How to Align Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success

Do you need to better align your sales, marketing, and customer success teams? Consider these five strategies:

1. Find an executive sponsor one level above marketing, sales, and customer success -- For a startup or scaleup (<100 employees), you'll likely need the support of your CEO, COO, or CRO. This person will be the judicial branch to resolve disputes or silos preventing teams from doing what's best for the customer.
2. Build a service level agreement (SLA) with a representative of each team -- Think of this document like wedding vows where you define which team carries which responsibilities.
3. Organize all communications in a single CRM system -- Every customer-facing team member needs access to the same information in realtime. If you need to cobble multiple tools, integrating those tools together is a must.
4. Encourage warm handoffs -- For example, have the account executive that closed the sale attend at least the initial onboarding call.
5. Relentlessly eliminate friction from your processes -- Anytime you encounter an opportunity to empower team members or clients to accelerate their journey or time to value, that's an opportunity to improve how you go to market and deliver your product or service.

What are you doing to better align your sales, marketing, and customer success teams? Let me know in the comments below.