At your company, your sales team is responsible for bringing in new customers, and your customer success team is responsible for making sure those customers stick around. While these are two distinct, defined roles, it’s essential for these two teams to work together seamlessly. If your sales team stops at bringing in new customers and doesn’t work with customer success to pass on key information, your customers may be left feeling unheard and misunderstood. And if your customer success team focuses solely on keeping customers happy and doesn’t make an effort to work with sales to foster new business, then the company might not be growing as much as it could be. 

With all of that in mind, it’s crucial to make sure your customer success and sales teams are working together seamlessly in order to set your company up for success and growth. Read on to discover some of the main benefits of well-connected sales & CS teams, as well as some tactics for improving their collaboration.

The benefits of streamlined collaboration between customer success and sales

Customer success and sales teams that work well together can have a massive impact on their organization’s overall success. Here are some of the most notable benefits of unity between these two teams.

• Improved customer experience: When these teams share knowledge about customers’ goals, preferences, and pain points, they are better equipped to deliver a positive experience. This helps speed up onboarding, builds trust, and contributes to customer satisfaction as a whole. 
• Increased revenue potential: When CS and sales teams work together effectively, they can pass on any “green flags” of upsell or cross-sell opportunities, and develop action plans together. This ensures that these valuable opportunities don’t get missed, which positively impacts revenue. In addition, a smooth sales-to-CS handoff will result in a better onboarding experience, which will increase likelihood of retention in the long run.
• Reduced churn risk: CS and sales teams that work together create a unified, cohesive experience for the customer. This collaboration makes customers feel heard, which reduces the risk of churn.

Tactics for improving collaboration between CS & sales

Master the sales to CS handoff

A smooth transition between sales to customer success is essential in providing a top-tier experience. Your sales team should provide detailed customer information to the CS team, including customer goals, pain points, KPIs, and other key information. Passing this information on efficiently enables CS teams to hit the ground running from day one with personalized success strategies. For a successful handoff, there needs to be clear expectations and roles for each team member, defined customer timelines and goals, and a system for measuring performance. 

Improve communication

Whether your sales and CS teams communicate through weekly team meetings, emails, Slack, or through your CRM, the important thing is that everyone is kept in the loop about what's going on with customers and what each role is doing to support them. Encourage a culture where collaboration is valued and celebrated — acknowledge successes, foster teamwork, build effective feedback loops, and set up cross-functional projects. Make sure everyone works together toward similar goals so they can come together and support each other.

Enable teams to share metrics  

Shared metrics, such as customer satisfaction, retention, and upsell rates, can help both teams combine efforts in pursuit of the same goals. That’s why it’s important to invest in tools that provide visibility into data throughout the customer journey, such as usage data, account data, and success scores. When both teams have access to this data, they can more effectively work together to monitor performance, make callouts, and share any value-driving data with customers. 

For instance, let's say a CSM notices on an internal account review that one of their customers is using a particular feature of your product extensively. This usage data helps them come to the conclusion that this customer could benefit from a higher-tier plan with additional features — and they need support from sales to take full advantage of this upsell opportunity. They can then pass this data along so the sales team can create an upsell strategy with the customer’s needs in mind.

In addition, it’s helpful for sales teams to have insight into CS metrics so they can share customer success stories with prospects. Having access to this data will enable them to drive interest and prove product value even before the customer starts using the product.  

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In conclusion, customer success and sales teams that work together can increase renewal rates, make customers happier, and ultimately affect revenue in a positive way. Next, check out this blog post to learn how CS and product can work together to drive company success even further.