The Sales and Success Partnership

There are a lot of players in the customer lifecycle. Some key ones are Sales, Success and Support — and it is important to establish a relationship with them all. Wondering how they differ? I like to think of it this way —

Sales will tell the customer what you need and the cost. Success will tell you why you need it. Support will tell you how to do it.

This particular piece will focus on the Sales and Success partnership. Not gonna lie — as a Customer Success Manager (CSM), I definitely leverage my non-sales role as a way to establish trust with my customers. This isn’t to say that Sales folks are not trustworthy; they totally are, but the purpose and function of the Sales and Success roles are quite different.

Sales roles are driven, measured and centered around revenue. It is the center of most if not all of their conversations. It’s not bad, but it is expected. Success on the other hand, has metrics like churn and contraction, and expansion, which are associated with revenue, but have conversations that are cemented in value vs. dollar. These roles are different, but similar, and the two of them definitely impact the greater good of the customer.

To start your sales and success partnership off on the right foot, you have to understand that the other doesn’t exist to serve you. I’ll repeat: Success does not exist to serve Sales. Sales does not exist to serve Success. We’re both only here to serve the customer, and it’s beneficial to us if we do that together and not in silo.

Open and clear communication in the partnership is key. Establish this as soon as possible and keep each other apprised of conversations and flag any hot topics or priorities. Both parties should know about customer goals, challenges, contract term and renewal date, expansion opportunities, etc. As a team, create a plan of attack. You do not have to be on every call with the customer and neither does the Account Executive, and with clear communication, you won’t need to be.

At the beginning of Q2 I started having 30 minute monthly meetings with my Account Executives. This has been crucial to keeping us aligned. Especially with the new work from home environment, these interactions could have easily fallen to one-off Slack messages or emails. You lose so much of the relationship building aspect, and again, this is a partnership. From these meetings we are both able to identify accounts that need immediate attention, new points of contact, discuss the overall Account Health Status, and discuss ownership of any tasks that need to be completed.

In the end, both Sales and Success are happy if the customer is happy. Take the path of least resistance to get there, and partner up!