Culture of Growth: How to Create a Common Lexicon for Your Teams
In part two of a three-part series based on his March 23 post titled “Growth and Customer Retention Starts with Building the Right Culture,” David Sill, Senior Vice President of Sales at DiscoverOrg, talks about how to get customer success and sales teams speaking the same language to improve communications flow
In June I began a series on culture shift within the marketing, sales and customer success teams at a company. The first post focused on encouraging members of these teams to step outside their comfort zones, to get to know and interact with other members of these teams, and to cultivate a culture of deep trust — with the goal of creating cohesiveness that ultimately benefits the customer and, along the way, each individual’s growth and professional development. In this post I’ll address the importance of getting your customer success and sales teams to adopt a common language to streamline workflow efficiencies.
This problem of a lack of a shared lexicon is frequent among organizations with teams that work adjacent to each other. Quite often individuals, or teams or people, on their own, and without the blessing of their team lead, develop and use their own definitions of terms across teams or departments. These definitions typically make perfect sense to them — take “buyer” or “decision-maker” as examples — but they may not jibe with other teams or people. In the worst case, this can cause customer-facing confusion that delays or derails a new business or expansion cycle. At the very least, it impedes day-to-day efficiency in the same way that a group of people speaking colloquial versions of the same language would cause a very real communication barrier. It takes some work, but instituting a common lexicon is well worth the effort.
I categorize it as a three-step process that includes creating standard definitions, manifesting those definitions system-wide, and applying them consistently.
1. Create standard definitions that are not open to interpretation
It seems like creating standard definitions should be easy issue to do, right? Not always. Sometime a sales or customer success team member very successfully uses the lexicon that they’ve developed, in their silo, and it can be hard to argue with their success. I’ve had many conversations over the years with individuals who adopt an “I’m making my numbers, so quit trying to make me change my process” attitude and have challenged me on why they need to change their terminology. They fail to see the bigger picture: that everyone on all teams needs to agree upon and use the same lexicon, or else the company’s scalability becomes limited.
Additionally, it saves time for everyone on all teams to use the same terminology. When a consistent lexicon isn’t used, even the simplest account review process can take twice as long (or 3x, or 5x) as it should. Think about referring to decision-making customers by the type of buyer they are. We define specific buyer types in terms of their authority to purchase and who their end users are. If a sales or customer success team member isn’t using those same definitions, you can spend an inordinate amount of time in a weekly account review alone simply discussing who the key decision-makers in the sales pipeline are. If you’re on the same page from the moment the account review begins, you can spend that limited, but critical, time moving opportunities forward and covering more ground with the “re-captured” time.
2. Make that common language live and breathe in your systems
Once all team members are on board with the concept of common definitions, it’s important to document and share the definitions. We do this by applying the lexicon not just verbally but across our systems, most notably our CRM. We integrate with Salesforce primarily, and it’s imperative that we input and use the same terminology across the system, because it informs every sales and customer success team member on the status of everything happening among our customer accounts. It’s the difference between needing to reach out to a colleague to get information or an answer, versus the self-serve-always-on convenience of looking in the CRM for it, whenever and wherever it’s needed.
3. Hold everyone accountable to using the new language day to day
As with any behavioral change, making sure everyone on the team is applying and using our agreed-upon definitions and lexicon isn’t easy. We are seeing success in this area through positive reinforcement and through our results. I’ve seen a lot of “ah-ha” moments happen during one-on-one and team meetings when one or more team members realizes they are talking the same language as their colleagues after using their own definitions and seeing the resulting confusion. These old habits die hard, but once they do, there’s typically a feeling of continuity and even relief that results. Bottom line: if you want to change habits, you have to earn the change by showing everyone the new way is in fact better — for them, for all. It’s a very pure and honest process.
Are we 100% compliant in our quest to adopt and use this common language? Not yet. It’s a work in progress, but we’ve come a long way. We’ve put good systems in place to provide oversight, such as flagging reports and continually stressing terminology in stand-up meetings, weekly training sessions, and 1:1 pipeline reviews. Over time, such incremental progress starts to take root. So the important takeaway is this: get started now.
