When Sales and Customer Success (CS) teams work seamlessly together, businesses create a powerful engine that drives revenue and strengthens customer relationships. Yet, achieving this alignment remains a challenge for many organizations.
In a recent webinar, Travis Hill, VP of Customer Experience at Altify, Chris Dishman, SVP of Global Customer Success at Totango, and Karen Budell, Chief Marketing Officer at Totango discussed this challenge and shared best practices they are embracing on their teams to achieve alignment.
Some enterprise buying groups have over 13 members involved in decisions related to renewals or expansions, said Travis. The insight: who you are engaged with matters. It is a huge risk if your teams are not multi-threading with the right stakeholders.
Without strong interdepartmental collaboration, companies risk mismanaging opportunities, losing customers, and leaving revenue on the table.
This article shares six proven strategies to align Account Management, Sales, and Customer Success (CS) teams to achieve revenue growth:
- Build joint account plans
- Define roles and responsibilities pre- and post-sale
- Implement a regular cadence to drive accountability
- Align hiring skills to desired outcomes
- Pivot to predictive AI-powered insights
- Build a customer-centric culture, not just a strategy
“If you have friction between Sales, CS, Marketing, and Product, you will have friction with your customer.”
— Chris Dishman, SVP of Global Customer Success, Totango
6 ways to overcome friction with alignment
1. Start with joint account plans
A comprehensive account plan serves as a "collaboration hub" for revenue teams, said Travis. It includes input from Sales and CS, to Marketing and Finance, to Product and Solution Engineering. It should be considered the foundation for the customer lifecycle. If it is built with incomplete information or without support from all teams, it will crumble. Said differently, when an account plan is built holistically, it includes business goals and a customer success or value plan, so all stakeholders are on the same page. This makes it easy to spot a crack in the “foundation” or know when the customer is ready for expansion.
Cross-functional account planning leads to:
- Strong stakeholder engagement: It identifies key decision-makers and opportunities where your cross-functional team members can multi-thread into the account.
- Whitespace identification: It helps all teams understand where saturation and expansion opportunities are, and it enables each team to be future-thinking versus reactive.
- Faster deal cycles: Insights from CS, marketing and product teams provide a more holistic view of the customer’s journey to help businesses get ahead of renewals, and reduce the time required to close.
"Joint account plans can help us win deals up to 50% faster with current accounts versus acquiring outside opportunities."
— Travis Hill, VP of Customer Experience, Altify
2. Define clear roles and responsibilities pre- and post-sale
Aligned teams thrive on well-defined roles and responsibilities. Establishing structured swim lanes ensures everyone knows:
- Who owns renewals
- Who owns cross-sell and upsell expansion
- Who engages with key stakeholders
- What each team, Sales and CS, is responsible for each activity during a hand-off
There are various frameworks for organizing role responsibility. The most important thing is that the details of your framework are frequently revaluated. If customer goals shift, or stakeholders change, your internal roles and responsibilities might also have to change.
Businesses are traditionally good at identifying clear roles and goals pre-sale. Most businesses are less comfortable establishing the same clarity and rigor post-sale. Extending RACI models (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed matrices) to support customers through the ongoing post-sale journey is necessary to achieve customer-led growth.
3. Implement a regular accountability cadence with internal partners
Cadence is critical for alignment to become part of the organizational culture. During the discussion, Travis shared two ways he found success with internal partners:
- Bi-weekly account plan reviews: Account teams should be the driver for these meetings, coordinating updates on customer progress, risks, and opportunities.
- Revenue team meetings: These aren’t Sales or Customer Success meetings, these are cross-functional meetings with every go-to-market function to discuss objectives and assign ownership to specific actions that will achieve those revenue goals.
“Inspect what you expect!”
— Chris Dishman, SVP of Global Customer Success, Totango
It's easy to skip or deprioritize meetings, but leaders can set the precedent and spotlight why it's important for regular updates, attendance and open discussion.
4. Align hiring to desired business outcomes
In a customer-first or customer-led growth world, sales AEs, AMs, and CSMs play a critical role in driving revenue, fostering strategic relationships, and ensuring long-term customer value. Each function has a different role, but they work in harmony, with the opportunity to impact renewals, expansions, and customer advocacy.
“We’ve been hiring customer success managers with sales instincts. This means we also have to adjust how we compensate internally.”
— Travis Hill, VP of Customer Experience, Altify
5. Pivot to AI-powered insights
AI is improving how businesses can track customer health and forecast renewals or expansions. Adopting AI-powered insights can help businesses better predict churn, detect risks, and identify hidden expansion opportunities.
“AI can spot what the human eye can’t,” says Karen. It’s no longer hearsay or hopeful. AI-powered insights can quickly come from call recordings, emails, support tickets, product engagement data, and other market data to spot patterns. Your go-to-market teams no longer have to solely rely on the sentiment from the account team to make decisions to shift into action.
6. Build a customer-centric culture
One way to know if your business has alignment across teams is to recognize if customer-centricity is part of your culture or is just a strategy line? Fostering an environment where every person in the organization contributes and feels accountable to customer outcomes is a culture.
From Sales to CS, to Marketing and Product, to Finance and Engineering, every team member plays a role in fueling customer-led growth. Team leaders have the responsibility to help their team members know how their role and actions translate into revenue. That is the foundation for building a customer-centric culture.
Ready to remove friction from your revenue engine?
Alignment between Sales and CS is essential for sustained revenue growth. Businesses that build clear processes, define team roles, leverage predictive AI, and foster a culture of collaboration will unlock new levels of performance.
“Everyone sells,” said Travis. When Sales, CS and the organization come together with a shared purpose, the customer benefits, and so does your bottom line.
Recurring revenue is a rhythm — not one note. It’s a commitment to continuous improvement and innovation, led by the customers you’ve got. So, they meet their goals, and you meet yours.
Learn how Totango can help your business put revenue on repeat.
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