When you think of a revenue department, what’s the first department that comes to mind?

The obvious answer is sales, it’s literally in the definition…

“the amount of money a business generates during a specific period of time aka sales.”

But what about Customer Success?

Do you consider CS to be a part of your revenue team?If not, you should and here’s why.

The Customer Success team works directly with your customers to help them get more value out of their purchase and throughout that process they gain powerful insight that can be leveraged across multiple departments including sales and marketing.

When we spoke with Gemma Cipriani-Espineria, VP of Customer Success at Chili Piper, during a recent episode of The Customer Engagement Lab, she said something that got the wheels in our brain churning.

As you might guess, there are so many benefits to prioritizing cross-team alignment. And we’re not just talking about Sales + Marketing. Let’s take a closer look at aligning your Sales + CS teams.

With a smooth, orchestrated alignment, you can enhance the sales motion and create a better overall customer experience.

Sales + CS = $$$ & Happy Customers (who turn into brand ambassadors).

Tips to align Sales and Customer Success

Create a Sales + Customer Success Managers (CSM) sync

Your CSMs have a lot of stories to share (good, bad, and some that make you want to buy them a bottle of tequila) that can provide long-term value for your growing business.

In case you haven’t heard this before, all churns aren’t bad. You know the saying, “it’s not you, it’s me.” Well, sometimes that’s truly the case with customers.

By syncing on a regular basis, you can work together to identify characteristics of successful customers and share data on bad-fit customers.

You can even take this a step further by creating a no-go list for your internal teams to use for future go-to-market strategies.

Implement a note taking system

We think it’s a really smart idea to create a note taking template that can be used internally by sales reps to make sure the CSM is well briefed on the customers before the official hand-off.

On the CSM side of things, the success team could use a similar approach to document interactions with customers that could be used for future sales pitches.

For example, if your higher education client discovers a new use case for your product this could be a key selling point for future prospects.

Collaborate on the customer handoff

The ultimate goal of the Sales + CS alignment is to create a seamless sales to customer success handoff. There are many ways to go about this handoff.

For instance, some companies pair sales reps with specific customer success managers to help establish an ongoing relationship. Others use checklists and next steps to set expectations for the customers.

Another alternative could be a brief get to know you call. This could be used to warm up a new customer to the next steps in their journey and transition them into the hands of a CSM.

About the Customer Engagement Lab podcast

The Customer Engagement Lab podcast is the B2B podcast guaranteed to make you LOL.

Every Friday, we share our favorite outreach examples from the week, interview Customer Engagement experts from companies like Chili Piper, and so much more.

Tune in to find out.

The Customer Engagement Lab is proudly made by the PandaDoc content marketing team.

Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.