One of the key ingredients for a successful long term marriage is alignment for key topics such as how to spend money, how to raise children and an agreed upon work/life balance.  In business, cross-departmental alignment of key philosophies and practices is equally important.

For example, a SaaS organization with a highly customer-focused sales team, but a professional services team that lacks empathy and urgency, or a rigid legal or revenue operations team, or a product team that operates without customer feedback, can hinder consistent growth.

It’s a bad sign when, after the sales team closes a major deal, the services team begins their engagement by saying, "Wait, the sales team promised what?"  The damage of that lack of alignment as it relates to the customer’s trust is immeasurable.

Imagine how the customer feels when, during the demo, the sales team explained a future feature only to have the product team disavow that feature being released in the foreseeable future during implementation.

These unforced errors as a result of a lack of cross-departmental alignment unfortunately occur frequently and are totally avoidable.

On the other hand, cross-departmental alignment and consistency in philosophy offer many advantages. For instance, customers appreciate the seamless experience when both sales and services teams provide them with the same perspective.

Of course, cross-departmental alignment has financial benefits as well, such as higher customer satisfaction and retention.  Winning back a customer costs roughly ten times as much as winning that customer initially, so there is tremendous incentive to treat them well.

Lack of cross departmental alignment also leads to higher internal turnover, which leads to higher internal costs.  Higher turnover also creates uneasiness within the customer base, which can affect reference-ability and expansions.

Ultimately, senior leadership sets the tone across the organization.  If the departmental leaders demonstrate consistent alignment and collaborate well, it will trickle through the entire company.  The customer also feels this alignment and reacts positively to it. 

If your SaaS company struggles with cross-departmental alignment, please email dave@moicpartners.com for best practices in this area. Sign up here to improve your forecast accuracy.