Scaling company culture and setting goals for customer-facing teams

Setting goals for customer facing teams is becoming tougher by the day.
Take an example of customer facing teams in a 500-member organisation. There are multiple such teams including customer success, customer support, pre-sales, sales, teams with implementation engineers, etc.
With so many functions within the organisation, how does one go about setting a goal? How do you ensure you don’t step on each others toes?
We sat down with Craig Stoss, director of R&D - platform support at Arctic Wolf Networks to discuss this.
“The key to goal setting is to ensure that everyone is aligned towards a certain big overarching goal at the corporate level,” Craig said.
Contextualising goals
Craig believes that having an overarching goal and tying that to each team's KPI will be a great starting point. For instance, how a customer success manager contributes to a goal will be very different from how a support agent contributes to a goal. But together, they all add up to the same overarching goal.
Let’s say your overarching goal is increasing revenues or decreasing margins (which is what most companies have as a goal). The challenge comes when this kind of a goal is not contextualised to support agent or pre-sales engineer.
So how do you handle this?
For instance, you could incentivize support folks to look at where automation can help or make sure the knowledge base is of high quality. That intangibly affects the revenue or helps with decreasing margins. Drawing a parallel to the customer success world, there could incentives or goals with respect to retention, and it could be around ease and pace of implementation for pre-sales engineers.
If you have a deeper look at these, you'll find that all these folks have achieved what they’re supposed to and are also adding a ton of value in terms of revenue or with decreasing margins. Goals really work when individuals understand what they’re working towards.
“If you have someone on your team that is very knowledge-centred or technical, has a technical writing background, maybe their way of achieving a better margin is different than someone who is more technically minded and is more focused on solving a deep technical issues. But they are still in the same team doing similar work,” Craig pointed out.
So always remember to contextualise your goals.

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