“Tear Down This Wall!” is probably one of the most famous lines from 20th century American politics. President Reagan was talking about bringing down a wall that separated soviet controlled East-Berlin from Western controlled West Berlin.

I’m here today to tell you that there’s another wall that needs to be torn down. A wall that was built in the pursuit of organizational efficiency in the pre-SaaS world, but is today creating organizational inefficiency because it is a relic from a time long gone. This wall is the barrier that exists between Sales and Customer Success.

The Sales and Customer Success Wall

Before the world of SaaS, customer success was just a check-box in the customer journey. It acted as a stage a customer went through in the process of rolling out software, but it was really more of a logistical stepping stone.

And this made sense. Sales was held accountable to bookings and Customer Success to NPS score’s. These metrics are fundamentally different.

Enter the World of SaaS

In today’s world, SaaS is King and recurring revenue is the currency we trade with. This means that the revenue machine is a constantly going. An organization always has to be ready to instantly cater to customers as expanding accounts become just as important as closing a new account. Constant innovation and increasing value must be brought to the customer as customer expectations are at an all-time high.

This might sound daunting for today’s companies and startups. But really, this isn’t a sad story. This has been a win for the customer — even though the early SaaS businesses and conventional business models that converted to SaaS were looked at with skepticism. It’s a win because it essentially democratized the software industry by giving more power to the consumer (business or individual) to make a decision to change at ANY point in time and pushed companies to continue to innovate, care about the customer, or risk losing the customer.

A New Wave of Change

While the business model was changing in the tech industry, a culture shift was happening. The expectations of individuals began to change. This change has been described as a generational shift where Millennial are increasingly the demographic organizations try to cater to.

With Millennials, there’s no hiding the facts. Restaurants learned this when Yelp came and changed the world of restaurant reviews, and businesses that sell software are learning this as companies like trustRadius and G2Crowd are growing and getting well funded.

The impact of networks, social graphs, and the internets ability to connect us with incredible amount of information has created a paradigm shift in the way companies communicate with us. This shift is governed by the laws of authenticity.

Authenticity

In the world where SaaS is king, and a world where authenticity is the law, the role of the customer success and sales (and by extension marketing) has to be fundamentally strategized. No longer can sales promise whatever it needs to get “the win.” Then throw the customer over the proverbial wall to customer success leaving customer success to hold the account and bootstrap a way to please the customer.

No.

For a organization to be successful it must abide by the scale of authenticity.

Failure to insure that the message between sales and customer success is authentic will lead customers to churn. A lack of authenticity occurs when there’s a breakdown in accountability. Both sales and customer success need to be held accountable in achieving an authentic experience and message to the customer. If this accountability doesn’t exist, then the Scale of Authenticity becomes unbalanced and customers will churn.

This means the proverbial wall separating these departments needs to be broken down. To break-down this wall and allow authenticity in, a CEO must implement Authentic GTM.

Authentic GTM

Once an organization correctly aligns Sales and Customer success, it can begin to implement what we call Authentic GTM. We talk a lot about this idea in “Authentic” GTM.

If an organization implements Authentic GTM, it will fundamentally alter the organizations marketing strategy, sales strategy, and customer success experiences by ensuring that the customer experience in each of the aforementioned phases is consistent with what the authentic customer needs, expectations and wants. Organizations that are successful in implementing Authentic GTM will experience hyper-growth.

Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success must be authentic with a customer’s needs, expectations, and wants.

The Authentic GTM is the new GTM wave. Companies like Engagio, Cloudwords, YesPath, and Salesloft (all companies in our portfolio) have emerged to help organizations effectively implement Authentic GTM strategies. They understand that the what we communicate to a customer has to be consistent with what they will experience.

A company cannot have marketing aimed at converting developers into customers if the product is used by SDR’s — that’s not authentic.

A company cannot promise new product features that haven’t fully rolled out yet, leaving that issue to customer success during implementation — that’s not authentic.

A company has to be consistent, authentic, and always innovating to win over millennial today, or they risk being destroyed by the strong networks — social, business, and review — that govern the daily lives of every millennial and increasingly the world.