How do you coordinate and work cross functionally with the sales team to create commonly shared KPIs?

Let's think bigger than just Sales here!

Customer Success is the glue between all of the customer-impacting departments in your company (note: that's pretty much every department). Your job as a CS leader is to build partnerships with all of the business leaders that will drive the best outcomes for your customers and for your company as a result.

Here are a few tips:

• If your company has a framework for cross-departmental goals, make sure you study those. How does serving customers better impact the high-level company goals? How about each department's specific goal?  
• Craft your narrative for how your team's work impacts the other departments.  Will you boost Sales productivity?  Will you produce referenceable customers whom Marketing can leverage to grow the pipeline? Will you make the Customer to Product Management feedback cycle easier? Will you reduce the noise and burden of escalations on the Support and Engineering teams?
• Sign up for goals that benefit both teams. An example we used recently was driving customers to use our new Support Portal rather than opening cases by email. CSMs talk to customers frequently so they were a natural choice to get customers registered and trained on how to use the new Portal. Both CSMs and Support benefit from the reduced email noise, and we strengthened our partnership with Support leadership as a result.

KPIs for the sake of measurement are fun but useless. Zero in on the ones that are making a real impact to your company's top and bottom line and ask for partnership in helping to drive those.

When you're establishing a new CS department, you might have the luxury to point to customers who are in the CS program vs. those who are not and compare churn and growth rates in those cohorts. Sales will perk up if you're showing them faster and larger expansions in the accounts managed by Customer Success.

A real win I've had with Sales specifically was to have the Head of Sales add churn into the Sales Leader comp plans so a dollar saved was as good as a dollar earned (wildly unpopular with the sales leaders at first but it drove real change in the churn fight for our company).  

A high NRR rate can only be achieved if a collaboration between Sales and CS exists. So if you run land and expand approach, the two teams must work closely together

• CS is seen as the trusted advisor and knows when the time is right to expand an account
• So Sales is brought in at the right time to drive the expansion