Sales teams are obsessed with generating opportunities, but what decides whether a customer renews, expands or recommends you is what happens after the contract is signed. In this episode of Entre Directores Comerciales (in Spanish), José María Machuca, a customer experience consultant with 17 years in strategy consulting, explains how to align sales, marketing and CX around a single customer.
Sales and customer experience speak different languages
Sales talks about deals, transactions and the funnel; customer experience talks about NPS and recommendation rates. Both are valid, but there is only one customer, and when these two worlds don't understand each other, forecasting the company's growth becomes impossible.
Machuca describes how the three roles involved have evolved. The all-or-nothing salesperson who sells whatever it takes, regardless of real needs, has given way to a more consultative profile. Marketing no longer just positions the brand. And CX has grown from customer service into a senior function, because much of the recurring revenue depends on it.
The driver is a better-informed customer with a louder voice: a bad experience is shared on social media instantly. And customers don't care whether marketing, sales or CX dropped the ball: to them, the brand did.
The silences in the customer journey count too
One of the strongest ideas in the episode: almost every customer journey has moments when the brand is absent. Between signing for an off-plan home and getting the keys, or while waiting for a car, months can go by without any news. That gap is not neutral.
For Machuca, those moments should be used: show how the project is progressing, give the customer something to interact with, even gamify the wait. The same applies further up the funnel: a brand that shows up while the customer is still imagining the purchase is already shaping it.
Staying silent is just as negative as a bad experience. When you analyze the customer journeys of different companies, there are moments when the brand isn't acting: moments of absence and silence. And if you're not analyzing how the customer perceives them, they can be a pain point rather than a wow moment.
Shared goals: the ball belongs to everyone
The classic conflict is familiar: sales blames CX when a customer doesn't renew, and CX blames sales for promising what operations can't deliver. The way out, Machuca argues, is shared objectives and someone at the top who sets them. If every team only chases its own bonus, each one pulls in a different direction.
He also makes the case for customer experience as a cross-functional guardian of the customer relationship, since it's the only team present at every delivery, renewal or complaint. And the salesperson doesn't vanish after the signature: they introduce the team, join the quarterly reviews and share the wins, so the customer sees a business partner rather than someone who signs and leaves.
Before I work on customer experience, I have to work on employee experience. I can have a very clear sales plan, but there has to be a global plan where we're all at the table and all pushing in the same direction.
How to overcome resistance to change
Imposing a document with the new process doesn't work. What does work is involving the teams: role plays, customer interviews that salespeople are invited to, and focus groups with real customers where nobody knows who is a customer and who isn't. When salespeople hear the problem first-hand, it stops being an outsider's opinion.
For transformation projects, Machuca recommends first understanding why the silos exist, relying on early adopters in every area and securing genuine backing from leadership. Resistance doesn't only come from senior staff: it also comes from the executive who says «it's working fine for me». With those profiles, numbers do the talking.
Data and AI to anticipate the customer
Data is the fourth player in this story: it underpins the case for change and, with AI, helps predict customer behavior far more accurately than before. But Machuca points to a sore spot: many salespeople still keep their own notebook instead of logging information in the CRM, so the data exists but goes unused.
His advice in the face of technological change that overwhelms even those who work with it daily: use the technology because it works, rely on hybrid profiles and multidisciplinary teams, and don't lose the human side.
