If Sales and Marketing Aren’t Driving CS, What’s the Point?
These days, most B2B SaaS sales and marketing teams are often laser-focused on one thing: acquisition. But here’s a truth bomb—acquiring customers isn’t enough.
What if I told you that your business’s success doesn’t hinge on how many customers you get, but on how many you keep and grow? That’s where customer success goals come into play. Every action your marketing and sales teams take should serve one primary purpose: enabling customer success.
This post will show you why everything—from your marketing campaigns to your sales pitches—should be rooted in a strategy that retains and grows your customer base. We’ll dive into the specific roles marketing, sales, and customer success teams play in this ecosystem and how their alignment can supercharge your long-term growth.
Your Customer’s Journey Doesn’t End at the Sale—It’s Just Beginning
Most SaaS companies spend a fortune on getting prospects to convert, but what happens after that? Marketing and sales often consider their jobs done once a customer signs on the dotted line. But in reality, that’s just the starting point of the customer journey. If you want to retain and grow customers, your marketing and sales efforts need to be tailored to support customer success, starting from the first interaction.
Imagine this: A SaaS company uses flashy marketing tactics, promising customers the world with unrealistic claims about their product’s capabilities. The sales team closes deals left and right, driven by aggressive quotas. But when the customer gets their hands on the product, it doesn’t meet their expectations. Now, the customer success team is left cleaning up the mess, trying to manage frustrated clients, and scrambling to retain them.
The reality is that customer success goals should drive everything—from marketing to sales to onboarding processes. When marketing and sales teams collaborate with customer success teams, they set realistic expectations that allow customers to achieve their desired outcomes smoothly. By doing so, you foster customer loyalty and position your business for long-term profitability.
One-Way Ticket to Churn Town
Sure, acquisition is critical. But what good is getting new customers if you can’t keep them? If your marketing and sales teams are focused only on signing new deals and hitting short-term revenue goals, you’re missing the bigger picture.
Long-term success in SaaS comes from retention and customer expansion. Your customer base should not only stay with you but also grow, delivering ongoing value and profitability.
Let’s break this down: the cost of acquiring a new customer is often several times higher than the cost of retaining an existing one. Every time a customer churns, you’re throwing away the money and effort invested in acquiring them. In contrast, retaining and expanding relationships with existing customers results in higher Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) and increased profitability.
But retention doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a direct result of marketing and sales working in sync with the customer success team. When these teams share insights and data, they can build a cohesive strategy that not only lands new customers but also ensures they stay, grow, and succeed.
When CS Teams, Sales, and Marketing are in Sync, Everyone Wins
Think of your sales, marketing, and customer success teams as three legs of a stool. If one leg is missing or wobbly, the whole thing falls apart. So, how do you ensure that all three teams are working together to deliver long-term growth? By aligning their goals around customer success.
The role of the customer success team extends far beyond just troubleshooting. They are in the trenches with your customers, understanding their challenges and helping them reach their business goals. By sharing these insights with sales and marketing, they can help those teams refine their strategies.
Marketing teams can tailor their messages based on the real needs and desires of the customer, setting more realistic expectations that lead to satisfaction rather than disappointment. Meanwhile, sales teams can structure deals that offer flexibility for future growth, ensuring that customers can scale their use of your product as their needs evolve.
A key part of this collaboration is the sharing of customer health scores and other important metrics. Building a customer success team can provide valuable data on which customers are thriving and which are at risk of churn. Armed with this information, marketing can create more targeted campaigns, while sales can focus on upselling and cross-selling to customers who are primed for expansion.
In short, when CS teams, sales, and marketing are all in sync, they create a seamless experience for the customer—one that fosters retention, customer loyalty, and growth.
Marketing’s Role in the Customer Success Story: From Hype to Help
We’ve all seen it before: marketing campaigns that overpromise and underdeliver. It’s the equivalent of selling someone a luxury car and handing them the keys to a rusty bicycle. This kind of disconnect between marketing and the actual product can damage customer relationships before they even have a chance to flourish.
Your marketing team should focus on creating authentic, accurate messaging that reflects the true value of your product or service. Set expectations that your customer success team can deliver on. If marketing promises quick wins or game-changing results without the context of time and effort, it’s setting up the customer success function to fail.
Instead, use customer insights gathered by your CS teams to inform your marketing campaigns. What challenges are your customers facing? How have they succeeded using your product? These insights can help shape a marketing narrative that’s both compelling and realistic, ensuring that new customers come in with the right expectations—and are more likely to stay because they’re not disappointed.
A Deal Isn’t Done Until Your Customers Are Succeeding
Sales teams are under pressure to hit quotas and close deals, but short-term wins should never come at the expense of long-term customer success. If a sales deal is structured in a way that traps the customer in a box—such as with restrictive pricing tiers or limitations on features—your customer success team members will struggle to help the customer grow with your product.
Sales teams should take a customer-centric approach. Instead of pushing deals that close quickly but don’t offer scalability, focus on creating agreements that allow for flexibility and future growth. This not only gives your customers the room they need to evolve but also opens the door for upselling and cross-selling opportunities later on.
A key part of this strategy is ensuring that the onboarding process is smooth and that customers are set up for success from day one. Customer onboarding is often the first real interaction a customer has with your product, so it needs to be seamless. A bad onboarding experience can start the relationship on the wrong foot and make it difficult for your customer success team to turn things around.
By aligning sales with customer success goals, your company will ensure that every deal sets the customer—and the business—up for long-term success.
It Takes a Village (or at Least a Cross-Functional Team)
If you want to drive customer success, your sales, marketing, and customer success teams need to work together. This isn’t just about keeping everyone informed—it’s about creating cross-functional teams that share responsibility for retaining and growing your customer base.
Cross-functional teams help break down silos between departments, ensuring that everyone is working toward the same business goals. They also help improve communication, as customer feedback can quickly flow from one department to another, allowing for faster responses and more agile decision-making.
For example, if your customer success function identifies a new need among customers that isn’t being addressed, they can communicate that to both marketing and sales. Marketing teams can then develop campaigns to highlight how your product addresses that need, while sales teams can adjust their pitches to include that new information, ultimately helping customers achieve their desired outcomes.
Customer Success Metrics That Matter
So how do you know if your marketing and sales efforts are driving customer success? The answer lies in the data. Customer health scores, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) are all metrics you should be tracking to gauge the effectiveness of your strategies.
- Customer Health Scores: A strong indicator of whether your customers are happy and seeing value from your product. Sales and marketing teams can use this data to identify which accounts need extra attention.
- NPS: A direct measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction. By consistently improving this score, you’ll ensure customers stay longer and are more likely to recommend your product.
- LTV: The ultimate measure of success. A growing LTV means that your efforts are driving not only retention but also account expansion.
By tracking these metrics, your sales and marketing teams can continuously refine their strategies, ensuring they’re aligned with customer success goals.
Cross-Functional Collaboration for Business Goals
In a customer-centric business, the success of your customers isn’t just the responsibility of the customer success team—it’s a shared goal that spans the entire organization. When marketing, sales, and customer success teams align around a unified vision, the outcome is not only better for customers but also for the company’s bottom line.
By fostering cross-functional collaboration, you can create a culture where everyone is laser-focused on achieving key business goals that lead to customer retention, expansion, and overall profitability.
At the heart of this collaboration is a deep understanding of your customers. Each team brings unique customer insights that can collectively improve the way your organization meets its customer success goals. For instance, marketing’s engagement data and customer behavior patterns can highlight key points in the customer journey where clients are most engaged or at risk of dropping off.
Meanwhile, the sales team provides real-time feedback on customer pain points, helping refine messaging and product positioning.
This alignment also helps prioritize desired outcomes for the customer. Whether it’s shortening the onboarding process or improving access to product features, cross-functional teams can collaborate to find solutions that directly impact customer success. A well-aligned team also ensures consistent messaging and experience across all touchpoints, reinforcing the customer’s confidence in your brand.
Another key benefit of cross-functional collaboration is the ability to quickly adapt to changes in customer needs or market conditions. When these teams work in silos, it can take weeks or months for important information to circulate. However, when they communicate frequently, sharing customer feedback and customer health scores, it becomes much easier to adjust strategies and stay ahead of potential issues.
Ultimately, aligning your marketing, sales, and customer success teams creates a more seamless and supportive experience for the customer. This leads to stronger customer relationships, improved customer loyalty, and the ability to meet both your customers’ and your company’s business goals.
The Sales to Success Handoff: Ensuring Seamless Transitions
Closing a deal is just the beginning of the customer’s journey, and how well you handle the transition from the sales team to the customer success function can make or break the relationship. This is often a critical juncture where companies falter—expectations set during the sales process might not be fully communicated to the customer success team, leading to confusion, frustration, and ultimately, churn.
A seamless handoff is essential to ensuring that the customer’s post-sale experience matches their expectations. When the sales team hands over all relevant information—such as the customer’s business goals, specific product needs, and potential pain points—it enables the customer success team to hit the ground running. Without a detailed transfer of knowledge, the customer success team members are left to guess the customer’s priorities, potentially leading to a disjointed experience.
To avoid this, the handoff should be viewed as a strategic step in the overall customer success strategy. First, ensure that the sales team captures and shares comprehensive data with the customer success team during the transfer. This should include details such as the customer’s unique use cases, key stakeholders, desired outcomes, and any promises made during the sales process. This ensures that the onboarding process begins smoothly and customers feel supported from day one.
Another way to ensure a seamless handoff is by involving the customer success team earlier in the sales cycle. This allows the CS team to build rapport with the customer before the deal closes, giving them insight into the client’s needs and expectations. By the time the handoff happens, the customer success function is already familiar with the customer’s journey and prepared to deliver immediate value.
Clear and open communication between sales and customer success teams is also crucial during this transition. Regular syncs, joint meetings, and shared goals can help bridge any gaps between these functions, ensuring that the customer experience is consistent throughout their journey. A strong handoff not only improves customer satisfaction but also sets the stage for future opportunities, such as upselling, cross-selling, and building long-term partnerships.
By focusing on a smooth transition from sales to customer success, companies can ensure that they’re not just acquiring customers—they’re setting them up to succeed and grow. This, in turn, drives higher customer retention, greater customer loyalty, and ultimately, sustained growth for your business.
If Customer Success Isn’t the Goal, You’re Doing It Wrong
At the end of the day, everything your company does should come back to one goal: enabling customer success. Marketing, sales, and customer success must be aligned to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes, stay loyal, and grow with your company. By focusing on customer success goals from the very beginning, you’ll build a customer-centric strategy that fosters retention, expansion, and long-term profitability.
So ask yourself: Are your marketing and sales teams working toward customer success, or are they just chasing short-term wins? If it’s the latter, it’s time to make a change.
Call to Action: Want to learn more about how Reditus can help you align your teams for customer success? Contact us today to discover how our Fractional Revenue Team services can transform your customer retention and growth strategies.
