Creating happy, successful customers is a shared responsibility

Everyone should understand that their work impacts the experience your customers have.

Customer-facing teams are not just responsible for customers themselves, but also for ensuring every other team understands the goals your customers have, the challenges they are looking to solve, and the road-blocks they encounter along the way.

Here's a gut check for aligning your sales, marketing, and success teams.

Marketing

The work of your marketing team is likely the first thing your future customers engage with. These prospects come to your marketing site to learn about your product. They follow your brand on social media. They sign up for your newsletters or blogs. And, they might go through a self-serve experience on their way to scheduling a demo.

Your marketing teams set the initial stage and expectations for your future customers.

Here are 3 things they SHOULD be doing

1. Interviewing customers - speak with as many of your successful customers as possible to understand the needs they come to you for. This will help create better assets and messaging on all marketing materials.
   
2. Learning from sales - your marketing leaders and sales leaders should constantly be talking. The questions that come up in sales about your product or service, should be answered through marketing materials earlier in that customer journey.
   
3. Working with success - customers have many needs and questions beyond the initial sales cycle. Have your marketing teams listen to customer calls, join business reviews, and meet with your success leaders to be sure the voice of the customer is always top of mind.

Sales

Your sales teams are likely the first “humans” your future customers engage with, the front line if you will. They should know the ins and outs of your product AND be able to communicate them clearly with potential customers.

Here are 2 things they SHOULD be doing

1. Sharing Product knowledge - these teams should be the first to know about new features and functionality. Be sure your product marketing teams are collaborating closely with your sales enablement teams to empower your sales reps to answer questions and highlight new problems your product can solve and value it can deliver.
   
2. Fostering relationships with customer success teams - when a deal hits “closed - won” and it’s time to introduce the next line of support, the smoother that handoff, the better. Be sure your sales and success teams have a process for handoffs and a CLEAR action plan for your customers as to what’s next.

Customer Success

Once a prospect has made it through your initial marketing efforts and sales cycle, it’s up to the success teams to support them in achieve the outcome they signed up for. But they can’t do it alone. Although they field the questions and hold the calls, without support from marketing and sales, success can’t be successful.

Here are 2 things they SHOULD be doing

1. Learning from sales - be sure your success teams are reading sales notes, understanding what discovery has been done (to avoid double asking and annoying customers), and really understanding the pains being shared with sales reps - all of this insight will help them better nurture and support those customers in the future.
   
2. Giving feedback to marketing and sales - your success teams are likely doing customer onboarding, check-in conversations, business reviews, and crisis-management. All of these are opportunities to learn what customers need AND insanely valuable for your marketing and sales teams to be aware of.

The main takeaway here is that ALL of your teams should be focused on enabling your customers, especially the ones that are directly engaging with them.

Let’s make “handoffs” an internal term that your customers don’t even know exists!

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