Is sales misalignment costing you customers?

Episode topics

• 00:00 - The Cost of Sales and CX Misalignment
• 01:28 - When a Promise Becomes Reality
• 02:27 - Breaking Down Organizational Silos
• 03:51 - Defining the Prospect Experience
• 05:10 - B2B Value Gap vs. B2C Expectation Gap
• 06:26 - The Root Cause: Misaligned Incentives
• 08:10 - Three Costs of Misalignment: Economic, Brand, and Culture
• 10:54 - Transferring "The Why" from Sales to CX
• 12:29 - Using AI to Personalize Customer Interaction
• 13:50 - Advice for CX Leaders: Getting Upstream
• 16:44 - The Symphony of Orchestration: Unified Data
• 18:41 - Why You Must "Shop" Your Own Business
• 20:27 - Using NRR to Bridge the Sales-CX Gap
• 21:57 - Why Retention is the New Acquisition
• 22:39 - Recognize and Recommend: Driving Revenue in CX
• 26:05 - Future Outlook: Total Relationship Management

Transcript

[00:00:01] Robert Zirk: Your sales team just landed a major deal. The bell is ringing, and the Slack channel is flooded with emojis.

[00:00:08] (Sounds of multiple notifications at once.)

[00:00:09] Robert Zirk: But before you know it, that same customer calls support frustrated — and unbeknownst to you, they're already shopping your competitors.

[00:00:19] Robin Jakobsen: When sales is under pressure, they often push the sales a little bit more to hit the quota. And when they do that, then often CX is left with a mess that they need to clean up afterwards.

[00:00:29] Robert Zirk: The transition from sales to customer teams should be seamless. But for too many organizations, this is where customer relationships break down.

[00:00:38] Shawn Casemore: If customer service or CX is measured based on efficiency — how quickly can we resolve these issues — that drives a certain behavior, which is "satisfy this to the extent we believe it's satisfied and move on to the next one, 'cause there's always another one." That's driving the wrong behavior.

[00:00:53] Robert Zirk: Today on Questions for now, I'm joined by Robin Jakobsen, director of product strategy for Customer Experience Management at TELUS Digital, and Shawn Casemore, sales keynote speaker and author, to answer: Is sales misalignment costing you customers?

[00:01:17] Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS Digital where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

[00:01:30] Robert Zirk: There's a moment that happens in every customer relationship that determines whether that customer becomes a long-term advocate or passively stays only until something better comes along, or actively voices their dissatisfaction on social media.

[00:01:45] It's not when they click “buy.” Or their first support call. It's when the promise made during the sales process meets the reality of actually being a customer.

[00:01:55] Robin Jakobsen has spent more than two decades working where sales promises meet customer reality. He's the director of product strategy for Customer Experience Management at TELUS Digital and our in-house expert on B2B sales services, where he helps global brands win the moments that matter across the customer journey.

[00:02:15] Robin Jakobsen: There's a moment in sales where a promise becomes reality. And if you get that intersection completely right, you have customers that are gonna stay with you for a very long time and they'll bring the value that you're giving them.

[00:02:27] Robert Zirk: Getting that right requires something most organizations struggle with: alignment between the teams that acquire customers and the teams that serve them.

[00:02:37] According to Salesforce, 70% of CX leaders view organizational silos as their most significant barrier in delivering a seamless customer experience. And within the consumer goods industry, for example, just 4% of executives report that their organizations have fully aligned sales and service across all channels.

[00:02:59] To understand why achieving this alignment can be so difficult, I also spoke with Shawn Casemore, keynote speaker and author of The Unstoppable Sales Prospecting System. He highlighted that today's buyers, particularly in B2B, are often doing a significant amount of research about products and services before they even reach a sales representative.

[00:03:22] Shawn Casemore: So sales professionals need to start to think about how we're interacting with prospects right out of the gate, because they've already drawn some conclusions, which may be wrong. They've looked at us and the competitors. And they're trying to assess how we're different.

[00:03:35] We then have to give them an experience that suggests we are different. That is how we capture their attention, such that they wanna move the conversation forward with us rather than continue on their research and do what most people do when they're doing research and everything looks similar, is that they qualify based on price.

[00:03:51] Robert Zirk: And this context has evolved Shawn's perspective to increasingly focus on what he calls "prospect experience."

[00:03:58] Shawn Casemore: So when you think about customer experience, as we know, right? It's all about once they are a customer, how do we best serve them and support them so that they stick around so that they buy more over the long term and, ultimately, so they can refer others.

[00:04:12] Prospect experience, which is what we need to start to think about, is the experience we give right from the very first point of contact they have with us so that we can earn the ability or the attention so that we can do business with them.

[00:04:23] Robert Zirk: And if sales and CX aren't aligned on what the experience should look like, you're setting yourself up for failure before a contract is signed or an order is placed.

[00:04:33] So what does misalignment actually look like? Robin describes it as “day one friction.”

[00:04:40] Robin Jakobsen: If the customer, the first call to a CX team, is to ask for a feature that doesn't exist or complain that the price is different than what was discussed, then you have a misalignment, a clear misalignment. Another sign is internally: if sales and CX are pointing fingers at each other during the churn reviews, then the system's broken. We have an issue there.

[00:04:57] There has to be a clear alignment between the two departments of "What is a good customer experience? What does the journey look like, and how do we ensure that both departments, they actually know and understand what's going on with the customer throughout that journey?"

[00:05:10] Robert Zirk: And how this misalignment manifests depends on your business model. Robin draws the distinction between B2B and B2C contexts.

[00:05:19] Robin Jakobsen: B2B, it's a value gap. The software doesn't solve the complex business problem or we didn't have the right pain lever to begin with when we actually provided the solution.

[00:05:28] Robert Zirk: A Bain & Company study on the "B2B Elements of Value" revealed that organizational self-assessments of the customer experience can often differ from actual customer opinions. The study identified 40 elements grouped into five categories of a pyramid that begin at table stakes at the base and become increasingly subjective toward the summit.

[00:05:50] Elements in those more subjective categories, like ease of doing business, attention to individualized priorities and inspirational values, tend to be tougher to measure and operationalize, but they offer the greatest potential for B2B brands to differentiate themselves from competitors and build customer loyalty.

[00:06:10] Robin Jakobsen: And in B2C it's an expectation gap. It's usually regarding speed, use of ease or hidden fees.

[00:06:16] Robert Zirk: PwC Research shows that, depending on the industry, customer satisfaction falls anywhere from 8% to 33% short of expectations.

[00:06:26] Whether it's a value gap or an expectation gap, the root cause is the same: misaligned incentives.

[00:06:34] Robin Jakobsen: Sales is often incentivized by volume, new logos, while CX is incentivized by retention, CSAT and NPS. So when sales is under pressure, they often push the sales a little bit more to hit the quota. And when they do that, then often CX is left with a mess that they need to clean up afterwards, or they're left with a situation where they need to rectify and actually explain what actually happened in the first interaction.

[00:06:57] Robert Zirk: But the problem of misaligned incentives isn't unique to sales teams, as Shawn pointed out.

[00:07:03] Shawn Casemore: if customer service or CX is measured based on efficiency — how quickly can we resolve these issues — that drives a certain behavior, which is "satisfy this to the extent we believe it's satisfied and move on to the next one, 'cause there's always another one." That's driving the wrong behavior.

[00:07:18] Robert Zirk: Shawn saw this dynamic play out with a client in the insurance industry.

[00:07:22] Shawn Casemore: They had seen a decline in their clients in the last couple of years. They brought me in because they believed the issue was their sales team. And in talking to some of those that were managing accounts, it became pretty clear that their idea of supporting clients was, again, very transactional. So requests come in at four o'clock and they're done at 4:30. They wouldn't check their email till Monday morning.

[00:07:45] Robert Zirk: After interviewing clients, Shawn delivered news the leadership team wasn't expecting.

[00:07:50] Shawn Casemore: I said "I think you have a bigger issue here, which is your CX team is not really focused on the customer. They seem to be overwhelmed with number of clients and number of issues to manage. You can help your BD team. We can get more accounts, but you've still got a leaky bucket back here. I think you've gotta fix the CX issue before you're gonna be able to bring on more clients and retain them."

[00:08:10] Robert Zirk: Robin characterizes the cost of misalignment in three ways. The first is economic, measured primarily on customer acquisition cost, or CAC, which is everything you spend on marketing and sales to win a new customer.

[00:08:25] Robin Jakobsen: Sales is extremely focused on cost of acquisition, which is totally normal. That's why we're doing it. We're constantly looking at how do we do that in the best possible way: where, how and why. But that's wasted if the customer's churning immediately. So we need to consistently focus on not just closing here now — it's what's gonna happen afterwards with the customer.

[00:08:43] Robert Zirk: Research from Forrester found that companies that don't align their customer-facing teams experience 2.4 times lower revenue growth and half the profitability growth compared to companies that are aligned.

[00:08:56] Beyond the economic impact, there's a second cost: brand reputation.

[00:09:01] Robin Jakobsen: A disappointed customer is much louder than a happy one and will create you additional cost because you're gonna use a lot more time to actually work with that customer. And it will take you a very long time before you actually have recovered your initial investment on that customer.

[00:09:14] Robert Zirk: Shawn pointed out how the reach of a single bad experience has fundamentally changed.

[00:09:19] Shawn Casemore: Back when I was younger, if I had a bad experience at the bank, I'd be upset about it and I would tell my friends that evening.

[00:09:25] Nowadays, what do people do? They get on social media. They go to a local group in their area and they complain. And they publish it to hundreds, if not thousands, of people. So, the impact of a bad experience today, it's farther reaching than ever before. And that continues to grow as more and more social media platforms come up. The damage that can be done from one person with one bad experience is enormous.

[00:09:47] Robert Zirk: And this damage can happen even before someone becomes a customer.

[00:09:51] Shawn Casemore: Let's say you're not a customer of mine yet, but you could buy from me and I go to an event and we meet and I give you a bad first impression.

[00:09:58] Maybe I come off as rude. Maybe I accidentally knock your coffee. Whatever happens, you're not even a customer or client yet. But what are you gonna tell people? "I met this Shawn guy with this company. What a horrible experience." And you're not even a customer. And that in and of itself is damaging. That's why I'm saying we need to expand the view of this experience.

[00:10:16] Robert Zirk: Going back to Robin's explanation of the costs of misalignment, he explained that the third cost is to the culture of the organization.

[00:10:24] Robin Jakobsen: It creates internally, inside the companies, a toxic culture. It creates an us versus them, which we need to evolve at any point because it has to be: we are all on that journey with the customer and we are all here to make sure that we are proactive and we are creating a great experience. So that mentality, it kills productivity and kills a good customer experience.

[00:10:43] Robert Zirk: That us versus them mentality Robin described only makes it harder to address the root problem: that information isn't being effectively communicated between teams.

[00:10:54] One of the most critical pieces of information that should flow from sales to CX — but rarely does — is what Robin calls "the why."

[00:11:03] Robin Jakobsen: We always start with "the why": what motivated the customer to choose the product, the service, et cetera. And sales, they usually pass on "the what": the SKU, the price, the seat count, et cetera. But they very rarely pass on the emotional trigger.

[00:11:16] So that means there's a specific pain point, or a problem, that made that customer sign that contract to begin with. So without the why, CX, they're basically just onboarding a number, not solving a problem. And when sales and CX aren't aligned, we are essentially choosing a short play or a long play. So the short play is: you hit your monthly target, that's fantastic, but you've actually poisoned the well and that's almost like sabotaging your customer acquisition cost. And, that ROI of that customer, it's gonna require years before you make that back. That means before the relationship ever begun, you've already put in a cap of where we can go with it. So we often talk of CX as a revenue function, but if the initial sale was misaligned, you've already lost that ability to actually make CX a revenue function.

[00:12:00] Robert Zirk: Shawn describes what this looks like in practice and what becomes possible when that context transfers.

[00:12:06] Shawn Casemore: Can you imagine if a customer was to call in, you answered the phone and you had records in front of you that you could call up and say, "Hi, Shawn. I appreciate you calling us. I'm here to answer your question. I know one of the things you mentioned to sales that's important to you is your mortgage. How is that going?" People would be shocked. They'd say, "How... how did you know that?"

[00:12:23] Guess who does know that? Sales, if they're asking the right question. But that information often dies with sales.

[00:12:29] Robert Zirk: That personalization — knowing not just what a customer bought, but why they bought it — can be the catalyst for transforming a transactional interaction into a relationship.

[00:12:40] And Shawn went on to share his thoughts on how AI could help surface this information in ways that weren't possible before.

[00:12:48] Shawn Casemore: You just go back and say, " Remember I asked you this six months ago, I think. What did we say?" It finds it like that, and that's where the opportunity's gonna be with software like AI to help us get that information in front of the CX team so they can really continue to personalize that experience.

[00:13:03] Robert Zirk: But the information gap isn't one directional. What's happening with the customer after the sale needs to flow back to sales as well.

[00:13:11] Shawn Casemore: Oft times issues or challenges or problems that a customer might deal with with CX does not get back to sales. It might get captured somewhere, but sales isn't aware of it. Then they get a call that they've gotta deal with something they didn't know was happening, or they make a check-in call, "Hey Robert, how are things?" And you say, "Actually, very horrible. Did you not hear I've left your bank?"

[00:13:30] So that information, there's gotta be a two-way street: what matters to the customer most? And then what's happening with the customer? And that information needs to flow dynamically back and forth between those two teams because our goal is to create a seamless experience for each customer or client that makes them feel personalized, makes them feel that we are doing what they want us to do and we're here for them.

[00:13:50] Robert Zirk: So how do you fix this? Robin's advice for CX leaders is simple: don't wait for the deal to close to start a conversation with your sales team.

[00:14:00] Robin Jakobsen: I actually think CX leaders need to get upstream. Ask to review the sales collateral with the sales department, sit in on late stage sales calls. Understand what's actually happening on them. If CX leaders, they understand the promise that's actually being made, and let's call it in the "lab", they can much better build out the "factory" that's actually gonna be delivering on this afterwards.

[00:14:19] So be involved as early in the stage, come with your inputs, give your consultation on what that process should look like to make it better. And that actually mitigates a lot of those issues later on in the journey.

[00:14:32] Robert Zirk: But there's a challenge: many CX leaders face resistance from sales. The two departments often don't see eye to eye. Shawn acknowledged this dynamic can occur in organizations.

[00:14:44] Shawn Casemore: I think there's just a general misunderstanding of each other's priorities and roles. And I understand that, but I think as somebody, as a CX leader, you've gotta be willing to set aside frustrations, misunderstandings. Sales can sometimes be a "Rah rah! Get out of the way. We're gonna make it happen! We don't need anybody!" kind of an environment. But what I find is when CX or even marketing is trying to work with sales, that environment, they find it uncomfortable.

[00:15:13] So I guess the message is just recognize if that's the environment you're facing or you're getting some pushback on collaboration, there's a reason for it. It's because sales usually tries to protect sales.

[00:15:22] Robert Zirk: Shawn emphasized that the key for CX leaders is to approach your peers in sales with their priorities in mind. And if you can come equipped with data from customer conversations and surveys, even better.

[00:15:35] Shawn Casemore: If you go in with that mindset, that "Hey, I think I can help sales win more," sales will listen to you. It's not about, "Hey, I wanna be more efficient. Here's what I think I could do." It's about, "Hey, I got some ideas to help you sell more and to make it easier on your team."

[00:15:47] If you approach it in that way, they're all ears. And now you can start to learn more about their priorities and look for opportunities to collaborate and work together at a simple level. You don't have to create a big process to do you just need to start the conversation and that's the best way to open the door.

[00:16:00] Robert Zirk: Shawn explored alignment between sales and CX teams in his book, The Sales Multiplier Formula, which focuses on how every team in an organization can contribute to building better experiences that drive more sales.

[00:16:14] Shawn Casemore: So if you take a look at the measures you have today that you have for CX versus sales, are those measures aligned? Is the messaging aligned? If you were to talk to somebody in CX and ask them, "How does your job today support us in finding or bringing on new customers or clients," will they have an answer for you?

[00:16:31] Because the ultimate answer is: if I give a good experience, that client or customer will be so happy that they'll want to tell people about it, which will result in referrals, which then get transitioned over to sales.

[00:16:44] Robert Zirk: We've talked about tactics to fix misalignment, but what does great alignment actually look like in practice? Robin calls it orchestration.

[00:16:53] Robin Jakobsen: Orchestration is moving away from a relay race: "I have a baton, I reach my post, I give it on to someone else, now it's your problem." That's not what we're looking for.

[00:17:01] In the symphony, there's different sections that play at different times. But they're all looking at the same sheet of music, so they're all playing the same song. So in practice that means we shared our CRM notes. We have joint account planning. We have a 360 view on the customer. We know what was promised. The notes were taken in the right way, they were passed on. There is clear insight to actually what happened in the process.

[00:17:21] But you can't have a symphony if the violinist is reading a different sheet than the cellist actually is. It's gonna be a horrible song.

[00:17:28] Robert Zirk: According to research from Salesforce, 82% of high performing service teams share a CRM platform with their sales and marketing teams.

[00:17:37] Shared data means shared understanding. So if you want your experience to be music to your customer's ears, you need a conductor — and that role has to be filled by your leadership.

[00:17:49] Robin Jakobsen: We need to move away from department goals. It doesn't work in the big picture. And then we need to move to what we call a unified journey. We have to have a shared vision where every employee knows exactly where the customer just came from and exactly where we want to take them. If we look at a sales rep that thinks their job is just closing and a CX rep that thinks that their job is just a ticket, we have an issue. So we haven't actually taken the time to actually show them that's a failure point that will create problems further down.

[00:18:17] Alignment happens when frontline, they really understand there are two parts of the same story. That's a leadership responsibility. It's a leadership failure if your frontline doesn't understand that and if they're surprised about what the customer expectations are, that's where we have a break point in that. Alignment requires leaders to actually sit down — not just once, but regularly — and they need to map out the journey and then they have to over communicate that map to the people doing the work on the frontline.

[00:18:41] Robert Zirk: Leadership maps the journey and communicates the vision. But how do you know if that vision is actually being delivered? Shawn says you need to know what's really happening when customers interact with your teams.

[00:18:54] Shawn Casemore: Number one: You should be shopping your business on a regular basis. Call in, or have somebody call in that is a potential customer or client, and see what experience they have. Have them bring a challenge to the table and see what happens. The second thing is you've gotta be talking to your existing customers or clients and interviewing them. Not automating the interview, because the people that answer the automated emails and surveys, they fall into two categories: they absolutely love you and they've gotta tell somebody about it, or they absolutely despise you and they've been waiting to tell somebody about it. But that's not the majority of people. That's maybe 20% and 20%.

[00:19:25] So you've gotta be reaching out and having conversations like this with clients, asking them questions to find out "what could we be doing better?" Even if it's a handful every quarter, that's gonna give you cost and insights into "how do we keep tightening and focusing on a better and better experience over time?"

[00:19:40] Robert Zirk: Remember that critical information Robin mentioned: the “why” behind each customer's purchase?

[00:19:46] Technology, particularly AI, promises to help surface and share that context. But Robin cautions against using it as the sole remedy for your alignment issues.

[00:19:57] Robin Jakobsen: AI is brilliant at transcription and sentiment. It can scan a thousand sales calls, it can flag to CX, "The customer mentioned there's a problem, a budget concern three times." It'll bring that message.

[00:20:08] Where it falls short is in nuance. So AI can't replace that gut feeling you have in sales. It's still not at that level. And salespeople, they have a gut feeling. They know about the client's corporate culture. They know about the sentiment of the client at that moment. And that still requires a human-to-human handoff. So we still need to have a human in the loop of that.

[00:20:27] Robert Zirk: AI can help sales and CX teams share information, but if each team is still chasing different goals, that information sharing won't solve any misalignment issues. You need a metric that aligns both teams — and Robin shared a clear recommendation.

[00:20:43] Robin Jakobsen: People would tend to say CSAT, NPS, whatever. I actually think there's a hard measurable KPI that you can track that is aligned between both departments and that's net revenue retention. It measures not just who bought in, but who stayed in and who did we actually grow. And it forces sales to find good fit customers. Customers that actually will be happy with our services and it forces CX to provide very high value service.

[00:21:07] Robert Zirk: Net revenue retention, or NRR, captures a more complete picture of customer health. It accounts for upgrades, downgrades and churn. And unlike acquisition-focused metrics, it incentivizes both sales and CX teams to think long-term.

[00:21:24] So how do high performing organizations use this metric?

[00:21:28] Robin Jakobsen: The best program is where CX actually has a formal seat at the table and they actually say, "Hey, sales, these type of customers you're bringing, they're churning at 40%. They're not bringing value. They'll leave us just as fast as they come in." It's the message about "we need to adjust our targeting." High performing teams, they treat bad revenue as a shared enemy. And you know, we all want revenue but we want revenue that we can keep.

[00:21:49] Robert Zirk: Bad revenue is worse than no revenue. It means you've spent money to acquire a customer who leaves before you break even.

[00:21:57] But here's the flip side: when sales and CX align on bringing in the right customers and unlocking the revenue potential that already exists in your customer base, CX can become a major growth driver for your brand.

[00:22:10] Robin Jakobsen: The era of growth at all costs, that's a little bit over, and it's not because we don't wanna grow, don't take me wrong, but I actually think in today's economy, retention is the new acquisition. I think investors and CEOs, they are realizing it's significantly cheaper to upsell to a happy customer than it is to find a new one. And if you look at CX, there's so many companies out there that still hasn't tapped into this, and CX is sitting on a gold mine of untapped revenue.

[00:22:39] Robert Zirk: How can CX capitalize on that revenue opportunity? Robin said it comes down to recognizing signals in customer conversations — what he calls “trigger-based selling.”

[00:22:50] Robin Jakobsen: When a customer asks "how do I do X?" Or "how does this work?" Or "do you have this in another color?" or whatever it is, that's often a signal that they need a higher service or an add-on, or they're interested in some part of the product. And then it's not about selling, it's about recommending the next logical step in success. If we can teach our teams to do great recommendation. I always say I have a double model that's "recognize and recommend." Recognize the need, the problem, the issue, and do a very strong recommendation. You need to become the trusted consultant in the conversation.

[00:23:23] Robert Zirk: Shawn provided a concrete example of what this looks like.

[00:23:26] Shawn Casemore: If I'm in customer service or customer experience and I'm having a conversation with a customer and it's going well, and they have a need: "I really wish this phone service included internet," right? A lot of customer experience teams today would say, "Oh, no problem. Let me transfer you over to sales." If we're lucky, they would say that. If we're unlucky, they would miss the point raised and finish the call and that's it.

[00:23:47] What you want them to be able to say is "Have you considered our internet programs which we can bundle along with what you currently have? And that could actually save you some money, you're only gonna have one point of contact..." Then you go into talking about the benefits. If they say, "Yeah, that might be something I'm interested in," then you're saying, "Look, I'm gonna send you some information and I'm gonna introduce you to Shawn on our sales team." So now I'm making it personalized. "And Shawn is happy to follow up with you."

[00:24:08] So there's an example of customer experience is hearing a need, they should be the one to initiate the conversation, but they've gotta be ready to do so. "What am I listening for? What are the scripts I'm going to use to say things? How do I turn this over?" Those are oft times the missing gaps.

[00:24:23] Robert Zirk: But this approach requires a shift in how CX teams are trained and measured.

[00:24:28] Shawn Casemore: Strong CX people will do that themselves because they know internally, "I'm gonna send this over to my buddy Shawn, and he'll take it from here." But many teams have not been trained on that. And that's a little bit of a different idea for CX because it affects efficiency.

[00:24:41] "If we start doing that, now we're not gonna get through our calls as quickly." Yes, but you're generating more revenue and you're supporting that client. So it's a little bit of a different view, in my experience, from what CX typically thinks of, but that's, to me, the ultimate. That's where you want to go.

[00:24:55] Robert Zirk: Shawn's point about training assumes that the customer already trusts your brand enough to accept those recommendations. But as Robin pointed out, you have to earn the right to recommend in the first place.

[00:25:07] Robin Jakobsen: You haven't earned that right if the journey is disconnected. So the better journey you do, the more right you have to recommend, upsell and cross-sell new products, new value, that actually will create a happy customer at the end.

[00:25:20] Robert Zirk: At TELUS Digital, Robin and his team help brands achieve alignment by managing both sales and service under one operation. TELUS Digital recently won Gold for Demand Generation Program of the Year in the Stevie Awards for Sales and Customer Service 2026 — recognition for creating integrated programs that align marketing, sales and service around the customer.

[00:25:43] Robin Jakobsen: Because we actually often manage both sales and the service at the same time, we don't have silos. We have one vision, one alignment of what we need to do, and that often makes us see the whole journey much more clearly. And we use unified platforms so the person answering the support ticket can actually see what the original sales team was doing. So we're creating that alignment much easier.

[00:26:05] Robert Zirk: Looking ahead, both Robin and Shawn see the line between sales and CX blurring significantly.

[00:26:11] Robin Jakobsen: Sales and CX can't keep having a siloed approach, especially when retaining the customers and creating more value, a better lifetime value for the customers is key. So I think we are moving towards what we call a total relationship management model.

[00:26:24] Great alignment will look a little bit like an invisible handoff. And we can actually thank AI for that. If we use that properly, we can do that very well. So it won't be a meeting document or a presentation or whatever it is. It will be a continuous stream of shared data. So that means that the CX team will have been listening to the sales process via AI summaries long before the contract is signed. So they actually know exactly what's happening at every single point.

[00:26:47] Robert Zirk: And he predicts a shift in how success is measured.

[00:26:50] Robin Jakobsen: We'll see revenue operations, rev ops, take over both departments. So it's unified. So every fund will be measured in the end of lifetime value. So LTV will be the new big measurement. And I spoke about net recurring revenue. That goes into that as well. And it's more about continuous success more than just an initial contract value.

[00:27:11] And then the last thing I'm seeing is instead of reacting to churn alignment, this will mean that sales and CX, they use more predictive models to identify which products are actually high success profiles before we even pitch them. That means we know where it's Pareto in the end.

[00:27:27] Robert Zirk: …referring to the Pareto principle, the idea that about 80% of your outcomes come from just 20% of your inputs.

[00:27:35] Robin Jakobsen: Let's be effective, let's go after what gives the higher value to begin with.

[00:27:38] Robert Zirk: Shawn sees a similar evolution in organizational structure.

[00:27:42] Shawn Casemore: It's gonna be different in every organization, but I think the shift we'll continue to see, 'cause it's already been around, this is nothing new, but in larger organizations you'll see a chief revenue officer. Now again, different companies, that CRO will be responsible for different things, right? Sometimes it's just sales, sometimes it's marketing and sales. Sometimes it's marketing, sales and CX.

[00:28:02] I think we're gonna continue to transition to somebody overseeing these three areas because, at the end of the day, the three areas are there for a revenue purpose.

[00:28:10] So I think as we look to centralize oversight to all three of these areas, which are really client or customer-facing, we'll find better ways to collaborate. Our measures will be more aligned. That in and of itself will help us achieve what we need to achieve.

[00:28:24] Robert Zirk: To wrap up, Shawn advises CX leaders to take the first step and think of ways you can help sales.

[00:28:30] Shawn Casemore: And then I would reach out to the sales leader, regardless of their title, and just say that "I'd like to have a conversation. I've got some ideas. I think I'll help you sell and, in turn, will help my team be more effective."

[00:28:40] I think you'll find when you position it that way, as long as you've got some ideas, I think you'll find that the sales leader will be open to having that conversation. And that's your starting point. You wanna figure out what is important to sales right now and how do they see us aligning?

[00:28:52] Robert Zirk: Robin has a question he'd challenge every CX leader to bring to their head of sales.

[00:28:57] Robin Jakobsen: If we stop paying commission on any customer who churns in the first 90 days, how would our ideal customer profile change? And it's a bit of a provocative question, but it starts the right conversation. It moves the focus away from "how much can we sell?" and towards "who can we actually serve?" I think it's the fastest way to actually find that gap between what your sales targets are and what's your operational reality?

[00:29:26] Robert Zirk: Thank you so much to Robin Jakobsen and Shawn Casemore for joining me and sharing their insights today. And thank you for listening to Questions for now — a TELUS Digital podcast.

[00:29:37] If this episode got you thinking about the relationship between your sales and customer teams, share it with your head of sales. Better yet, use it as a conversation starter.

[00:29:48] For more insights on today's big questions and digital customer experience. Follow Questions for now on your podcast player of choice.

[00:29:56] I'm Robert Zirk, and until next time, that's all… for now.

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