How do you foster collaboration and communication between customer success, sales, marketing, and other departments within the organization?

Here are some of the ways that we use to foster collaboration and communication between customer success, sales, marketing, and other departments within the organization.

Conduct Regular Sessions with Internal Stakeholders:

Customer Success Leaders schedule routine cross-functional sessions with internal stakeholders. During these sessions, we share insights on the role of Customer Success and how it contributes to the organization's success. These sessions are an opportunity to communicate successes, challenges, and align priorities. We provide opportunity to answer questions and collect feedback.

Sales QBR Sessions:

Customer Success Leaders actively participate in Sales Quarterly Business Review (QBR) sessions. These meetings allow for the exchange of valuable insights and ensure that customer success is integrated into the sales strategy, enhancing alignment between both departments.

Virtual Account Teams:

We promote a unified approach by integrating Customer Success Managers (CSMs) into the Virtual Account Team, which typically includes Sales, Pre-Sales Engineering, and Professional Services. This integration fosters close collaboration and ensures that each team member understands their role in delivering a seamless customer experience forcussed on the customer objectives.

Joint Meetings with Sales:

We have regular joint meetings between Customer Success and Sales teams. These meetings help to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, align on account strategies, and address any customer issues collectively.

Key Role in Expansion Selling with CSQL Process:

Customer Success plays a key role in the expansion selling process from the  Customer Success Qualified Lead (CSQL) process. This process identifies customers with the potential for expansion and ensures that the Customer Success team is actively engaged in nurturing these opportunities. It is the best source of leads from existing customers with a high win rate.

Customer Success Stories:

CSMs collaborate with the marketing team to create and promote Customer Success stories as part of our Customer Advocacy OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). These stories showcase the success of our customers, which can be used for marketing and sales efforts, ultimately benefiting all teams involved.

Mutual Goal Alignment for OKRs:

When possible we establish mutual goal alignment for our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) between Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and other relevant departments. This ensures that all teams are working towards shared objectives, which may include customer retention, expansion revenue, and customer advocacy.

Prioritizing and Coordinating Support Issues:

Customer Success can collaborate closely with the Technical Support team to ensure the impact of support issues is clearly understood. For customers with multiple issues, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) can play a critical role in prioritizing these concerns. By working with the customer to identify which issues are most critical to their success and relaying this information to the Technical Support team, CSMs help ensure that support resources are allocated to address the most important and impactful issues first