Summary: You already know the misalignment is costing you. At ZERO-IN in October, Krista Lugo, vice president of client success at Smokeball, broke down how much — and what to do about it. This article is based on her session: Sales sold WHAT?! Promises, finger-pointing and how to stop both: A playbook for sales → CS alignment.
You’ve heard it before.
“Sales sold what?!”
“CS always slows or kills the deal.”
“They’re just tossing new accounts over the fence.”
Sales and customer success misalignment is a well-wrought story, and the finger-pointing gets old fast. But it isn’t just a matter of internal friction: it’s a fundamental business challenge that impacts momentum and financial stability.
“Sales and customer success are two sides of the same coin,” says Krista Lugo. The vice president of client success at Smokeball led a ZERO-IN session focused on this misalignment, and she laid out numbers and remedies to a problem that most teams only grumble about amid their own goals and outcomes.
When misalignment has a price tag.
Krista shared a misalignment horror story during her session: A manager flagged a $250,000 contract that promised an integration the company just didn’t have. The delivery didn’t know about it. The product team didn’t have it on the roadmap. The account was reversed, but the situation got worse — it wasn’t an isolated event.
This was more than churn risk. It was an example of misaligned incentives and a lack of shared boundaries and goal-setting from the start. If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone:
- Conflicting incentives. Sales survives by closed-won. CS lives by adoption, retention, and expansion. Both incentives make sense. Without shared goals, both teams end up competing inside the same accounts.
- ICP drift. Most teams have an ideal customer profile. The problems come when Sales pushes the edges or over-promises (“we can make that work”), while CS doesn’t have the access or information to reinforce guardrails.
- Fear of the “deal killer.” Many sales teams have concerns about involving CS early, worried that they will slow down the process and focus too much on what the product cannot do. Those concerns are often legitimate — and often self-fulfilling.
- Sloppy or sudden handoffs. If both teams aren’t aligned before the deal is signed, onboarding becomes a scramble — accounts tossed around, expectations mismatched, trust eroded before it’s built. The result: confusion for customers and defensive posturing for internal teams.
The true cost of a bad deal.
Krista put it plainly: “Every bad client isn’t just a headache. It’s real money.”
Here’s what that looks like:
- Direct revenue risk: If 10% of your client base is a bad fit and your average contract value is around $100,000, you’re facing $1 million in ARR risk when those clients churn.
- Erosion of trust: Misalignment creates brand damage that’s difficult to overcome in a market driven by reviews and peer recommendations.
- Team toxicity: Constant exposure to broken promises leads to CSM turnover, frustration, and an environment where everyone braces when a new deal is announced.
Building a partnership for unified growth.
Blame is corrosive. Fix it with shared ownership. The fix starts when you bring both teams together, set aside functional silos, review shared revenue metrics, and ask: “How do we move these together?”
That’s a structural shift, one where sales and CS share both the burden and the win.
1. Make the ICP a living contract.
Review your ICP monthly with the product team and require approvals for fringe deals. Don’t ban edge cases, just document the trade-offs. That transparency builds trust and reduces conflict.
2. Bring CS into pre-sales.
Position CS as a solutions partner to frame options, risks, and realistic implementation timelines. That’s not policing the deal. It’s protecting it.
3. Share accountability.
Run joint deal reviews and call coaching. Give account executives onboarding literacy and talk tracks for realistic expectations — without losing deal momentum.
Teach the handoff before it happens
Krista made the case that alignment is built through education, not just process. In a previous company, every new hire went through the same onboarding training as the implementation team. Sales learned exactly what onboarding required, what clients would experience and where expectations slip.
She used that same logic with account executives, bringing onboarding knowledge directly into Sales. Krista worked with her vice president of sales to give every account executive a copy of Onboarding Matters and use it as a shared learning tool. The result was not just better empathy for Customer Success, but better language for Sales: clearer talk tracks, stronger positioning around service delivery and a better understanding of how to sell the full customer journey — not just the close.
4. Take it upstairs.
Alignment only sticks when incentives change. Start with monthly retrospectives to review deal quality. Then work with the C-suite to align compensation with long-term retention. Krista recommends bringing an “alignment dashboard”:
- Percentage of new clients flagged as misaligned in the first 90 days
- ARR at risk from bad fit
- Lost expansion from misalignment
- Wasted customer acquisition cost
Add a funnel: sold outside ideal customer profile → flagged in onboarding → churn or zero expansion — and a call-out: “This is not a CS problem — it’s a business alignment problem.”
Then ask leadership to align incentives and enforce the ideal customer profile.
Your internal deal review checklist.
Formalize the handoff, and you take control of the scramble. CS walks into every new account knowing the deal. Sales understands what comes next for the customer. Here’s a template to make it happen.
1. Client motivation and success criteria.
- The “Why”: Why did the client buy at this specific moment?
- Success definition: What does the client consider success at 30, 60, and 90 days?
- The “Hook”: What got the deal closed?
2. Technical and service scope.
- Integration audit: Any integrations promised that aren’t currently live or on the roadmap?
- Migration requirements: What is the scope of data migration, and were any “free” professional services promised to secure the signature?
- Service delivery: Does the client expect a specific implementation timeline?
3. Account dynamics and personalities.
- Key stakeholders: Who are the champions and potential detractors?
- Personalities: What should the customer success manager be prepared for?
- Relationship history: What friction points or objections during the sales cycle might resurface during onboarding?
4. ICP alignment and risk assessment.
- ICP status: Does this client fit the ideal customer profile?
- Risk flags: If outside the ideal customer profile, is it flagged to leadership for a backup plan?
- Commercial accuracy: Does the signed contract match the verbal promises regarding future pricing or expansion caps?
