Selling. Customer and support Plan: Social Selling

Sales and Customer Service

When working together, sales and customer service teams create a more comfortable, user-friendly buying experience. Sales teams help customers find products and services and customer service ensures their interactions with the business remain positive over time. This creates long-term customer satisfaction and generates word-of-mouth referrals for potential leads.
Sales and customer service should help each other in a variety of ways. After all, these two departments spend more time working with customers than anyone else at your business. Since they maintain a personal connection with your customer base each possesses valuable insights that can assist the other. By sharing information between the two departments, your company will create a more enjoyable customer experience.
Below are a few examples we’ve put together to demonstrate how sales and customer service teams can work together.

6 Examples of Effective Sales and Customer Service Alignment

1. Salespeople should invest in customer relationships.

Gone are the days when salespeople could close a deal and never speak to the customer again.
Today's salespeople should start the relationship -- and continue it throughout the course of the customer's time working with their company.
That doesn't mean the customer service rep or customer success manager (CSM) won't still be the point person in charge of solving customer problems and helping guide them toward using your product or service most effectively to achieve their goals. It just means the salesperson should keep building a relationship with them, too. Not to achieve anything transactional or squeeze more sales out of the customer -- but to build another touchpoint between your customer and your brand, without asking for something in return.
Loyal customers are happy customers who, in addition to liking your product or service, also love your brand. In fact, Harvard Business Review research found that customers with an emotional connection to a brand were twice as likely to be loyal customers than just customers who were satisfied with the product and service they'd received.
Salespeople should continue to maintain a relationship with customers to better align and communicate with their customer service colleagues, but also just to be a nice person your customer loves hearing from and connecting with on social media. These customers will share your content, be more malleable and understanding when it comes to product issues or pricing changes, and they'll recommend you to their family and friends.

2. Customer service should know the sales process.

If you encountered any resistance over the course of the sales process that you think could impact the future relationship between a customer and your counterpart on the customer service team, let the customer service rep know as soon as possible so there aren't any future surprises.
Expectations should be properly set by both the salesperson and the customer service rep. But if the salesperson has concerns that a customer might back out of the deal, or that pricing changes might be a huge roadblock that will risk the customer churning, the sooner the customer service rep is made aware, the sooner they can address misaligned expectations to salvage the relationship.
Before and after the sales to service handoff, the salesperson and the customer service rep should communicate to ensure both parties are on the same page and sharing best practices for managing what could be a tough customer relationship.

3. Customer service should exchange customer data.

Proper documentation of the ongoing relationship is critical for both the sales and the customer service teams. Salespeople should have visibility into ongoing interactions with customer service in order to gauge when to reach out and the likelihood of a customer churning or renewing their subscription.
Customer service reps, meanwhile, should document their interactions with customers to help them keep track of the different conversations and emails taking place over the course of their day, and in order to make it transparent across their team in case they need to collaborate with other specialists to solve customer issues.
(Technology is key here to making this happen. HubSpot has free CRM and shared inbox tools that make it easy for multiple people across teams to document and share information about different customer relationships and communications across channels.)

4. Service reps should identify opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.

Because customer service reps will communicate with customers more frequently and spend more time analyzing their activities using a product or service once they've closed, they will be the ideal person to identify opportunities to upsell and cross-sell new products and features to them.
It's important to choose the right opportunity to offer an upsell or cross-sell so salespeople don't come across as pushy -- instead, these offers should be perceived by the customer as helpful and relevant to them. Customer service reps can help identify key moments in the customer lifecycle to offer an upsell, or point out behaviors or actions customer are taking that suggest they're ready to invest more resources in a solution better-suited to their needs. Then, they can give their colleague in sales a heads up to close the deal.

5. Customer service reps should provide feedback.

If there were any missed expectations the customer service rep encounters further along in the relationship, or if they notice trends among new customers that they encounter an obstacle after a certain period of use, they can share that feedback with salespeople to help them improve their positioning during the sales process. This regular feedback is key to ensuring that sales and customer service teams are working toward the same goal, and that salespeople aren't closing bad-fit customers that end up churning a few months later.
As HubSpot Service Hub General Manager Michael Redbord puts it in Inbound Organization, "The goal is to align the promise of value, made during the earlier stages of the buyer's journey, with the achievement of success by the buyer once the customer success journey begins. The promise of value must align with what the inbound service and success teams manage, so the buyer's expectations are met."

6. Customer service should generate customer referrals.

Once customer service reps have been working with customers over a period of time, they can identify potential candidates for brand evangelism. Those happy customers who are invested in your product or service and who love working with you are great candidates to help you grow your business even further by writing reviews and testimonials, serving as case studies, or connecting you with referrals.
Because they function as two separate departments, many businesses make the mistake of viewing sales and support as independent operations. They see the customer journey as a straight line where the customer comes into contact with the business, purchases a product or service and seeks help from support should any issues arise.
This linear viewpoint ignores the value of existing customers and misses out on the opportunity to "wow" them and create long-term value so they will renew, add seats, and potentially add additional features. Current, satisfied users of your product are perfectly primed to increase their subscriptions and also provide word of mouth referrals. Sales and support should work as a circle, not as a straight line.