#24: 3 Ideas To Improve Customer Success and Sales Alignment

In today’s issue, I’m going to share 3 very simple ideas that you can use to improve Customer Success and Sales alignment in your organisation.

If you are struggling to:

• Get sales leadership buy-in; 
• Get collaboration to help drive NRR;
• Drive behavioural change that is hurting retention.

You should try implementing the 3 plays below over the next quarter.

1- Implement a Monthly Flywheel Meeting 

 If you want to get sales leadership buy-in, you need to tell a story they care about.

It's not enough to say "We're seeing an increase of poor fit customers". You gotta have the MRR that is at risk, the reason they are a bad fit, how it's impacting LTV:CAC for your business etc. 

The Flywheel Meeting is the perfect vehicle for that conversation to happen frequently.

In this session, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success leaders come together to share key insights on how teams are performing against KPIs and OKRs.  

The structure should be simple and not require hours of prep work:

• Hindsight: what happened last month
• Insight: what trends and lessons have we learned
• Foresight: headwinds and tailwinds we expect for the following month, and what we need help with from this group.

Each leader should spend no more than 10 minutes in their section. Asks and action items are noted and agreed upon.

Bonus points if you can circulate the slides before the meeting and come prepared.

2- Create Shared Incentives

Incentives drive behaviour and collaboration.

If your CSMs and Sales reps have no reason to collaborate, they won't. So give them one. 

Ideally, you share some of the same metrics of success (ie. reps get clawback when a customer churn in onboarding). But if you don't, that's ok.

You can create shared incentives in the form of:

1. Competitions: The Sales Rep with the highest CS-QL work rate gets a prize.
2. Showdowns: Sales Rep and CSM sharing customer stories in front of executives.
3. Accelerators: Expansion deals or healthy retention get sales reps better commission or bonus points to get to President's Club. 

Work on those with sales leadership. You're bound to see some immediate change.

3- Find CS:Sales Alignment Champions 

If you have leadership buy and the right incentives are in place, your next goal is to drive behavioural change.

Here you will likely be more successful with a grass-roots approach.  

1. Find at least one DRI in each team to collaborate on solving the top challenges and opportunities. Sales reps and CSMs are more likely to listen to their peers. And your message will resonate better if it's coming from someone that understands what people care about.
2. Define a set of OKRs that's critical so that you can hold these DRIs accountable for driving change. 
3.  Allow the DRIs to pave the way. It's important for DRIs to tackle those issues using the channels they feel it's most likely to resonate with the teams.
4. Be open to the team's feedback. If there are specific systems and process issues that need to be fixed in order for the change to take effect, the team will let you know. Your job is to listen and act and remove any roadblocks. 

Summary:

If you are looking to improve sales and customer success alignment at every level, you should try to:

1. Have a Monthly Flyhweel Meeting with the leadership team
2. Create one incentive to drive collaboration between sales reps and CSMs
3. Find one sales rep and one CSM to champion the change

If you can get these 3 things in motion, you are already better than most companies out there ;)

See you next week!