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It was a great conversation (thanks to my fellow panelists - Marie Lunney, Markus Rentsch and Sally Stowe!) and unsurprisingly, the majority of attendees agreed that the most painful part of silos are competing priorities between different teams and functions. As we dug in further, it was clear that there was broad agreement on some of the best approaches to silo-busting. These included:

• Making customer-centricity a strategic priority - a lot has been written on this topic (in fact, I published an article on this recently too), but we found that on a practical level, businesses have generally been a little slow in adopting this approach. I actually believe that the recent shift to profitability over growth will be a key driver here - especially in measuring key metrics like customer lifetime value (CLTV) and net retention rates (NRR).
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• Customer Success at the center - while top-down change is super important, we chatted about the role that customer success has in advocating for bottom-up change and being key influencers, too. Practically, this means the customer success team has to understand how to support and translate the priorities from other parts of the business into a holistic approach to the customer (whether that’s sales, customer support, marketing or product development for example). We also discussed the importance of creating tiger teams as a way to solve major issues (for example, product issues or limitations leading to increased customer churn) - I’m a huge proponent of the agility this approach can take too.
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• Rewarding cross functional collaboration with incentives - while this sounds easy to do, it has to be supported by clear, shared OKRs where everyone has accountability and an opportunity to benefit. This has a downstream impact on everything from a shared sense of culture to optimizing the tech stack to deliver a great customer experience. 
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• Addressing the pain at a data level - in a siloed organization data resides across multiple systems that aren’t set up to talk to each other, which can easily lead to misalignment. An important first step is documenting the types of data you have and getting it all in the same place so you can surface it to other departments. With the CS team at the center and shared OKRs, it’s then easier to create a common narrative and a plan of what needs to get done. 

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You can watch the full webinar recording here. 

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So, what do you think? What has worked (or failed) to overcome silos in your organization? Feel free to send me a message to talk more about this topic and learn how LoudNClear can support silo-busting. 

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