Our September Leadership Office Hours focused on the need to break down silos within our organizations, and Emily Garza showed us what this can look like.
In order to make sure that your customers are having their needs met in the most effective and successful way, cross-functional collaboration is a must. So how do you as a CS leader make sure this is happening?
- Be sure you are looking at all internal teams to see where overlap and support can happen. What are they doing on their side of the fence that can align with what you are doing or what you customers need?
- Being cross-functional is not a one-way street. This is a give and take that benefits both teams.
- Goals are usually similar across various teams, but the process isn’t always the same.
Emily took a look at three different teams and walked through some alignment identification and then some next steps in getting cross-collaboration started.
Product Team
- Focuses on
- Ideation, design, launching new products
- Gathering customer feedback
- Growing revenue from products
- The CS Involvement
- Helping prioritize feature requests
- Identifying beta customers
- Providing customer exposure
- Post-launch feedback loop
- Getting started
- Invite product to join your customer calls
- Bi-weekly meeting to open communication
- Determine vision/customer feedback impact on roadmap
Marketing Team
- Focuses on
- Brand awareness
- Customer or prospect events
- Sales leads
- Highlighting customer stories
- The CS Involvement
- Gain logo rights
- Identify customers for quotes
- Document use cases
- Document and share success criteria and outcomes
- Identify customer marketing support needed
- Determine communication structure
- Getting started
Finance Team
- Focuses on
- Revenue growth (minimize costs)
- Budgets and forecasting
- Accounts receivable
- The CS Involvement
- Customer forecasts
- Assisting on collection challenges
- Minimize renewal discounts
- Getting started
- Sit down with your finance leader leader and understand your business drivers
- Identify how to provide forecast/budget visibility
- Set up an end of month meeting with Billing team
After Emily shared the examples of what alignment and collaboration can look like, the attendees broke into small groups and discussed the following:
- Do you have common KPIs with any teams where you have high cross-functional needs?
- What could take a ‘good’ cross-functional relationship you have today and make it great?
Key Insights
- Common KPIs
- Need to pick the most important KPIs and always look at transitioning them throughout the customer and the product life cycle
- What are the cross-functional uses and needs of each team?
- Make sure you set goal measurement
- How do you know when you have reached the goal?
- Do all sides agree?
- Often AEs look at expansion and upselling
- Need to have a clear line between pre- and post-sale
- Define the handoffs
- Make sure goals are aligned between CSM and AE
- CS owns retention but other groups are influencers
- Product
- Usage
- Product adoption
- Customer education
- Beta launches and features
- Conversion rate*
- Product delivery
- Sales
- NRR and consumption
- Onboarding – time to launch
- Make sure KPIs are identified and shared
- TAM and CSM are accountable but not responsible directly
- Identify onboarding timeline
- Post-sales transition
- Must be documented
- Meetings needs to be booked within 48 hours of the close of the deal
- Customer kick-off must occur within 1 week of the close
- Retention goals
- CS doesn’t negotiate and close but supports the work that allows the sales team to be successful here
- Conversion rate*
- Moving the Needle
- Interviewing peers and some of their direct reports
- Assure teams of close collaboration and having many of the same end goals
- Review/celebrate quick wins (planned and unplanned efforts)
- Communicating what CS does
- Have teams speak to customer directly
- Build personal relationships with department heads
- Go through a difficult situation together (supporting a tough customer project
- Can help solidify a relationship and identify how to support each other effectively
- External validation of the relationship
- Delivery value through partnerships (internal and external)
- Set a team culture focused on the customer
- Set SLAs across the teams
- Sharing good examples of partnerships between teams can help
- Be sure a full understanding of compensation is clear with the sales team to avoid confusion or frustration
- Marketing
- NPS/CSAT
- Customer stories
- Case studies
- References
Download the pdf
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Emily Garza brings extensive experience across the customer journey, having worked for more than 12 years at AT&T and Fastly in sales, enablement, and customer success roles. At Fastly, she was responsible for customer engagement and growth, maintaining a 60+ Net Promoter Score while scaling the customer success organization from supporting $60M to $300M+ in annual recurring revenue. In 2021, she was named a Top 100 Customer Success Strategist by SuccessCOACHING. She is currently the VP, Customer Success at Proton, leading implementation, support, customer relationship development and growth. Outside of Proton, she serves as an advisor to the University of San Francisco School of Management and a Coach for Catalyst Coaching Corner. Emily lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Ernesto, and son, Luca.