If we can take one lesson from the movies, it’s that teams do better together. From the Avengers to Anchorman, our favorite characters overcome their problems when they put aside their differences and “assemble!”
So why aren’t sales, marketing, and customer success following the script? After all, we’re working towards the same goal of achieving predictable revenue growth.
Sure, each part of the revenue team has a specific role to play. But to provide a flawless experience, their efforts must join up — across goals, data, and technology. You want a finely-tuned orchestra, not a rag-tag collective of soloists.
By its very nature, the SaaS sale is ongoing. Signing the contract is just the start. You’ve got to build a lasting relationship for both parties to get full value from the partnership.
So selling with rigid siloes across customer-facing teams and data doesn’t make sense. At best, it serves up generic, forgettable experiences. At worst, it creates disjointed buyer journeys that often lead to churn.
To get past this, we need a new way of working. It’s time for your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to take their cue from Hollywood. It’s time for your revenue team to assemble!
Team Misalignment Leads to Underwhelming Experiences
The never-ending emergence of new channels makes B2B buying more complex. With six to 10 buyers per account, each with their own unique concerns, means there are countless paths to a purchase.
But one thing hasn’t changed. Sales, marketing, and customer success all serve the same person — the customer. And, while each function has its own contribution to make, all should be working together to make the customer. Because, ultimately, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable.
When sales, marketing, and service teams align, you see the kind of consistent and consultative experiences that build trust.
Think about when you shop for your favorite brand. Whether you’re online, in-store, or talking to customer service — it’s the same brand. You don’t differentiate across channels, or teams. And your customers are no different. Eighty-two percent of business buyers say they want the same experience as when they’re buying for themselves.
Unfortunately, they’re not getting it. Why? Because while 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, 54% say it feels like sales, service, and marketing teams don’t share information.
This misalignment makes it impossible to serve up the experiences your customers want, or achieve the predictable revenue you need.
Fixing the B2B Buyer Journey
So misalignment breeds broken B2B buyer journeys. But what happens when your revenue team comes together?
Firstly, from a practical standpoint, when sales, marketing, and customer success work closely you align on goals, personas, and KPIs. You make sure you’re going after the same accounts — something one in three account-driven organizations fail to do.
Beyond this essential alignment, when marketing, sales, customer success combine we start to see the real magic happen. With data and insights shared between the disciplines, customer journeys suddenly become personalized and driven by context:
Marketing gets the knowledge and insights they need to really understand your customer. Messaging becomes targeted, timely, and relevant — all the stuff marketing’s supposed to be.
Sales can see all the data, right from your customer’s research stage. They understand when to engage and which marketing assets fit with where the customer is in the journey. They can also curate perfect examples from customer success to demonstrate how you’ve already delivered what your prospect is looking for.
Customer success can see the bigger picture and act accordingly. They’re coming prepared with a complete knowledge of the interactions a customer has had to date with marketing and sales.
The continual sharing of data and information is a virtuous circle, one that matches the cyclical nature of SaaS sales. What’s more, a joined-up revenue team gives you better visibility of performance across the sales cycle. You can report, plan, and see any shortfalls — right from pipe creation to sales and customer renewals.
Assembling Your Revenue Team
Bringing together marketing, sales, and customer success is your path to better B2B experiences (and predictable revenue growth).
But uniting your entire revenue team requires change. Changes to your culture, the way you talk about your solutions, and the way you work. Moreover, it takes a platform that can make this unified approach possible.
You’re in luck. At 6sense, we’ve done away with separate categories to create the single revenue powerhouse we call revenue technology, or “RevTech.” Our platform puts your entire revenue team under one roof, backed by AI, big data, and machine learning.
With shared insights and real-time actions orchestrated by AI, your revenue team can combine efficiently and accurately at scale. More importantly, they can work together to build lasting relationships and help your customer navigate their unique buyer journey in the smoothest way possible.
So take a tip from the movies, start assembling your revenue team today.
For more tips on how you can align your revenue teams, check out this research report.
