6 Proven Ways You Can Facilitate Effective Collaboration Between Sales and Support Teams

Updated on November 18, 2024

How often do you consider the distinct yet interdependent roles of your sales and support teams? 

Sales teams are typically laser-focused on closing deals and driving revenue.

Support teams on the other hand dedicate themselves to solving customer issues and ensuring satisfaction.

Despite having a lot of cross-functional responsibilities and working so closely with the same customers, each team often operates in silos that result in a disconnect. And this disconnect can cost a company valuable business.

The problem often stems from this: promises made by sales teams will fall flat if they’re not aligned with the support team. Anything the sales team commits to that service teams cannot fulfill will inevitably frustrate customers. This leads to complaints, dissatisfied customers, and, ultimately, loss of revenue.

It is clear that these two vital functions— sales and support— need to be completely aligned with each other to deliver the ideal customer experience. In this article, I’ll share six proven strategies I’ve personally implemented to bridge this gap. But first, let’s start by understanding the importance of sales-support collaboration in depth.

The Importance of Sales-Support Collaboration

The bottom line in an organization is directly affected by how well sales and support teams collaborate. When both departments work together effectively, customer satisfaction improves, leading to higher retention rates and loyalty, ultimately impacting overall business revenue.

When there’s a misalignment between both teams, it will lead to:

Negative Customer Experience

When a customer hears one thing from sales and experiences another from support, the disconnect isn’t just a matter of internal miscommunication. It directly hits your customer’s trust in your brand. And once that trust is broken, it’s incredibly difficult to regain.

Misalignment With Business Goals

Sales teams are often laser-focused on closing deals, sometimes leading them to make promises difficult for support to fulfill. Support, meanwhile, is tasked with keeping customers happy but often operates without insight into the sales-driven expectations or promises that sales teams commit to. This misalignment confuses customers and undermines broader business goals, leading to missed revenue opportunities.

As the founder of Hennessey Digital, I have worked with many companies, and I can tell you that the most successful businesses I’ve worked with are those where sales and support teams are in constant communication. And I don’t mean coordination happening only during significant deals, but constant communication throughout the entire customer lifecycle. They especially make it a point to create a shared knowledge base where sales could easily pass along details and commitments made during the pitching and onboarding process. This means any promises or special conditions agreed upon during the sale are explicitly communicated to the service teams. This simple practice ensures that support has all the information they need to meet or exceed customer expectations.

Given that, the question now is, how can a business facilitate better communication to ensure seamless sales-support collaboration? Let’s take a look at some proven strategies below. 

6 Proven Strategies for Effective Sales-Support Team Collaboration

Most businesses might assume that sales-support misalignment can easily be solved by traditional communication workflows. But if it were that easy, then this pervasive disconnect between then these two important functions wouldn’t even be an issue. 

In my experience, it takes a combination of focused strategies to ensure the successful, long-term alignment of sales and support teams. Here are six strongly recommend: 

1. Shared Customer Journey Mapping Sessions

The disconnect between sales and support teams usually stems from a lack of shared understanding of the customer’s journey. To address this, you can conduct shared customer journey mapping sessions.

By collaborating on customer journey maps, each team can then see how their actions impact the customer experience at across various stages. This will align both teams’ perspectives and ensure that the handoff from sales to support is seamless. 

How to Implement It:

1. Organize a workshop where both sales and support teams can collaborate in real-time. The aim is to map out the entire customer journey from initial contact to ongoing support.

2. Use tools like Miro or Lucidchart to create a visual representation of the journey. This makes it easy to identify key touchpoints, potential pain points, and moments of truth. 

Note: You’ll find it surprising how much customer journey visualization tools can help in pinpointing exactly where handoffs between teams happen and where they sometimes fail.

3. Next, as they map out the journey, ask each team to identify common pain points they experienced. For example, if sales often promises something that support can’t deliver on, mark it down and discuss how to address it.

4. Once you’ve mapped everything out, create a set of action steps to resolve any issues you’ve uncovered. If customers often feel abandoned after the sale, maybe your support team needs to step in earlier in the process. If service teams feel like they’re being handed tasks they can’t fulfill for their customers, it might be because sales teams are over-promising and they need to align earlier on what they can feasibly commit during the earlier sales stages. 

5. This isn’t a one-and-done deal. Make these sessions a regular part of your workflow so that both teams stay aligned as your business and customer expectations evolve.

2.  Build a Solid Foundation by Starting Manually Before Automating

Starting with manual processes before automating might seem like extra work, but it’s actually a smart move. When you start manually, you get to see firsthand what information is really valuable and how it flows between teams. You can tweak things on the fly and really fine-tune the process.

Then, once you’ve ironed out the flaws, you can move to automation with confidence. Essentially, you’re laying the foundation before you start building the house. You want to make sure it’s solid, or else the whole thing could collapse later on. 

Zach Dannett, co-founder of Tumble, shared how he benefited from this approach:

“Before we automated our customer support process, we spent time doing everything manually to see what really worked. We used a simple spreadsheet to track each support ticket from start to finish. This helped us spot issues, like how some tickets were getting stuck because of unclear priorities. We fixed these problems manually first, and it helped us make sure that when we switched to automation, the system was smooth and efficient. We were able to cut our ticket resolution time 35% before automating the process and manually carrying out support processes made our team more productive overall.”

How to Implement:

• Map Out Critical Information: Identify the key pieces of data that need to be shared between sales and support.
• Start with Manual Processes: Begin by manually sharing information between teams to understand the flow and identify any issues.
• Document the Process: Keep a record of what works and what doesn’t during this manual phase.
• Transition to Automation: Once you’ve established a solid manual process, gradually introduce automation to scale the workflow.

3. Develop a Unified Leadership Vision 

One of the biggest things that can make or break collaboration between sales and support is how leadership sets the tone. If the top brass doesn’t align these teams around a common goal—like focusing on customer success—then everything inevitably falls apart.

Leadership needs to emphasize that both sales and support aren’t just cogs in the wheel, but essential parts of a bigger machine. When everyone’s working towards the same customer-centric vision, you naturally start seeing better collaboration. The goal is for everyone to understand that the end goal isn’t just to close a deal or resolve a ticket—it’s to create a seamless, satisfying customer experience.

How to Implement:

• Define a Unified Vision: Develop a clear, customer-focused vision that outlines how both sales and support contribute to overall success. This should emphasize the importance of a seamless customer experience and shared goals.
• Communicate Regularly: Share this vision through all-hands meetings, newsletters, and internal communications. Make sure the vision is consistently reinforced in company updates and leadership messages.
• Embed in Performance Metrics: Integrate customer-centric goals into performance metrics for both teams. For example, sales goals could include customer satisfaction scores, while support goals might focus on customer retention rates.
• Monitor and Adjust: Regularly review the impact of this vision on team performance and make adjustments as needed. Use feedback from both teams to refine and strengthen the vision.

4 Train Support on Sales Needs

When support teams know what sales is looking for—whether it’s upsell opportunities or customer pain points—they can contribute so much more. It’s all about building cross-functional expertise. I’ve seen companies where support teams start recognizing when a customer might be ready for an upgrade, and they can seamlessly pass that lead on to sales.

You have to turn your support team into an extension of your sales force. And it doesn’t take much—just some targeted training sessions and maybe even some joint workshops where sales and support can share their experiences and insights.

How-To Implement:

• Identify Key Sales Needs: Determine what sales information is crucial for support to understand.
• Develop Training Programs: Create training sessions or workshops that focus on sales strategies and customer upsell opportunities.
• Facilitate Joint Workshops: Organize collaborative sessions where sales and support teams can share insights and learn from each other.
• Encourage Real-Time Collaboration: Set up systems where support can easily communicate potential sales leads to the sales team.

5.  Customer Success Handoff Templates

Sometimes, after closing a deal, you realize that the customer’s expectations were never properly communicated to the support team. Now your support team is scrambling to meet expectations they didn’t know existed. It’s a mess—and one that could have been easily avoided with the right process in place.

A customer success hand-off template ensures that all critical information is passed from sales to support without anything slipping through the cracks. This means fewer misunderstandings, smoother transitions, and happier customers.

Here’s an example of what an effective customer success handoff template looks like:

Section	Details
Account Name	XYZ
Sales Contact	[Name, Email]
CS Contact	[Name, Email]
Onboarding Contact	[Name, Email]
Admin Contact	[Name, Email]
Preferred Language	English
Target Market	Technology
Customer Intended Workflow	Integration with existing CRM
Goals with [Your Company]	Increase sales efficiency and data accuracy
Business Challenge	Low CRM adoption and data quality issues
Closed Reason	Budget constraints
Closed Sub-Reason	High cost
Closed Reason Detail	Customer cited budget limitations as the primary factor for not proceeding.
Customer Specific Requirements	Custom CRM integration and data migration support
Upsell Potential	High – Interested in additional analytics tools
Commercial Details	Initial contract value: $— ; Annual renewal rate: $—
CRM	Salesforce
Technologies Used	ERP System, Marketing Automation
Special T&Cs	[Payment terms, SLA]

How to Implement It:

1. Start by building a template that includes all necessary information—customer expectations, any promises made, special configurations, and service terms. It’s important that this template is comprehensive but easy to fill out.

2. This template should be a required step in your process, not an optional one. Before the customer is officially handed off to support, sales must complete this template in detail.

3. Practice transferring understanding and schedule a brief meeting between sales and support for every handoff. This will help in cases when sales can provide context that might not fit neatly into a template.

4. Regularly review your handoff process and the template itself. Get feedback from both teams on what’s working and what isn’t, then adjust as necessary to keep improving the process. 

Gianluca Ferruggia, managing director at DesignRush, shared how a well executed post sales handoff process affected the customer experience:

“We introduced a detailed customer handoff template that includes sections for customer expectations, previous interactions, and any special requests. By using this template we have reduced support-related issues by 25% and improved our customer retention rate by 15% over six months. Clear documentation ensures that support teams can meet or exceed customer expectations without missing a beat.”

6. Develop Joint KPIs

Sales and support teams are measured by different standards, so it’s easy for them to fall into silos. Sales might focus solely on revenue, while support zeros in on ticket resolution times. This division often leads to competing priorities rather than collaborative efforts to serve the customer better.

By creating joint KPIs, you can ensure both teams are working towards the same goals, such as customer satisfaction scores or overall customer retention rates. This alignment will also encourage collaboration since both teams now have a stake in each other’s success.

How to Implement It:

1. Start by pinpointing the common objectives that both teams contribute to, like customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), or customer retention. These should be metrics that reflect the quality of the entire customer journey.

2. Develop KPIs that both teams are responsible for. For example, link sales incentives not just to revenue but also to customer retention rates post-sale. Support teams can be measured on how well they maintain the promises made by sales.

3. Schedule quarterly meetings to review these KPIs with both teams. Discuss what’s working, what’s not, and how both teams can adjust their strategies to meet these shared goals.

4. KPIs should evolve as your business grows. Regularly assess whether your current KPIs are driving the right behavior and make adjustments as needed.

Another interesting thing you can do with KPIs is have sales and support teams work on complementary KPIs. Dominic Monn, founder at MentorCruise, explains how he does it: 

“We’ve integrated joint KPIs with complementary ones to get the most of our sales-support collaboration strategy. We prioritize joint KPIs like overall customer satisfaction and retention, which both sales and support teams work towards together. Alongside these, we assign complementary KPIs specific to each team’s function. For instance, the sales team focuses on metrics such as lead conversion rates, while the support team tracks customer onboarding success and issue resolution times. By doing this we ensure that while both teams are aligned on  shared objectives, they also have clear, individual metrics that drive their specific contributions.”

Conclusion

Bridging the divide between sales and support teams takes more than just policies and tools. It calls for a conscious change in mindset where both groups view themselves as key parts of the same customer journey. 

The approaches laid out here are concrete ways to bring about this shift in perspective. When put into practice well, the outcome will be a more unified effort where sales and support don’t just exist side by side but help each other succeed. 

As a business, you should aim to give customers a smooth experience where sales promises are backed up by great support. When sales and support work together, it leads to more satisfied customers, stronger customer loyalty, and better profits.