Customer Success vs Sales: How They Differ and Work Together to Drive Growth

In the world of business, two customer-facing teams reign supreme in driving growth and shaping the customer experience – Sales and Customer Success. While both play critical roles, they approach customers in very different ways.

Sales is all about bringing in new business by convincing prospects that your solution is the answer to their problems. Customer Success is about keeping those hard-won customers and helping them continually get value over the long haul.

Alignment between these two teams is one of the most impactful things a company can do to drive growth. According to SiriusDecisions, B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and customer success teams achieve 24% faster revenue growth and 27% faster profit growth.

But many organizations struggle to get it right, with Sales and Customer Success often operating in silos, duplicating efforts, and even working at cross-purposes. In this post, we‘ll do a deep dive into the key differences between Sales and Customer Success and share best practices for getting them aligned.

How Customer Success and Sales Differ

While both Sales and CS are customer-facing and revenue-focused, they have quite different:

  • Goals and responsibilities
  • Incentives and compensation structures
  • Skills and background needed for success
  • Key metrics and performance indicators

Let‘s unpack each of these.

Goals and Responsibilities

The primary goal of Sales is to bring in new customers and revenue by convincing prospects to buy. Salespeople are laser-focused on hitting their quotas, with their performance measured by the number of deals closed and revenue generated each period.

Some typical responsibilities of Sales include:

  • Prospecting and outreach to potential customers
  • Qualifying leads to determine fit
  • Conducting discovery calls and demos
  • Negotiating terms and pricing
  • Getting contracts signed

Customer Success, on the flip side, is all about retaining and growing the customers that Sales acquired. Their goal is to help customers achieve their desired outcomes and get continuous value from the product or service.

Typical CS responsibilities include:

  • Onboarding new customers
  • Developing success plans
  • Conducting business reviews and health checks
  • Answering customer questions and troubleshooting issues
  • Collecting product feedback
  • Identifying opportunities to expand

Incentives and Compensation

Because Sales and CS have different goals, they are compensated quite differently. Sales reps are often paid a base salary plus commission, with the bulk of their pay based on the revenue they bring in.

Many organizations use a tiered commission structure, with reps earning accelerators for overperformance. For example:

Percent of Quota Attained Commission Rate
0-90% 5%
91-100% 7%
101%+ 10%

Customer Success pay is typically more heavily weighted towards base salary, often 70-80% base and 20-30% variable. The variable portion is usually tied to retention and expansion metrics like:

  • Logo retention rate
  • Net dollar retention
  • Customer health scores
  • Expansion revenue

Skills and Background

Because Sales and CS have different focuses, they also tend to attract people with different skills and backgrounds. Sales reps are often:

  • Results-driven and competitive
  • Strong communicators and active listeners
  • Confident and persistent
  • Skilled at building rapport quickly
  • Savvy at negotiation and overcoming objections

Many come from business and marketing backgrounds or move into Sales after starting in more junior sales development rep (SDR) roles.

Customer Success Managers tend to be:

  • Empathetic and relationship-oriented
  • Strong problem solvers
  • Proactive and able to juggle multiple priorities
  • Data-savvy to identify risks and opportunities
  • Skilled at crisis management
  • Knowledgeable about the product and industry

There are many paths into Customer Success – some transition over from Sales roles while others come from account management, service and support, consulting, or technical backgrounds.

Why CS and Sales Alignment is Critical

When Sales and Customer Success are misaligned, the consequences include:

  • Poor customer experience stemming from inconsistent messaging and disjointed handoffs
  • Finger pointing and unhealthy tensions between the two teams
  • Missed expansion opportunities
  • Failure to close high-quality customers that are likely to renew

But when they work together in lockstep, the results can be game-changing for growth. A few powerful stats that underscore the importance of alignment:

  • According to Forrester, aligned organizations achieve an average of 32% annual revenue growth while less aligned companies report an average 7% decline in revenue.
  • Fabrick reports that companies that have strong alignment between Sales and Customer Success can increase customer retention rates by 14%.
  • Gainsight has found companies that involve Customer Success early in the sales cycle have a 20%+ increase in win rates.

So what does good alignment actually look like in practice? Here are a few key tenets:

1. Seamless Handoffs

Having a smooth handoff between Sales and CS sets the tone for the entire customer relationship. Some best practices:

  • Including a CS team member in the late stages of the sales cycle so they have context
  • Live intro meetings between the prospect, sales rep, and CSM before the deal closes
  • Documentation in the CRM of key info gathered during the sales process
  • Clear success criteria for the handoff (e.g. when key onboarding milestones are completed)

2. Shared Goals and Metrics

CS and Sales leadership should work together to define shared goals and KPIs that span the full customer lifecycle, such as:

  • Net dollar retention targets
  • Expansion revenue goals
  • Logo retention rates
  • Target customer acquisition cost (CAC) payback period

These shared goals ensure both teams are working towards the same outcomes.

3. Ongoing Communication

Alignment isn‘t a one-and-done – it requires ongoing collaboration and communication. Some ways to facilitate it:

  • Regular syncs between CS and Sales to discuss at-risk and growth-potential customers
  • Joint QBRs and customer health check meetings
  • CS participation in weekly sales pipeline reviews
  • Slack channels for real-time collaboration

4. CS Involved in Opportunity Management

Many teams make the mistake of only involving CS post-sale, but there are huge benefits to bringing them in early, especially on large, complex, or high-value deals. CS can:

  • Help assess customer fit based on product knowledge and past experience
  • Identify potential roadblocks or risks
  • Make the business case for long-term success (vs. just closing the deal)
  • Establish relationships with customer champions

5. Enabling Expansion

Since CS interacts with customers day in and day out, they are in prime position to identify expansion revenue opportunities – whether that‘s an upsell, cross-sell, or renewal. Some ways to empower them:

  • Train CSMs on expansion best practices and how/when to engage Sales
  • Build expansion plays and talk tracks CSMs can use to surface opportunities
  • Attend customer calls together to identify needs Sales can follow up on
  • Include CSMs in expansion pipeline reviews
  • Compensate CSMs on expansion revenue generated

Key Metrics for CS and Sales

In addition to shared goals, each team has their own set of metrics to measure performance:

Sales Metrics:

  • Number of qualified leads generated
  • Pipeline created
  • Win rate
  • Average deal size
  • Length of sales cycle

Customer Success Metrics:

  • Customer health scores
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • First contact resolution rate
  • Customer effort score
  • Adoption and usage rates

Examples of Good CS and Sales Alignment

Here are a few companies that are knocking it out of the park with CS and Sales working hand-in-hand:

Gusto

Gusto, an HR and payroll platform, implemented a sales-to-CS handoff where key info is documented in Salesforce and live meetings are conducted with the customer before the deal closes. Sales and CS leadership also co-own net retention targets.

The result? Gusto has seen a 10%+ increase in logo retention since implementing these practices.

Intercom

Intercom, a customer communications platform, has CS join late-stage sales opportunities to assess fit and co-pitch the long-term partnership. They also have a CS representative at every Sales QBR to align on account plans.

Since involving CS pre-sale, Intercom has increased its win rates by over 15% and grown average contract values by 20%+.

Moz

At SEO software company Moz, Sales and CS partner closely on renewals and upsells. CSMs are there right alongside account executives during the sales process, participating in calls, demos, and proposals.

This "one team" approach has been a huge driver in Moz‘s incredible 95% net dollar retention rate.

Bringing It All Together

The companies that will win in the 2020s and beyond are those that recognize Customer Success and Sales are two sides of the same coin. Both are absolutely critical to sustainable growth in a world where customer expectations have never been higher.

By aligning around the customer – their needs, their goals, their experience – CS and Sales can together have an outsized impact on revenue, retention, and the bottom line. It‘s not easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

Use the best practices and examples in this post to align your teams around the metrics that matter, build ongoing collaboration, and create a culture that puts the customer at the center of everything. When you do, you‘ll unlock the holy grail – predictable, profitable, and enduring growth.

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