Over 70% of tech companies have had a customer success team for more than two years. In other industries, the adoption of CSM practices also keeps growing. More and more companies realize that repeat sales are the best way to ensure a high and steady revenue.

These businesses hire CSM marketing experts to strengthen their sales and marketing teams. When aligned, sales reps, marketers, and customer success managers generate genuinely remarkable results. All the messages and experiences during the customer lifecycle become well-planned and timely.

Yet to achieve such multi-team synchronization, you need the right software. It’s important to collect detailed information about customers, render personalized communications, manage document delivery, and automate many other processes. Software integrations must create a single customer view for all the engaged teams.

Want to know what tools and data are necessary to connect CSM, marketing, and sales teams? Keep reading to find out.

How and Why CSM, Marketing, and Sales Teams Need to Cooperate

Although customer success managers, sales reps, and marketers solve different tasks, they pursue the same goal. All these teams do their best to keep customer loyalty and achieve conversions at different customer journey stages.

Here is a simple scenario of how the cooperation of CSM, marketing, and sales teams happens.

Marketers analyze the target audience and develop tailored advertising campaigns to attract customers. They build brand awareness and make sure people learn about a specific brand across several channels.

When leads become interested in the product, they contact the sales team or place an order. At this point, sales reps communicate with customers and nudge them into purchasing. The marketers keep targeting the new leads with relevant content and ads. As an option, the sales team makes a proactive move and reaches out to the interested customers first.

Later on, the sales reps and marketers will continue campaigns to encourage customer loyalty and repeat purchases. 

Discover 6 Types of Customer Loyalty Campaigns Powered by Address Validation

Throughout all these stages and customer interactions, CSM specialists care about how the customers feel. They help the new leads with onboarding and make sure people know how to use the product. Once the leads convert, the CSMs run customer health scoring to determine the satisfaction levels, churn possibility, and other related metrics.

Customer loyalty and overall customer satisfaction depend on the cooperative effort of these three teams. That’s why they must rely on the same quality data and a single customer view (SCV). For this shared goal, businesses need to integrate tools for customer success managers with other services. This will keep all data sources with customer information in one place and update them in real-time.

Information to Create a Single Customer View for CSM, Marketing, and Sales Specialists

Some categories of data are essential for creating a single customer view that is complete and accurate. CSM, marketing, and sales teams share them to have unified views of customer relationships.

Building a single customer view, make sure to collect the following details:

• Basic demographic data. Create a detailed customer persona learning their age, location, social status, gender, profession, contact information, email address, etc. This data will allow you to determine the needs of your target audience and personalize customer communications.
• Content performance. Make sure leads understand your product guides, read the blog, share social media posts, and generally find your content relevant. This information will help marketers enhance the content and show customer success managers how to assist the leads better.
• Bounce reasons. Find out when and why people leave with customer success tools and website tracking software. When a single customer view offers this information, sales reps know how to keep customers. It also helps marketers to customize retargeting campaigns.
• CRM Data. Monitor the length of contact with customers, decisive factors, and other metrics of the sales process.
• Billing and sales data. If some customers have stopped paying you, there might be a reason. The same is true for less frequent purchases. Make sure it’s not your fault, and they spend less because of the decreased purchase power, not the poor customer experience you provide. This information usually resides in data warehouses, point-of-sale systems, and marketing automation systems.
• Customer feedback and Help Desk data. Learn what people think about your service and what issues they face. When all teams share this information, they can cooperatively decide how to improve customer communication and interactions.
• Customer value and health. Adopt clear metrics that show which customers generate high revenue and which accounts are less profitable. This data helps all teams determine how much effort they should put into each specific customer.

According to the recent Deloitte study, most tools for customer success managers fail to collect the necessary customer data. They focus on behavioral and transactional information, neglecting filmographic (e.g., customer demographic, segment, spend) and interaction (e.g., cases and issues, calls, sales reach-outs) data. Only 40 and 48 percent of tools for customer success managers record filmographic and interaction data.

Therefore, to achieve a single customer view, you will need to integrate several kinds of tools. They will complement the standard tools for customer success managers and ensure a unified customer view.

What Tools Will Help to Achieve a Single Customer View and Connect Teams

Tools for customer success managers, sales, and marketing teams are versatile. Here we list the most critical services to integrate. 

Standard tools for customer success managers

Tools for customer success managers usually include customer engagement analytics, product usage services, health scoring tools, and user profiling software. You can also integrate customer success software for user onboarding and a self-serve knowledge base. Although this software is designed for CSM managers, it’s also beneficial for the marketing and sales teams.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems

CRM systems are essential for CSM, marketing, and sales teams’ cooperation. They help businesses: 

• Automate customer communications
• Record all interactions with leads,
• Monitor customer-related task completion,
• Organize customer data management,
• and more.

CRMs store priceless information about customers’ behavior and their previous experience with the company. The holistic customer profiles ensure a single customer view for all the involved teams.

Reach enablement software

Reach enablement software like Inkit is another essential service to integrate with tools for customer success managers. Such software allows companies to verify customer information, generate personalized communications, and deliver them through multiple channels. CSM, marketing, and sales teams can reach customers with tailored and accurate messages. Since the tool validates and checks the customer data quality, communications always reach the target. This considerably improves the effectiveness of sales and marketing campaigns.

Analytic tools

Analytic tools for customer success managers, sales reps, and marketers are a cherry on top of software integrations. Still, they shouldn’t be overlooked. Customer analytics enables all teams to monitor their efforts’ effectiveness and create a data-driven single customer view. Such software shows how customer behavior has changed over time, which is essential for strategic decision-making.

Inkit for a Single Customer View

Inkit’s reach enablement platform is one of the tools you should connect with customer success software. It verifies customer identity, automates message delivery, and HTML into PDF conversion.

Besides, our reach enablement service is a perfect basis for integrating other tools and achieving a single customer view. Inkit smoothly connects with hundreds of CRMs, analytics tools, customer data platforms, tools for customer success managers, and other services.

Want to test Inkit? Contact us for a demo.