4 Tips for Customer Success Managers for effective cross-functional work

7 min readMar 27, 2022

Best customer success teams know that having effective Cross-Functional Communication is the key to success.

The type of organizations you collaborate with can change depending on your company structure, nature of the product, and services your company offers. However, one thing stays the same: you can get what you need from other teams to retain and grow your customers.

Whether you are looking to excel at your current role, looking for a new CS role, or as a Customer Success Manager, you are trying to figure out how to build a strong rapport with your peers, leaders of cross-functional teams, this post is written for you :)

GENERAL TIPS

Before we dive into the nuts and bolts, I want to provide essential guidelines on how to be successful working on cross-functional teams in general:

Understand everyone’s priorities: Knowing what other teams’ success gets measured on will help you with the narrative of your asks. The more related your asks are to the success metrics of other teams, the more prioritization your asks will get compared to all the other asks.
Communicate clearly and respectfully: I will go more into detail on this for each team. In general, make sure that you cover what you are requesting, why and how you think your company can approach this if you have any recommendations you want to vet.
Accountability: Make sure you are inquiring to the right people. After each conversation, make sure you know who will be the point person to help you with your request.
Urgency/Timelines: This is the most critical piece of action-oriented communication. If you need people to respond to your request at a specific time, you need to share the reason behind it. You might have an upcoming renewal or a call coming up with the customer. If so, share the timeline you have to get your asks prioritized.

A few principles help you with this, such as the RACI model. RACI is an acronym that stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed. A RACI chart is a matrix of all the activities or decision-making authorities undertaken in an organization set against all the people or roles. You can read more about this principle here.

SALES

Sales and CS work interchangeably during and post-sales cycles. In many companies, the CS function reports to CROs, the Director of Sales & Revenue or the Chief Customer Officer. Irrespective of the org structure, the goals of sales and CS are both very revenue centric: Land a customer and grow that customer along the way: win for the account executive/sales team and best for the CSM from an ARR retention and growth perspective.

Onboarding

Internal sync with the AE once a new customer signs up is critical to long-term success. AEs gather a ton of insight during the sales cycle to the customer’s use case, hurdles that might come up down the line, the success criteria the customer is looking for in this partnership, and potential ways to grow the customer’s usage/services along the way. You want to make sure that you gather all this information from the AE before jumping on any external calls with your customer to make sure you and the AE look united and you do your homework so that the customer doesn’t have to repeat anything that was discussed during the sales/pilot cycle.

Maintaining the relationship

For Growth/MM/SMB CSMs: If you are in this category, then you most probably have the top %5 of your book of business requiring you to be high touch, and the rest is either super low touch or don’t have the full potential to be primed for an upsell or expansion. You would want to keep the AE in the loop during Joint Success Planning/Business Review calls to ensure you both have the context on how the customer is achieving their goals with your current offerings and what’s next for them in the partnership.
For Enterprise Strategic Customers: These folks will require a more white glow/high touch service, and they will make you think outside the box. Don’t feel like you are alone on this. Set up monthly or bi-weekly syncs with your AE to keep them in the loop. They might also have ideas on how to go about specific/customized asks of your strategic/enterprise customers. You can even divide some work depending on the urgency of the request. Also, this way, you are keeping the AE engaged on these accounts, and they can pick up if a customer is bringing any issues/requests from their end during a renewal or an upsell conversation. This way, you ensure that the dedicated AE for these accounts won’t be caught off guard during contractual discussions.
Renewals/Upsells: Depending on your organization, maybe you are the one driving renewals, a dedicated renewals manager, or solely the AE of the account. Include your AE on the renewal conversations 90 to 120 days before the renewal date, regardless of the case. Ask them if they want to join the renewal sync with the customer. If they think they won’t be adding value, all good. At least you give them a heads up so that you are not turning any opportunities down that would have surfaced by AE or the renewals manager during that call.

PARTNER

The dynamic between partnership and CS teams works differently from the dynamic we discussed above between sales and CS.

As a CSM, you might need a partner team to:

Conflict resolution/risk mitigation: Help you identify the right partners to enable/block your customers on a specific project.
Service improvement: Help you provide an advanced solution to help your customer scale their use of your product or services.
Education: Share know-how in your industry as a subject matter expert to educate your customers better.
Fulfilment: If your product is heavily dependent on a network of partners and service providers, you might need to work closely with your partner team to make sure you build a robust process to work together depending on typical partner-related inquiries/performance of the partners/outside of box requests from your customers.

When working with partner teams, here are some pointers for you to consider for effective cross-functional communication between partner and CS teams:

Context on your customer, what they do, why this ask is critical to them.
What do you need from the partner team, and what is the ultimate goal you are trying to achieve with this ask
Your timeline. Nothing gets done without a sharp/estimated timeline. As everyone within or outside your team has racing priorities, you need to make sure that your task takes palace on the to-do list of the colleague who can help you.

ENGINEERING/PRODUCT

You might manage pilots of product features for strategic and high-touch customers before they go GA. Sometimes, you might need an outside-the-box solution for a strategic customer. In these situations, you need product/engineering support. Here are the 4 essential items you need to include in your communication:

Why is this task necessary for the customer?
How is this task relevant to the OKRs of your product team or overall annual go to market/business goals?
Several other customers, who could be interested in this specific task/feature? Do you have a list of customers with associated total ARR or incremental ARR to share with PM to back up the Importance of the ask here?
Is there a current workaround? If there is, explain and focus on why it is not scalable or time-consuming.

These steps are not a replacement for your CS and Product leader’s ongoing conversations. If you have any, these are the requests made outside of the product feature submission cycle, you might need a more 1:1 approach with the product manager and the engineers. In the majority of the Saas companies, this tends to be between 3 to 6 months.

MARKETING

In many startups, marketing teams are mainly focused on new customer acquisition and retention marketing; the one for the growth of the existing customer base might be the second priority. In some companies, retention marketing and sales/revenue enablement can be under product marketing managers’ responsibility.

There are a few ways how CS and Marketing can team-up:

Webinars, surveys, G2 reviews, case studies: These efforts require CSMs to reach out to their customers to get them to take action. When working with marketing with these initiatives, make sure you provide context on which customers would be a good fit and why. Some customers might go through an unhealthy/problematic phase or simply onboarding with your product, so they might not have enough experience to speak. Depending on the ask, you have the right to evaluate/push back on specific requests with your customer’s success in mind. Imagine if you have an unhappy customer right before renewal; you most probably don’t want to nudge that customer for a case study.
Customer Enablement/Onboarding documents/Knowledge base: The direction of the request here changes. These are the asks CS team general has for marketing teams, and depending on the bandwidth of your retention/sales/CS enablement teams, you might need to take a more proactive approach. In general, for startups, due to lack of resources, you might need to create some of these resources and have your marketing team review them before it is ready to be customer-facing. If you have a bigger marketing team that has a specific function to support you on enablement, then make sure your asks have:
Type of request: deck, one-pager, article, etc
Share why you are requesting this collateral and how it will enable your customers to use your product on the scale.
ARR impact: If there are a list of other customers who might benefit from this ask, make sure to provide a list of customers along with the incremental ARR
Timeline: Make sure you state the deadline. Your marketing team can prioritize it depending on the urgency and the due date you across all the other requests they might have in the queue.

Useful Resources

More about the Importance of a Cross-Functional collaboration:

CS Slack Groups

CS in Focus: Join nearly 1000 CS professionals in this Slack community to learn, collaborate, and be the first to know about upcoming events, exciting news, and exclusive content for our community.
Global Customer Success Community: Join a global network of Customer Success professionals that are committed to cultivating knowledge exchange, and establishing a CS community.
On Deck Customer Success Bootcamp: As a member part of the inaugural Bootcamp for CS leaders, happy to be a referral for you to join this engaging community of CS leaders.

Do you have questions and want to learn more about effective cross-functional communication tips? Feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin.