Bridging marketing, sales and customer success for customer-centricity

Customer engagement and collaboration between marketing and customer success have never been more critical – or more challenging – than today.

As organizations face increasing pressure to deliver seamless, customer-centric experiences, it’s no longer enough to work in silos or rely on traditional approaches. Marketing, sales, and customer success must align around a shared purpose to truly meet customer needs and drive sustainable growth.

I’ve spent years leading global engagement at Philips Healthcare, so I understand the complexities of transforming a legacy organization into one that prioritizes the customer at every stage of their journey.

In this article, I’ll share insights from Philips’ journey toward audience-centric marketing, including the strategies we used to overcome obstacles, foster collaboration, and deliver measurable impact.

We’ll explore:

The internal and external challenges that necessitated change,
The four pillars of Philips’ audience-centric transformation,
How we bridged gaps between marketing, sales, and customer success, and
Practical frameworks and questions to assess customer centricity in your organization.

Understand the customer journey

You’re probably familiar with the concept of the customer decision journey. It’s not the newest model out there, but it’s still an important framework for understanding the customer’s experience.

When I talk about “fixing the basics,” this is one of the areas where we need to start. If you examine the customer decision journey, there’s a portion—on the left or right, depending on the diagram—that represents what happens to customers after they buy. This is where customer success teams shine. But there’s a bigger opportunity that I think we’re overlooking.

Extending customer success across the journey

The opportunity lies in bringing customer success principles into the earlier stages of the customer decision journey, even before someone becomes a customer. This includes the inquiry stage, when a potential customer is exploring their options, or when they transition into a lead in the marketing funnel.

It’s not easy, but I believe it’s essential for breaking through silos and ensuring a cohesive customer experience.

At the end of the day, the customer journey is one, unified process. Yet in most organizations, we’re divided into marketing, customer success, sales, and services, each focusing on our own “slice” of the journey. That fragmented perspective is a problem.

Collaboration across these functions isn’t just about getting along or liking each other—it’s about aligning around a shared mission, purpose, and strategy to better serve the customer.

One of my favorite metaphors is that the customer is like an elephant. Depending on the team, we see only a part of them. To marketing, the customer might look like a rope; to sales, maybe a spear; to customer success, perhaps a wall. Each team focuses on their specific interaction with the customer, but the reality is that the customer is a whole entity, not just the sum of these parts.

This fragmented view creates challenges, both practical and technological.

At Philips, we had a legacy of over 30 years with multiple systems that didn’t always communicate well. This made achieving a true 360-degree view of the customer nearly impossible. And yet, that single view is critical for delivering a seamless experience before, during, and after purchase.

Putting the customer at the center

Fixing the basics means understanding that we serve one customer, not just the segment or stage that fits our function.

It’s our collective responsibility as an organization to collaborate and align for the customer’s benefit. A happy customer is not only more likely to return but also contributes directly to the company’s success.

This isn’t about idealistic notions of “peace and love”—it’s about operational efficiency and alignment. We need to identify and address the barriers within our companies that prevent us from putting the customer at the center of our processes. Because when we do, it’s not just the customer who wins; the business thrives as well.