How to drive sales and customer success collaboration

Starting a small business can be risky  — but it can also be a roaring success. While the numbers show up to 60% fail within the first five years in Australia, they also show that 40% make it. 

For businesses that are customer focused, making sure your business falls into the latter category depends not only on keeping your sales up, it also relies on keeping your customers happy. Creating a strong collaborative culture between your sales and customer success teams is the best way to do this.

Created in the 90’s, customer success can still be a relatively new concept for some businesses, but it is rapidly proving to be an effective business strategy. It takes a proactive approach to the customer experience, in contrast to customer service, which is a reactive response to customer queries.

“Customer success teams take over from the sales team when a deal is closed, and are responsible for optimising the experience and maximising the value customers get from the product or service on an ongoing basis,” says Jasmine Gray, Customer Success Team Manager at Aircall.

This helps build a strong relationship with customers, and provides the business with invaluable insights into the customer experience, which when shared with the sales team can help boost the impact of future sales campaigns.

Let’s look at some conditions that can foster collaboration between sales and customer success teams to help build a successful business.

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Good communication 

The first step is to clearly define what the role of the customer success team is internally. This includes establishing when the team is introduced to new customers, and determining resource allocation between customer success and sales on a number of processes, for example who is responsible for on-boarding new customers.

The teams need to work together to evaluate new clients to determine whether they are suitable for engaging with the customer success team. Asking questions such as are they likely to need an upgrade in the future? How will their needs grow as their business does? 

“Once it is clear the client will benefit from customer success support, a business should set expectations with the client about the role of customer success, and their goals.” 

“This will help inform the customer success objectives and customise the product or service and customer experience in a way that will support them in their business objectives,” says Gray.

Building the right processes 

Setting up processes between both teams will minimise the chances there will be bumps in the road. Among others, a smooth handover between pre-sales and customer success is key to the customer experience.

“The honeymoon phase can quickly turn sour if there’s a hiccup at any of these stages, so there needs to be effective crossover between those teams,” says Gray.

There’s also a need to maintain mutual accountability for customers’ happiness through collaboration, and quarterly reviews with clients that are jointly prepared and led by customer success and sales can achieve that. 

“It’s important to spend extra time building and then iterating these processes to find the right balance. It’s about progress not perfection,” she says.

Financial incentives

Encouraging teams to collaborate can be supported through remuneration. In other words, ensure there is a vested interest in driving a good experience for both teams and incentivise collaboration, says Sheldon Brady, Sales Manager APAC at Aircall. 

“This can come in the form of fiscal responsibility until successful deployment or bonuses tied into Net Promoter Scores or other key performance indicators,” he says.

Connected through technology

Information is connected like never before, says Brady, and using the right technology stack not only inherently drives collaboration, it also saves time and removes a lot of human error from the process.

To really understand your customers and predict their needs, it’s important to use technology to track user data, gather input, and monitor how your tactics are affecting the customer.  

A solution like Aircall illustrates how technology can contribute to collaboration, and ultimately the customer’s experience. Aircall is a business phone system in the cloud designed for sales and customer success teams and that integrates with most core business tools these teams are using on a daily basis. 

It helps automate information sharing between both teams, but also equip them with critical information that will make the interaction with customers smoother. For example, when a customer calls, Aircall will pull and display information about the customer’s identity, background and potential present issues from CRMs or other critical business tools that it is connected with. Based on this information, the teams can anticipate the reason for the call and quickly understand the challenge the client is currently facing without a need for detailed comms between teams or asking the customer too many questions. 

Building a collaborative culture

Finally, customer success is not just the responsibility of a handful of people. Every employee from the top down should be focused on creating the best possible customer experience for new, current, and prospective customers — and work together to make that happen. 

“Good culture starts at the top, with both team’s leaders leading by example,” says Brady. 

“It’s also about not blaming each other if something goes wrong by creating a culture of accountability.

“We feed those who feed us, and we work together to achieve common success. For example, sales have an interest in helping the success team be successful, because when a satisfied client changes business, they’re likely to reach out to the sales team again,” says Brady.