“Success is revenue. You get success right; your revenue is coming.” – Charlie Sonnenberg, VP Sales, Totango + Catalyst
Customer-led growth is the only way to protect and sustain revenue growth. Bold statement? Perhaps, but industry data backs up this claim—SaaS companies are putting more resources and more strategic focus behind retaining and growing revenue from the existing customer base.
Achieving higher retention and growth, however, requires effective collaboration and mutual support between customer success and sales teams. And that, sadly, is easier said than done.
At Totango + Catalyst, we’ve made it our goal to “practice what we preach” and foster a culture of collaboration between our CS and sales teams. As Senior VP of Global Customer Success at Totango+Catalyst, I recently joined two of my colleagues, Charlie Sonnenberg, VP of Sales, and Mollie Gardner, VP of Global Revenue Strategy, for a discussion where we shared practical tips and insights into the new approaches we’ve taken to help our own GTM teams work better together and succeed.
Here are three ‘behind-the-curtain’ tactics that are working for us:
- Delineating responsibilities to drive alignment between CS and sales
- Tracking metrics that drive to valuable outcomes, not just what is easy or has been done before
- Experimenting with AI to drive efficiency and create opportunities for impact
Check out the full discussion to get an even deeper dive into fresh ideas and new strategies that can help you improve collaboration and unlock new revenue opportunities.
CS and sales alignment: The secret weapon for success
Over the past year, customer success managers (CSMs) have taken a stronger role in driving commercial responsibilities, like customer success qualified leads (CSQLs) and expansion revenue.
But to do that well, CS needs true alignment with their sales counterparts. For Charlie and me, this means balancing mutual support with not tripping over one another. Done right, our mutual processes and engagements with customers are purposeful and frictionless.
Three tricks we used to accomplish this include:
- Be RACI: Using a responsibility assignment matrix (aka a RACI—Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed—matrix) has helped us to clearly define the roles and responsibilities between our CS and sales teams. This tool can seem simplistic, but it quickly helps encourage communication between the teams, ensuring smoother handovers and better customer experiences.
- Don’t fight over the same bone: By implementing a variable compensation structure, we’ve been able to prevent situations where cross-functional team members are fighting for the same opportunity. This starts at the executive level by aligning goals and objectives, setting clear expectations, and determining compelling incentives for each team.
- Take time to celebrate: Leaning into celebrating both CS and sales wins has been an important part of creating a thriving partnership between the teams. It’s common to ring the bell when an account executive closes a sale, but don’t forget to give kudos to the CSM who found the opportunity as well.
Make sure that you’re aligned at an executive level on what the goals and objectives are for the team, and make sure you don’t create scenarios where you’re going to create conflict within the team when you get into specific deals or use cases.
– Chris Dishman
Stop guessing, start growing: The customer success metrics that matter
If you’re only tracking metrics like usage or churn, then you’re only seeing a small piece of the puzzle. When you track outcome-based metrics that help prove value to your customers, then you can proactively identify areas for growth and expansion.
Three types of metrics that we track to uncover revenue growth opportunities are:
- Historical data: Historical data is a blind spot for many companies, but knowing what happened in the past is key to helping determine if you are moving in the right direction for the future.
- Core value: Understanding why your customer bought your product and what they want to achieve with it is going to give you the core value from the customer’s perspective. Once you have that foundation, you can determine the metrics or proxy metrics to measure and benchmark. At the same time, you can build out new opportunities to drive that value.
- Top-of-the-funnel metrics: On the sales side, top-of-the-funnel metrics are often overlooked but are very important to a successful customer handoff and implementation. Consider tracking things like how many emails were sent, how many qualified leads came in, how many meetings were set, how many were attended, and the state of the pipeline.
Two pieces of data that we look at are: number one, how do we make the customer successful and help them realize that value that we define in the sales cycle, and number two, how do we use the data once they are realizing that value to surface up expansion opportunities?
– Charlie Sonnenberg
The future of customer success: How AI is changing the game
When utilized effectively, AI tools are incredibly valuable, however, many are still struggling with tactical execution.
If you’re just getting started with AI, here are three ways we recommend using it:
- Ticket deflection: Leveraging AI for ticket deflection can improve efficiency by helping to reduce tier one and tier two support needs, improve overall customer satisfaction, and remove escalations that are going to your CSM teams.
- Account summaries: AI-powered account summaries, like the one offered by Totango + Catalyst, can provide an executive summary of a given account. This is especially useful for providing executives with an initial view of a customer’s status before hopping on a call with them.
- Call recording: Tools like Chorus or Gong can provide fantastic summaries and transcriptions of phone calls and make for an easy win when just starting out with AI. These platforms also integrate with Totango + Catalyst, so the summaries go directly into your customer’s account timeline where you can capture key insights from the calls.
Start with something. Whether you’re using basic generative AI to write an email or account summary or call notes. Things like that are a great place to start and get some experience with AI and how it can improve some processes for you.
– Chris Dishman
Success is revenue
As a CS leader in a CS organization, it’s exciting to see more light on the strategic importance of customer success in delivering business outcomes and revenue expansion. I firmly believe that customer-led growth will continue to be the predominant growth engine for businesses in the future. To be successful, customer success will need to recognize a new level of collaboration, continue to use data more effectively, and step up our game with AI-powered solutions.
Check out our full discussion to hear more of our thoughts and best practices for improving collaboration across teams, leveraging data, and embracing AI to achieve growth. Wondering how Totango + Catalyst can help you improve cross-functional collaboration and unlock new revenue growth opportunities? Learn more here.