Thought Experiment
Imagine you’re a CEO in an arena filled with your employees. Four groups sit separately, each wearing colors that signify their function: blue for Sales, yellow for Marketing, red for Product, and green for Customer Success. At the center, a podium rises, and the speaker issues a challenge: “Which department is most important to achieving our company’s vision? And the follow-up question is, what is it that uniquely positions that department as the most important?”
No one takes charge of organizing a response and so chaos ensues. Arguments erupt. Sales touts revenue attainment numbers. Marketing waves brand and engagement metrics. Product teams cite innovation scores and G2 ratings. Customer Success pleads they are the voice of the client and their work improves retention rates. In their passion to prove supremacy, each group becomes deaf to the others. The opportunity to collaborate vanishes.
Now, rewind. Remove the podium, the seating arrangements, and the colored uniforms. Instead, invite the leaders of each group to the arena floor. This time they face a different challenge: “How do we help our largest strategic customer, ClientCorp, integrate our brand-new software product – the one the market is already betting will be a test of our future – before their critical launch next month?”
Watch what happens. Sales shares comprehensive client buying context. Marketing adapts messaging for urgent training and the sharing of industry research that supports the technology. Product opens a channel for direct feedback and fast-tracks improvements that can scale. Customer Success orchestrates the rollout and sets a strong plan for ongoing adoption. The artificial boundaries blur in service of a real goal. This time, they’re tasked with working together to achieve one thing: create the best outcome for a customer by leveraging the unique strengths of their teams.
This simple shift reveals a crucial truth: When we structure organizations around internal hierarchies and departmental competitions, we create artificial mountains that block our view of the one that matters – the success of customers and what it can mean for the future of the company.
Questions for Discussion:
- Who benefits from maintaining these artificial divisions?
- Why do we persist in framing corporate success as a zero-sum game?
- What would happen if we organized around customer journeys instead of department scorecards?
- How might leadership roles evolve in a truly collaborative environment?
- What prevents us from making this change, when we all see its value?
- Which metrics would matter most in this new landscape?
- How do we reward collective success without losing individual accountability?
From Division to Vision: A Mountaineering Approach
In mountaineering, success is a team effort. Each climber contributes their unique skills to reach the summit safely. The same principle applies to business. When organizations align around a shared mission—delivering exceptional customer outcomes—they eliminate wasteful friction and achieve extraordinary results.
Why Silos Persist
Traditional organizational structures encourage division:
- Politics over purpose: Departments compete for budget, visibility, and influence, often at the expense of customer outcomes
- Misaligned incentives: Recognition systems reward individual wins rather than collective success
- Predefined debates: Companies focus on a narrow set of “important” questions that perpetuate the status quo.
The Case for Change
- When we break down silos and align teams around customer outcomes, organizations unlock their full potential. But this transformation requires more than good intentions. It demands a clear framework, starting with the definition of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
The ICP: A Compass for Collaboration
An ICP acts as an organizational North Star, helping teams focus their efforts on the customers they are best equipped to serve. Like a mountaineering team choosing the right peak, an ICP ensures alignment across functions and maximizes the likelihood of success.
Key Benefits of a Shared ICP
1. Unified Focus on High-Impact Opportunities
Teams concentrate on prospects where the organization can deliver the most value. This reduces time and wasted effort, while simultaneously amplifying impact.
- Product builds more business-relevant solutions
- Marketing qualifies leads more effectively
- Sales builds and sells more compelling and convincing business cases
- Customer Success develops playbooks for predictable and scalable outcomes
2. Solutions Built for the Right Challenges
- Deep understanding of your ICP enables:
- Products designed for real customer problems
- Support speed and effectiveness optimized for common use cases
- Implementation strategies tailored to industry scenarios
- Proactive adoption and value realization effort timed to journey milestones
3. A Common Language Across Teams
- When everyone understands the ICP, communication flows seamlessly, customer pertinent automated data flows more frictionlessly, and misalignment—between what’s promised by Sales and delivered by Customer Success—is eliminated.
4. Better Resource Allocation and Strategic Decisions
- ICP clarity informs:
- Product development priorities
- Market entry strategies
- Investment in customer-serving and customer-selling resources
5.Reduced Risk and Improved Customer Outcomes
- Serving customers outside your ICP often leads to poor results, draining resources and harming morale. A strong ICP focus ensures more predictable growth, higher retention, greater customer satisfaction, and (eventually) higher company valuation.
The Path Forward
Moving from silos to synergy requires rethinking organizational norms:
- Reward collaboration: Shift recognition systems to prioritize team outcomes over individual wins
- Foster adaptability: Empower leaders to organize teams dynamically around customer outcomes
- Leverage AI: Use AI to enhance and drive cross-functional collaboration, eliminating bias and inefficiencies
In this new playbook, success isn’t about having to live with legacy thinking about one department being more important than others. The new playbook needs to be about harnessing the collective strengths of the entire organization to deliver exceptional customer outcomes. So, let’s stop asking who’s most important – or worse, assuming one is – and start asking: How can we achieve the summit together?
Does this argument strike you as hopelessly naïve? Well, I live by the old adage that cynicism may run the world but idealism changes it.
