What is the best way to align sales and customer success to increase positive outcomes for customers?

Sales and Customer Success shouldn't be two separate islands. These groups have to be incredibly synced in order to best serve your customer base. This is why I recommend a business hire a revenue leader who oversees both customer acquisition and customer retention. That way, you have an executive who isn't selfishly focused on one area of the business.

Roles & Responsibilities + Compensation Incentivization:

• Be sure to clearly define roles and swimlanes between AEs & CSMs

  • Recommend AEs build pipeline, close deals, expand accounts (full stack AEs)

    • Clearly defined handoff/partnership process once initial land is closed.

      • Account plans are a must based on mutually identified threshold (i.e. ARR, propensity to scale)

    • Customer journey mapping: Outline clear partnership touch points from pre to post sales to determine contribution amongst account teams. How might you quantify services for large scale deployments? Don't give anything away for free, use your concession playbook if post sales services are included.

  • Recommend CSMs renew customers

    • CSMs incentivized to generate expansion opportunities and will get % payout of net revenue retention (expansion)

  • Recommend RevOps is also incentivized to hit a revenue target. RevOps is the most crucial partner to your revenue leader. They need incentivization to support the sellers get their job done. Make them feel a part of the team and reward them for their work.

• Shared KPIs: 

  • Customer obsessed culture: 1 team, 1 dream, always asking “what’s in it for the customer?”

  • Pipeline (conversion vs. vanity stats), new business vs. expansion revenue, NPS, retention, churn vs. contraction, product/feature adoption

  • AEs & CSMs must have have consistent meetings to knowledge share, discuss and implement process improvement, strategize on key accounts, share feedback from the customers, etc. Pairing AEs and CSMs by segment can drive a much more seamless working relationship internally and for the customer

Don't forget, hiring A+ talent is what keeps these teams motivated most. People want to be surrounded by high performers. The moment you hire a B player, the entire attitude, work ethic, morale, and throughput of your team completely changes. Never settle for anything less than A+ talent/

• Identify needed skills by role in changing landscape. Don't hire the same profile every time. Find teammates who balance each other out. Look for innate skillsets you cannot coach (persistence, hustle, humility, selfless, grit, competitiveness, hunger)

• Performance management: Atomic unit of efficiency

  • Continuous coaching: Call reviews

• Career development: Career laddering across the entire organization. Invest in your SDRs and build a low lift, high return SMB segment to promote them into.

• Sell 90 Initiative:

  • Frontline reps spend 90% of time on customers

  • Automate/remove as much manual friction as possible from outbounding to accounts to renewing customers. Your customer facing team should never worry about anything other than their customer