Startup CXO

Chapter 92Partnering with the Organization

A healthy company behaves as if the most important person in that company is the customer. As the Chief Customer Officer, one of your most important jobs is to make sure that all the other groups in the company—Engineering, Product, Marketing, Sales—are thinking about the customer. I think that the Chief Customer Officer job boils down to three things:

• Running the service organization.
• Coordinating with other departments to ensure the end‐to‐end client experience is great.
• Giving the entire organization the “why” of why we exist, which is, of course, to help clients reach their desired outcomes.

When working closely with the other functions, you shouldn't expect that you'll be totally aligned all the time—but that's the goal. The more aligned you are at the executive level, the better it is for the people on your team and the better it is for the customer.

The following are a few of the common sources of friction that I've seen across functions:

• Is the sales organization selling to the right customer? If the company has done its job correctly, its products and services are tailored to serve a certain kind of customer, maybe in a particular vertical, sophistication, or size. The common tension between sales and the service organization is rooted in the fact that the sales organization is judged by the revenue they generate. Their incentive is to sell to as many different kinds of prospects as possible. An aligned sales organization ...