customer success specialists are often the first point of contact for new customers. They’re the ones actively engaging with them, offering support, and providing valuable information on how to use your product more effectively.
However, many don’t have access to key data that could help them provide even better service—like what features a customer is looking for or whether they’re regularly inviting other users into their account or group.
As sales reps talk with customers about their product needs, they can gather this kind of information about each prospect or customer and pass it along so that your CSMs can use it when speaking with these folks later on.
With the right tools, a collaboration between sales and customer success can yield big gains for customers and your company
The right tools can help you collaborate between sales and customer success. As you’re thinking about how to align your teams, here are some tools you might want to consider:
Customer success tools for onboarding. The right tool can make it easier for a sales rep to provide high-quality support by letting them easily share relevant content with customers. That way, the customer has all the information they need at their fingertips when they’re ready to sign up or start using your product.
Sales tools to help with new customer acquisition. Once you have a customer signed up, your job doesn’t end there! With the right sales tool in place, it will be easier for both sides of this equation—sales and CSM—to stay on top of their leads and follow up on opportunities as needed.
Conclusion
Sales and customer success are two pillars of any successful SaaS company. While they may have different goals, there is still a lot they can do together to drive growth and engagement. By working collaboratively on the first 90 days of onboarding, sales and customer success teams can help ensure that customers are set up for long-term success with your product.
Share this Post
Follow me
Photo by Linkedin Sales Navigator on Pexels
