How to Create Synergy between your Sales, Marketing and Customer Service Teams

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” 

– Michael Jordan

Unity is a crucial success factor in business. When teams or units within a company start isolating themselves from others, the entire group may be progressing swiftly towards failure.

In business, a synergized team works in sync towards the same goals. This sync drives business growth, smooth operations, and productivity. It’s no surprise studies reveal that synergized teams grow revenues by an average of 32% annually.

Every team has and plays an important role in an organization. For most businesses, however, the sales, marketing and customer service teams are the three musketeers of revenue generation that keeps the business afloat. The problem is, sometimes, these three musketeers leave their enemies and start fighting themselves. The result is always catastrophic for every stakeholder.

Also read: Empathy in Customer Service: How to Unlock Customer Loyalty With Empathy

Sales vs Customer Service

Customer service and sales teams tend to clash due to the nature of their roles. These two teams relate directly with the customers the most. While the sales team bring the customers and clients to the business, the customer service team provides the needed support to retain them.

The lack of synergy between these two teams causes data vacuums that hurt both the customers and the business.

Here’s a scenario – 

A salesperson converts a potential customer from being a lead to a customer, without any input whatsoever from the customer service team. This means that an unqualified lead is sold to without going through the proper customer journey. This eventually causes them to be unsatisfied with the experience. The customer service team must now resolve this internal crisis – contacting the lead to apologize for the hiccup.

This is just a chaotic situation for everyone involved. And the only way to ensure situations like these are curtailed is to bring synergy between the two teams.

Sales vs marketing

Yes, salespeople again. As they sometimes fight the customer service team with one hand, the other hand is busy dealing blows with the marketing team. In the end, though, the reasons for these disputes are sometimes understandable. But more often than not, the result is usually the opposite.

Also read: 6 Customer Service Tools You Need to Retain More Customers in 2022

Of the three departments, sales and marketing appear to always be at a loggerhead. And the bone of contention is always about who did what. For instance, a salesperson may claim they single-handedly converted a prospect to a customer, while marketing insists the customer would not have converted if not for their emails and other strategic marketing efforts. This is an age-long issue that can only be managed at best.

Marketing and sales are inextricably liked, and you can only grow your business through both. Therefore, for businesses to succeed, the sales and marketing teams must constantly work together.

5 ways to create synergy between sales, marketing and customer service

1. Cross-Team Training

Employees can learn how to perform various duties of employees from other departments by participating in cross-training sessions. Training like this encourage all teams to work more collaboratively as they gain new skills. Additionally, it reduces reliance on a single team to carry out a particular task.

Customer service agents, for example, can answer customer questions without sales reps when they have the same knowledge and soft skills. Customers can even be asked questions to determine if they are quality leads they can pass along to sales.

As a result of adopting a cross-training culture, all teams will be exposed to the challenges they face. Therefore, each team would know how their decisions affect other employees’ work. They get a better understanding of why they do what they do. This also results in open lines of communication between the teams, allowing them to discuss how they can collaborate better to accomplish their goals.

Also read: 7 Ways to Turn Customers into Brand Advocates

2. Exchange customer data

As a result of departmental silos, teams are limited in the data they collect and the specific tools they use. As a result, the different teams in the organization are at risk of miscommunication. A team that does not share customer interaction data makes poor decisions and misinforms customers. That’s why it’s crucial to work with an omnichannel tool that syncs all communication in one place for all to see.

The transparency of data also allows customers to resolve conflicts and inquiries. Additionally, all the teams can access customer history without having to ask customers to repeat details. Findings reveal that customers repeating themselves to multiple customer service representatives is the most frustrating experience for 33% of customers.

3. A Customer-centric approach

When you take a customer-centric approach, you put your customers first and tailor your business to meet their needs. All the teams within the organisation make customer satisfaction their collective goal. In turn, you earn loyal customers by providing positive customer experiences. 

To ensure customer expectations match customer journeys, your customer-centric approach should encourage collaboration among the teams. In other words, each customer gets quality service as they get what is promised by each team.

For this to work, the teams have to consistently be on the same page so they can work collaboratively and deliver excellent service. Most customers anticipate this kind of service. 58% don’t mind paying additional fees just to enjoy great customer service.

4. Work with insights and analytics

CRM and analytics tools such as NotchCX help to analyze outcomes from ongoing efforts of team members; losses and wins. You also get a birds-eye view of your content, campaigns and different tactics.

Furthermore, you should also make sure your sales team have access to a wholesome CRM like NotchCX. They can use these tools to monitor how leads engage with and respond to content. Your sales team would get a better understanding of their leads’ interests and patterns through this type of lead intelligence, and understand what role other teams, such as marketing, play in the process.

Teamwork and collaboration are essential for increasing synergy among your sales, customer service and marketing teams. Find a system that works for your organization, whether it’s a monthly meeting or a check-in when necessary. These would help to make sure everyone is on the same page at all times, and douse every tension that may want to arise.

Also read: 10 Proven Ways to Improve Your Customer Service Response Time

5. Team bonding

How do you even work well with someone you barely know? In most cases, most members of a particular team know next to nothing about members of the other team. All they do is fire messages to each other across Microsoft Teams or Slack like absolute strangers.

Company-wide team bonding events and hangouts allow members of various teams to get to connect and know each other outside the office space. Everybody gets to be themselves and you get a clearer view of who you are working with. This would ultimately boost synergy at work, not necessarily because you’d suddenly like your colleagues more, but because you get to understand their personalities more and know how to relate with them.

In conclusion

As the saying goes, “teamwork makes the dream work”. This often happens when organizations promote synergy between customer service, sales and marketing teams. Therefore, if your company’s main focus is to provide excellent customer service that leads to customer satisfaction and retention, it is time to ensure collaboration between the three teams.

By aligning your sales and customer service teams, you can deliver better service to your customers. The result? Increased customer retention due to happier customers.