Sales and Customer Success must become a unified team mutually responsible for shared revenue goals and delivering a seamless customer experience. 

Why? Because the days of keeping the lights on through acquisition business are over and customers have high expectations. We work with digital-first customers who are informed, highly varied and expect sophisticated, personalized multi-channel experiences. If you’re not unifying Sales and CS to manage revenue from prospect to advocate—you’re in trouble.

The good news, though, is that paying attention to this issue leads to more growth. A recent study found that 42% of organizations helped improve cross-selling and upselling by unifying their customer experience team, among other benefits as seen below. 

Read further to get started on your journey towards a unified revenue organization.

3 Reasons Why Unified CX Drives More Growth

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Step one: A unified team starts with unified leadership

In order to build a unified revenue team effectively, we recommend aligning the Sales and CS reporting relationships under the same leader, which will typically be your Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).  

Overall, bringing together your reporting structures is crucial for one big (and often overlooked) thing: communication. At a bare minimum, Sales and CS must be talking to reduce friction around getting everyone aligned on the same mission: drive revenue from prospect to advocate.

Here’s what can go wrong if these teams aren’t communicating: 

• If Sales isn’t positioning Success properly, then you’ll likely end up with an expensive customer to manage who demands additional support.
• If Success isn’t empowered to educate Sales on their best-fit customers, then you’re wasting acquisition dollars targeting the wrong segments. 
• If Sales does not have strong deal references or customer stories to share, who is going to buy into your brand promise?
• If CS isn’t enabled to pass expansion opportunities back to sales, then you’re missing out on growing revenue at higher profit margins than net-new.

The downstream impacts of disjointed communications alone—outside of many other misalignment issues—can be detrimental to growth. It has been reported that over half (53%) of employees say they’ve missed key messages because of a communication misalignment. In the same study, over one-tenth (12%) of company leaders admitted they lost customers due to communication challenges and 30% of customers have reported poor experiences due to these issues. 

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Now, we understand this can take time… 

You likely can’t change this overnight. In the meantime, we recommend the following in terms of a crawl, walk, run approach:

CS leaders: Voice your impact. 

Show your revenue influence and demonstrate how strong of a partner you can be to the CRO, as well as your Sales peers. Check out Catalyst’s Best Deck for CS Leaders in the Boardroom and CLG Guide linked below to get started.

Sales leaders: Welcome a new revenue partner.

Download Catalyst’s Definitive Guide to Customer-Led Growth and read further to get inspired and excited about the revenue growth you can accelerate through a unified Success partnership.

All leaders: Share your revenue goals.

Build shared revenue goals in executive planning meetings rather than going after your targets in a silo. And, this applies to Sales and CS, as well as other teams covered below. While each team might have different KPIs—for instance, Sales might measure ICP-fit on closed business while Customer Success measures time to onboard—these insights relate to one another. When approached as a shared responsibility, your revenue goals will surely be less stressful, time-consuming, and more attainable to reach.

In its most basic form, a dotted reporting line between Sales and Success executives is formed to break down the biggest gap to initiate faster growth: communication and collaboration. But, the real game plan is unifying these teams across a single strategy, team culture, and overall purpose to drive revenue faster and more efficiently together. 

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Customer-led growth truly takes it from a simple “team” designation to a company-wide viewpoint. CSMs have always known that growing recurring revenue is easier through existing customers than acquiring new customers, and it's time to bring the numbers along to sustain realistic growth rates. It's a way to help inward-focused organizations focus on their customers and use that knowledge to fuel the right marketing and sales levers, delivering wins across the board.
- Peter Sterkenberg, Revenue Operations Manager, Pleo 

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Step two: Clearly define revenue roles, identify gaps and build processes to support them

Sure, Sales owns the pre-sales process and Customer success owns post-sales. However, do you know how many expansion opportunities you’ve missed because Success didn’t know whether they should run with it, pass it over to sales, or keep quiet to not disturb the customer relationship? And, do you know how much the buying experience can suffer across new business to expansion if roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined?

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Here are some key nuances to think about as you define the gray areas between revenue ownership and processes across these revenue teams:

• Does your company have an expansion target? 
• How does Success have a CSQL (Customer Success Qualified Leads) process set up with Sales?
• How does Success share potential deal references to sales or customer stories to Marketing?
• Have you defined your cross-sell, upsell and true-up motions to assign clear ownership?
• Does Sales own closing expansion revenue entirely?
• Is your product and/or business mature enough to hire a dedicated expansion team?
• Should CS have a smaller expansion target and own opportunities by deal type (ex: true-up) or up to a certain ARR threshold?
• Should CS have SPIFFs, bonuses, or commissions to encourage identifying and potentially closing upsells?
• Is Sales enabled with a proper template to pass customers off to success for a fast start to growth?
• How does Sales gather insights from CS within their ICP? For example, share customer wins, failed implementations or churn reasons from Catalyst to Slack.

Once you’ve brainstormed revenue ownership and processes, here’s how Sales and CS should look as the end goal.

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In Customer Success 

A CS leader and team who powers customer revenue optimization. CS facilitates ongoing ICP communication, process alignment, and sharing feedback from the field, all done with the ultimate goal of informing revenue teams on their ideal customer profile to grow win rate, retention, and brand advocacy. 

Plus, CSMs can’t be scared to own revenue numbers and leadership should ensure they’re awarded for their efforts, whether that’s internal shout-outs, monetary rewards, gifts, contests, or annual summits like a President’s Club. Customer Success is essential to keeping and growing your revenue: let’s celebrate that!

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In Sales 

Sales views CS as a valuable revenue partner, not an antagonist. They welcome and encourage working proactively with CS both from a learning standpoint and a revenue perspective. Sales intentionally learns from CS, orients around targeting their ICP and supports new customer pass-offs for adoption and retention—and perhaps coming back as an expansion lead for growth!

In addition, Sales leaders intentionally motivate their team to support the retention and expansion process. Strategies to achieve this include: implementing commission clawbacks on early cancellations, ensuring expansion revenue is compensated on, enabling Sales with updated expansion plays, facilitating a Customer Success Qualified Lead (CSQL) process, and celebrating expansion wins in collaboration with Success.

Step three: Align your cross-functional partners to fuel this flywheel

Don’t forget, Customer-Led Growth is ultimately owned by the whole company. When Sales and CS are united on this front, they can start to optimize the way they work with cross-functional partners—creating a true end-to-end flywheel for stronger retention, expansion and new business growth.

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In Marketing: As a primary revenue partner to Sales and CS, Marketing needs to collaborate with these teams to align marketing touchpoints that effectively drive revenue through the right prospects and existing customers. 

In Product: This partnership is critical. Our investor literally told us this week that one of his top concerns in the Boardroom is when the roadmap doesn’t reflect feature gaps that contribute to lost deals or churned accounts. Product must ensure development continues to meet the needs of key target personas while prioritizing gaps that impact customer revenue.

In Ops: For Operations, they need to be all over this opportunity. Using data to reveal Sales and CS bottlenecks and then implementing processes to overcome them will be essential to this Principle… and can be a big career win in Ops.

In Enablement: Unified enablement is a must. These teams must receive the same revenue messaging and frequently gather (virtual or in person) to build familiarity and trust. Stronger Sales and CS relations will certainly influence your customer’s experience and trust in return.

In the C-Suite: This year is all about GRR—driving sustainable growth through delivering customer value and signing the right prospects who don’t leave. No one has the time or budget to re-acquire lost customers. Customer-led growth should be every executive’s top priority and the best place to start your journey is by aligning Sales with Customer Success.

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Forrester’s research shows that surveyed customer-obsessed firms (subscription required) grew 2.5 times faster than non-obsessed ones and retained 2.2 times more customers per year.
- Forrester Research

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The future of growth is a unified revenue team 

The future of growth is end-to-end revenue collaboration—approaching revenue intentionally with an informed, united Sales and CS org—and then all other GTM teams to support. This is what gets you ahead in 2023, this is what investors want to see, and this is what will ignite your Customer-Led Growth engine. Download our Definitive Guide to Customer-Led Growth to learn more and stay tuned next week when we continue to unravel the 10 Principles of this strategy.