Stop blaming the sales team

“Did you see that crazy deal that just came in? I can’t believe that we sold to them!”

“The salesperson reached out to my client and didn’t tell me. Now I have to clean up this mess that they created.”

“Why did sales push through that upsell? They clearly weren’t ready to make that purchase!”

Do any of these sound familiar? While these examples are fictitious, they are commonly said by customer success teams in regards to their sales colleagues. I’m sure I’ve said something similar over the years as well.

We’re also seeing these stereotypes perpetuated on social media (see the example below). I mean, they are really funny I’ll admit. But it’s not helping solve the underlying issue and while it’s an unpopular opinion, improvements can actually be made.

While it may seem nice to have a laugh at someone else’s expense, it’s causing a deeper rift between sales and customer success. Do you think this will help prevent another “wrong fit” customer from being signed? Do you think this will prevent the sales team from trying to upsell clients who are at-risk? Complaining about the problem just perpetuates it. It can make things worse as it becomes harder to see things from other people’s perspectives. That same empathy that is needed to help your clients also needs to be directed inwardly to your own organization. It’s time to look at this from a different perspective and break out of this us vs them mentality.

Your ego is in your way

“Own your s**t” is something that was ingrained into me over the years as a leader. The book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin really drove this point home and changed my way of thinking. My takeaway from the book is that I’m fully responsible for everything that my team is involved in. If we lost a customer, that’s my fault and not the CSM. If someone quits on my team, that’s on me. I focused on improving our processes and creating a culture of accountability and high performance. I made sure that we owned our s**t. The problem I learned is that it isn’t enough.

I had a situation where we ran an upsell campaign that wasn’t communicated well to our customers. This caused some unnecessary friction with a small number of customers and the brunt of their unhappiness fell on the customer success team. Under the pressure of being chewed out by customers and then having my overburdened CS team being dragged through the mud yet again, I had had it. I escalated this to senior management and lashed out: “We really screwed this up. Why did this happen?”

I thought I was being a good soldier and practicing “extreme ownership”. I had my s**t together - why didn’t other people have the same mentality? I thought “if you mess up, own it, learn from it and move on”. What I realized later was that I had let my ego get in the way. I was looking at this from a black and white perspective. However, I couldn’t get past my own way of thinking that I was right and the other teams were wrong. While someone else may have made a mistake here, I was making the bigger one.

Own their s**t too

It wasn’t until I read Meg Poag’s book “The Adversity Hack” that it dawned on me that my thinking was flawed. As she phrases it, “I had to go to battle with my ego”. She defines ego as the following:

“Ego is the armor that guards the beliefs, pathways, and patterns we have built up to protect ourselves, survive, and feel better.”

I was blaming someone else as I was giving in to my ego. What I needed to do was to stay curious and try and better understand why certain actions were taken. We have to assume that everyone is trying to do the right thing (and not just the CS team). If mistakes are made, it’s best to understand why they happened. I needed to ask myself, “what role did I play in this situation?” and “How could have I prevented this from happening?”

In the situation with the upsell campaign, I could have made more of an effort to review the communication strategy to mitigate potential issues. My sphere of ownership needs to go beyond my team - I need to extend my ownership to others. In summary - you need to own other people’s s**t too.

This applies to many situations. If you find challenges between sales and CS in your own organization, you need to take responsibility and find out why this is happening. It could be that this was how the sales team was trained (or not trained). It could be due to how the sales team is compensated.

Stay curious and focus on the role that you play in the situation rather than feeding into your own ego and falling back on the blame game (and the Insta memes). Be the better person and you will speed up the chance to make real change and progress. Above all, stop blaming sales by default. This doesn’t help and only hinders the situation.

PS: This way of thinking goes well beyond sales and customer success and can extend to any situation - including personal relationships.

PPS: While I am aware of my ego it doesn’t mean that I still don’t get tripped up in my own s**t. I have a good sense of when it may be happening and when I need to pull myself up.

Meg Poag, The Adversity Hack (Austin: River Grove Books, 2021), 13

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