Breaking the Silos — Growth Starts with Cross-Functional Alignment
As CS leaders, we’re often held accountable for retention and expansion. But those outcomes depend on more than our team.
They rely on:
- Sales, and how well they set expectations.
- Product, and whether it listens and delivers value.
- Support, and how it handles customer friction.
- Implementation, and how quickly they deliver time-to-value.
- Billing and Compliance, and how they influence trust at critical moments
Customer success leaders must break down silos between departments to enhance growth effectively. Alignment doesn’t happen organically. It happens intentionally — and CS leaders have to drive it.
Why? We’re the connective tissue of the customer journey. And that journey crosses way more
than just Sales and Product.
In this episode I share how to align with 6 cross-functional teams that impact retention and growth.
Transcript
Welcome to CS Shift, the podcast that goes beyond retention with strategists for customer success leaders navigating the new era.
Speaker A:I'm your host Naldido Su, customer success executive with over a decade of experience helping enterprise organizations scale with purpose and passionate advocate for growth that is both measurable and human.
Speaker A:On this show we cut through the noise and focus on what actually works using frameworks, mindset, hard won lessons and technology to thrive through it all.
Speaker A:Because the shift is happening, will you lead it or break it?
Speaker A:Let's dive into today's episode.
Speaker A:Welcome to CS Shift, the podcast that goes beyond retention with strategies for customer success leaders navigating the new era.
Speaker A:I'm your host Nandido Suh and today we are tackling one of the biggest blockers to CS driven growth.
Speaker A:I mean silos.
Speaker A:We can have the best CSMs in the world.
Speaker A:But if sales over promises product ignores feedback or support burns trust expansion becomes impossible.
Speaker A:So let's talk about how to break those silos and lead cross functional alignment that actually drives growth.
Speaker A:As CS leaders we are often held accountable for retention and expansion.
Speaker A:Expansion becoming the new norm.
Speaker A:But those outcomes depend on more than our team.
Speaker A:They rely on sales and how well they set expectations, product whether they listen and deliver value support, how they handle customer frictions, implementation, how quickly they deliver time to value, bidding and compliance, how they influence trust at critical moment.
Speaker A:Knowing that, it's quite interesting that too often we operate in silos.
Speaker A:Why?
Speaker A:We have different tools, different goals, different KPIs and different leadership.
Speaker A:What's the result?
Speaker A:Confused customers, frustrated teams, slower growth.
Speaker A:I do believe that alignment does not happen organically, it happens intentionally and CS leaders have to drive it.
Speaker A:Why?
Speaker A:Because we are the connective tissue of the customer journey and that journey crosses way more than just sales and product.
Speaker A:I've identified six core cross functional partners.
Speaker A:We might have more but these are the six most important cross functional partners I've been working with and I'm going to share with you how to align with each of them.
Speaker A:Sales with sales One thing which is very important is bringing customer success into deal Dex reviews and when needed sales into QBRs.
Speaker A:Sometimes at CSM we complain, you know with the fact that sales are not selling customers for success because they're over promised or they even sell success some features that we cannot deliver.
Speaker A:So a way that I've identified as always working has been to bring customer success team into deal closing.
Speaker A:Very important.
Speaker A:You know when the deal is at 70%, 80% of being closed.
Speaker A:I been working with my sales counterparts so that you know, they have a meeting with the customer so that the customer can understand what customer success means in our organization, how they're going to be helped, when they're going to sign, how things going to work.
Speaker A:Also part of those meetings as well, you know, for very large and big deals where you know, by coming as the head of CS that was really bringing value and helping accelerate the closing of the deal with product is two ideas.
Speaker A:Work with your cross functional partner in order to create structured feedback channels.
Speaker A:I've been working in companies where we had a place to log those requests asked by our customers.
Speaker A:And I've been working in companies where we didn't have a common place where to put those ideas.
Speaker A:And because of that we didn't even have a view of the request made by our different customers around the globe on the product.
Speaker A:So working on that is very helpful because it helps the world organization to see, you know, the request that comes very often as well as it helps the organization to see, you know, some of the requests that are particular to some regions because of the languages for instance, or some specificities.
Speaker A:And number two, is really bringing customer success into roadmap conversations.
Speaker A:Very important, you know, for your team as well to know, you know, what product is building, you know what's coming in because you know, we can help product as well with some customers who might want to test some of the features that have been developed.
Speaker A:So it creates the relationship, it creates the alignment that is needed for our customers to be successful.
Speaker A:Now let's talk about support for support, number one, I will say is working with your support cross functional partner to define clear escalation protocols.
Speaker A:What I've seen is that sometimes CSM are not even aware of, you know, the cases that are being handled by support.
Speaker A:And then it's when things are not working, when the customer is angry that they understand that, you know, some of the answers were not appropriate, were not the right response.
Speaker A:You know, there are several things that you know, might happen.
Speaker A:And one thing I did, for instance in one of the company I work in was to work with our internal IT team to have customer cases or requests if you want being integrated within the CRM.
Speaker A:So that when we were going into one of our customer, we could see, you know, besides, you know, all the meetings being logged well, we can also see all the different requests closed with support in progress or the one where we definitely need to intervene.
Speaker A:So the escalation protocols are very important.
Speaker A:Which step, you know, the CSM has to act as a single voice in front of the customer and how we work from there.
Speaker A:Also number two is really to share customer intelligence or customer contests regularly.
Speaker A:Sometimes support does not necessarily know because they don't have access to the CRM.
Speaker A:In some companies they don't necessarily know what's going on with the customer.
Speaker A:Why this request is urgent, why this request is important.
Speaker A:Having a place where, you know, they can go and get some information about a customer is very important so that they know that these are either at risk accounts, growth accounts.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:With implementation, I want to talk about two things will really help in terms of aligning customer success with implementation.
Speaker A:Define what success means at GO Live, what it means, when is the customer live, what are the criteria by which we assess that the customer is live?
Speaker A:Number one.
Speaker A:And number two, how to transition those customers with a warm structured handoff.
Speaker A:Very important because I've seen cases where customer is live, no one is aware of that customer is live.
Speaker A:There are some technical workarounds used by implementation team that support does not necessarily know.
Speaker A:So having a clear Go Live document where we have all the learnings from the implementation, all the things we should know not only for CS but as well as for support.
Speaker A:And last but not least, billing and compliance.
Speaker A:It's important I think in two ways to create that alignment, clarify who owns what when issues arise.
Speaker A:Like here I have two examples.
Speaker A:In one of my experience, the compliance team was contacting directly our customers, you know, just to get some information or updated documents or telling them that they've been, you know, doing some activities that make them in a place where they have to pay more money, give more guarantee and you know, when things start to talk about money, these can really create issues with the customer and we were not aware.
Speaker A:So what I did was really to, you know, have a meeting with my cross functional partner in compliance to understand, you know, why they were doing what they were doing, you know, and also share to her, you know, what, you know, some of what they were doing was creating us issues for us and we come with something very simple.
Speaker A:She was sending us the list of the of our customers that was planned to be contacted in the month and from the list we're just telling her this customer, we're going to contact them directly.
Speaker A:And for this one you can directly contact them directly.
Speaker A:Simple because it's also about, you know, building relationship as well.
Speaker A:Alignment is building relationships and also from those relationship, creating the alignment so that we worked well together and not, you know, work against each other.
Speaker A:And number two is really proactively include compliance renewal prep for regulated Customers.
Speaker A:When I talk about clarifying, we own SWAT when issues arise.
Speaker A:From the billing standpoint, our issues were billing.
Speaker A:After several attempts, they know getting, you know, the money.
Speaker A:We just realized that hey, they were looking at some place in the CRM to contact the billing team and we were not updating that place where we were updating other fields.
Speaker A:So we came with one thing to always be updated number one.
Speaker A:And number two, we work with our sales team so that you know, for billing instead of having one contact, we ask now those customers to provide an email alias where we could have at least two or three people.
Speaker A:Why?
Speaker A:Because people move, you know, when the billing contact is one person, once the person leaves the company, well, we don't necessarily have an answer or if the person asks, just move to another role.
Speaker A:Sometimes they just don't respond to the email and then, you know, we stay there with a customer not paying us.
Speaker A:So issues are good in a sense that when they arise, it's just about sitting together and deciding about what to do about that.
Speaker A:So one thing I've done several times and several times as well, I've been having joint strategy session with my cross functional partners.
Speaker A:And those joint strategy session might be monthly cross functional reviews, might be escalation playbooks, might also be internal quarterly business reviews.
Speaker A:And I think this is really great because we have internal quarterly business review and specifically when we have the senior leadership team attending that it's a way for different teams on one or two slides share, you know, what I've worked for them in the quarter, what I've not really works and where they need help from one of the cross functional partners.
Speaker A:So it's a place where we can really share how it wins but we can also share our struggles.
Speaker A:But also we can request help and from there define next steps so that we can work better and better altogether.
Speaker A:If you don't have internal quarterly business review with your cross functional partners, this might be a way to start that.
Speaker A:And if based on your organization it might be very complicated to have everybody on the table, you can start, you know, doing that, you know, first with sales and then you can add support team and then, you know, month by month or quarter by quarter, you can really start adding more and more of your partners or do different meetings.
Speaker A:It depends on your the culture of the company, the difficulties you might have, et cetera.
Speaker A:Here are some free quick wins you can implement this quarter.
Speaker A:Number one, you can run a joint CS and sales workshop on handover quality.
Speaker A:If you realize that you're not sure of your handover quality and when I'm.
Speaker A:When I'm talking about being sure in some organization they don't even have an end over framework or structure.
Speaker A:It means what?
Speaker A:It means that when a new customer is signed, the information you're going to see in your CRM depends on the sales and this is not excellent.
Speaker A:So this might be a first place to start.
Speaker A:Number two, you can build a quarterly product CS roadmap feedback review.
Speaker A:Really see it from the roadmap or from what have been delivered, a new feature, you know what's going on, what has been the feedback from the customer and will it start working together.
Speaker A:And number three, you can map your cross functional customer journey and identify where friction lives.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:You know, because the journey from past sale to renewal, as I said earlier, cross many teams.
Speaker A:So where do you see a lot of frictions?
Speaker A:Well, this might be the place to start.
Speaker A:Why?
Speaker A:Because you're not just the voice of the customer.
Speaker A:You are the bridge between every team that touches them.
Speaker A:I want to close by saying that growth does not live in one department.
Speaker A:It lives in alignment.
Speaker A:We are all responsible for retention and expansion.
Speaker A:It's just that CS is also accountable for it.
Speaker A:It starts with you.
Speaker A:The CS leader who sees the full picture endears to lead across silos.
Speaker A:Next week I'm going to wrap up season one.
Speaker A:That will be our fifth episode and I'm going to wrap it up with how to identify expansion opportunities before it's too late.
Speaker A:If this episode sparked ideas you can share it with your sales product or support counterpart, it might be the start of better alignment.
Speaker A:I'm Nandi Dossiou and this is CS Shift.
Speaker A:Let's lead the change.
Speaker A:Thank you for listening to this show.
Speaker A:Remember, the new mandate for customer success is driving growth.
Speaker A:And growth does not happen in isolation.
Speaker A:It's driven by strategic and operational leadership.
Speaker A:Subscribe and share this episode with another CS leader ready to shift their strategy.
Speaker A:I'm Nandi Dosu and this is CS Shift.
