How to Create Alignment Between Sales and CS
CS Show and Tell with Trey Praytor, Customer Success Strategy & Ops at Monday.com
đ The Problem
Have you ever worked with a customer that was âoversoldâ?
Have you felt the pressure of being understaffed and unable to ramp up new team members fast enough to meet demand?Â
The tension between customer expectations coming out of the sales process and what you can realistically implement is familiar to anyone in SaaS. That tension is only magnified when your team is stretched thin.Â
When we began scaling up our CSM team at Monday.com, we had two distinct challenges:
Early misalignment in the customer journey resulted in needless time spent coming up with creative workarounds for our customers.Â
We didnât have the time and resources to effectively train and onboard all our new team members for client-facing roles.Â
In reality, we had one issueâsilos.
No one from Sales or any other team intentionally created these silos. Yet gaps in our teamâs understanding of our product, the solution that was being sold, and the customersâ expectations made for a less than ideal customer experience.Â
Small misalignments quickly grew into larger issues. In golf, even small differences in where you hit the ball can result in very large differences in where it lands. So for us, solving these silos meant starting when the gaps were smallestânew hire onboarding.Â
đĄ Our Idea
To combat these gaps, we created a cross-departmental three-week boot camp for all client-facing roles including Sales, Partners, Customer Success, and Customer Experience. The boot camp covered how to use the product, what each role was and how they all worked together, and a general understanding of the different teams within the company. After the boot camp, each role broke into training relevant for their day-to-day and how to ramp up in their role.
(see example training schedule below)
đ Our Results
The new boot camp was less efficient because each team not only learned their role but also some preliminary information about other teams.Â
The boot camp was more work for Sales Enablement since they were now coordinating multiple roles.Â
More stakeholders needed to be consulted on changes, so the training was less flexible.
Training took longer due to an increased focus on learning the product before splitting out into role-specific training.Â
But at the end of the day, it worked.Â
While this approach was less than optimal for any one specific role, we made up for it by building alignment on our process, camaraderie across teams, and a deeper understanding of the product across the training cohort.Â
By focusing on closing the gap early:Â
Sales better understood the technical limitations of the platform and could better qualify leads.Â
CS could better empathize with our customers and distill the value of the product into compelling touchpoints.Â
Everyone aligned around our shared vision of delivering the best results for our customers.Â
When Covid moved the company to work remotely, it was also much easier to ensure team members were exposed to the same material regardless of where they were located. The standardized boot camp also provided an opportunity to share the experience of remote onboarding with more people in other roles, deepening their connection.Â
Our Enablement teams have scaled and created more specialized, efficient, and relevant role-specific training in the past few months. At some point, we will wind down most of the combined elements of the boot camp and retain only the most essential pieces, but the value of bringing new team members on board together in a shared experience has been incredible.Â
đ Your Turn
Thinking about trying something similar?
Start by overlaying the information needed to do each role. Then combine as much as possible.
Have stakeholders from each role review and revise any combined training so that everyone is âspeaking the same languageâ when describing your product, services, and company.Â
Get people working together. Some of the most beneficial elements of our onboarding are when we group people across roles and have them solve a problem or create a solution.Â
Donât stop at onboarding. Create intentional cross-team opportunities for collaboration and interaction.
You can find Trey Praytor on LinkedIn or email him at trey@monday.com