As a CFO, your role is about more than just managing the company’s finances—you’re in the perfect position to help align two crucial, but often disconnected, teams: Solution Engineering and Customer Success.
Think about it. These teams are on the frontlines of customer engagement:
- Solution Engineering ensures the product or service is the perfect fit for the customer’s needs.
- Customer Success (CS) ensures the solution delivers value over time, leading to customer satisfaction, retention, and growth.
When these two teams are in sync, the result is clear: higher customer lifetime value, lower churn, and better overall financial performance. But when they’re not aligned? Promises made during pre-sales can fall apart post-sale, leading to frustrated customers and lost revenue.
So, what role can the CFO play in bridging this gap? Here are four actionable ways you can drive alignment between Solution Engineering and Customer Success—and boost your company’s financial health in the process.
1. Unify Metrics and Financial Accountability 📊
One of the key reasons Solution Engineering and Customer Success often feel disconnected is that they’re measured by different metrics:
- Solution Engineering tends to focus on pre-sale metrics, like successful POCs (Proof of Concept) and time-to-deploy.
- Customer Success is all about post-sale metrics, like NPS scores, churn, and upsell rates.
As a CFO, you can encourage alignment by introducing unified financial metrics that both teams are accountable for, such as:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) as it relates to long-term revenue.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), factoring in the contribution of both pre- and post-sales efforts.
- Revenue expansion metrics, such as upsell and cross-sell opportunities driven by both teams.
By unifying these financial metrics, both teams will start to see themselves as part of the same customer journey—and they’ll collaborate more naturally to ensure that journey is as profitable as possible.
💡 Pro tip: Review current Goals with both teams and identify overlaps. Prioritise metrics that drive financial outcomes directly tied to the customer lifecycle. You can track and visualise these in places like Stellafai
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2. Promote Collaborative Budgeting for Long-Term Value 💰
It’s common for Solution Engineering and Customer Success to work with separate budgets and timelines. This often results in misalignment—for example, Solution Engineering might focus on building a highly complex custom solution, while Customer Success struggles to maintain it over time.
As CFO, you can promote collaborative budgeting that ensures both teams are incentivised to focus on long-term customer value instead of short-term wins.
- Joint Investment: Encourage a shared budget for initiatives that enhance both the solution’s technical fit and its long-term viability. For instance, investments in automation, onboarding tools, or shared platforms can ensure smoother transitions from pre-sale to post-sale.
- Customer Health Funds: Set aside part of the budget for initiatives that improve the customer experience across both Solution Engineering and Customer Success touchpoints, such as integrating feedback loops or enabling ongoing solution customisation.
💡 Pro tip: Host quarterly budget review meetings with leaders from both teams to align on priorities and assess the financial impact of ongoing projects.
3. Enable Seamless Handovers with Clear Data and Communication Tools 🔄
Handovers between Solution Engineering and Customer Success are notorious for being clunky, leading to misunderstandings, duplication of work, or worse—frustrated customers.
The key to seamless handovers lies in data transparency and communication tools that ensure both teams are working from the same playbook.
As a CFO, you can take the lead on:
- Investing in integrated tools that track the customer journey from pre-sale to post-sale, such as a CRM that both teams can access. This will ensure that Customer Success can see exactly what was promised by Solution Engineering.
- Defining a structured handover process that includes clear checkpoints and shared documentation. This could be as simple as ensuring all POC results, customer goals, and solution specifications are included in a shared handoff report.
By focusing on the tools and processes that facilitate communication, you can directly impact both teams’ effectiveness and the overall financial health of the customer relationship.
💡 Pro tip: Use metrics to track the quality of handovers—such as how quickly Customer Success can onboard customers post-handoff—and tie those metrics to financial outcomes.
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4. Align Incentives with Customer Retention and Growth 🎯
Often, Solution Engineering is incentivised by closed deals and successful implementations, while Customer Success is rewarded for customer retention and upselling opportunities. This divide can lead to short-term thinking on the Solution Engineering side and frustration on the Customer Success side when they inherit projects that don’t deliver long-term value.
Here’s where you can step in as CFO: align the incentive structures of both teams with customer retention and growth.
- Long-Term Bonuses: Offer bonuses to Solution Engineering that are partially tied to customer retention and growth beyond the initial implementation. This will ensure they build scalable solutions that set Customer Success up for long-term success.
- Joint Goals: Create shared goals between Solution Engineering and Customer Success, such as reducing churn or increasing renewal rates. These shared incentives will motivate both teams to collaborate more closely.
💡 Pro tip: Consider rolling out a longer-term compensation plan for Solution Engineering that rewards not only immediate customer acquisition but also long-term satisfaction and retention metrics.
Conclusion: The CFO as a Cross-Team Connector 🚀
The CFO is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between Solution Engineering and Customer Success. By aligning financial metrics, promoting joint budgeting, enabling seamless handovers, and recalibrating incentives, you can ensure these two critical teams work together to drive long-term customer value.
Ultimately, the alignment you create will directly impact revenue retention, customer satisfaction, and your company’s bottom line. It’s time to move beyond financial oversight and become the strategic leader who connects the dots across your organisation’s customer journey.
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