Over the years, we’ve seen a shift in customer success (CS). A concerted effort has taken place to ensure it, as a function, is closely tied to revenue. Teams that were once grouped with customer support now report to a CRO. And yet, for all that structural change, sales and customer success still aren't as integrated as they could be.
If both functions share the same goals – customer retention and expansion – surely they should be measured on the same metrics?
The 2026 State of Customer Success Report asked a straightforward question: What KPIs, if any, do sales and customer success teams share? The most common answer was none.
35.4% of respondents said their organization has no shared metric between the two functions – more than any other group. The CS profession has spent years talking about breaking down silos and treating retention and expansion as a shared commercial objective. More than 1 in 3 teams still don't have a single number both functions are held to.
Where sales and customer success KPIs are aligned
Where alignment exists, it concentrates around the commercial outcomes that arrive after the deal closes.
Net revenue retention (NRR) and gross revenue retention (GRR) each appear at 17.3% of responses, followed by expansion revenue at 15.7%.
Customer satisfaction metrics like NPS or CSAT are shared by just 3.1%.
Onboarding success or time to value sits at 4.7%. And 6.3% of respondents weren't sure whether any shared KPI exists in their organization – which is itself revealing about how clearly the alignment has been communicated.
The irony is that shared metrics, when they work, seem to work well. Speaking at Customer Success Summit Amsterdam 2025, Dhia Hayouni, then Manager, Growth Accounts at Hivebrite, recounted the shift his organization made when CS moved under a Chief Revenue Officer, alongside sales:
"For us, a ‘customer success metrics vs. sales’ mentality doesn’t exist. We all are one and the same. We both are measured on NRR, and the same GRR. This structural readjustment has changed the narrative so much."
Dina Hassan, Head of Customer Success, Global Accounts, Search and Staffing at LinkedIn, reported that her team had introduced shared value reviews – a metric co-owned by both sales and CS to ensure both functions show up for customer ROI conversations – and found it changed the internal dynamic:
"I'm seeing the CS teams feel a lot more empowered and feel like they have an equal place at the table as opposed to a subservient place at the table."
Those are the outcomes that metric alignment makes possible. The 35.4% without any shared KPI are, by definition, not getting there.
The handoff problem underneath the numbers
The absence of a shared metric tends to calcify the handoff model: sales closes, CS inherits, and the incentive to care about what happens after the signature drops sharply on the sales side.
During a panel discussion at Customer Success Summit Las Vegas in 2023, Maranda Dziekonski, then SVP, Customer Success & Ops at Datasembly, described the pre- and post-alignment difference at her company explicitly:
"When we had a clawback, that significantly changed behaviors, because we were all aligned around retention. And it also made sales care more about how the onboarding was going. We would hear more questions after the sale."
Our 2026 report data reflects the downstream cost of that dynamic.
Cross-functional friction was cited by roughly 16% of open-text respondents as one of their biggest current challenges, with comments like "our product does not fix bugs fast enough" and "development team has historically done their own thing."
CS sits closest to the customer, which also means it absorbs the impact of every gap upstream. Without shared metrics, there's no structural pressure on other functions to feel that impact too.
There's also the perception problem. More often than not, CS isn’t in the room when critical major decisions are made. Shared KPIs are, in part, what earns CS that seat.
What the organizations that have solved this actually do
Several patterns emerge from Customer Success Summit speakers who’ve made alignment work.
1. Joint accountability
Consider building joint accountability at the account level rather than just the function level.
In another panel discussion at Customer Success Summit Amsterdam 2025, Margariet Paagman, Director Customer Success at Contentstack, shared that her CS team has "biweekly deal-making sessions where the account team – CSM and AE together – prep 30 minutes to discuss strategy on the customer."
It's a small structural intervention, but it creates a regular forum for the two functions to operate off the same information.
2. Align incentive structures directly
If CSMs have a GRR target and account executives don't, the tension is baked in: CS cares about retention in a way that sales, structurally, doesn't have to.
Dina Hassan suggests that both functions share a growth target for strategic accounts, while maintaining separate targets elsewhere. That distinction matters because shared metrics don't have to mean identical metrics, just enough overlap that both teams have skin in the same outcomes.
3. Document everything
This option may be simpler: remember to document what was sold, what was promised, and what success looks like before the deal closes, and make that documentation available to CS before the handoff.
When speaking on a panel at Customer Success Summit Boston 2022, Megan Holsinger, then Director of Sales & Customer Success at Sell Better, had an interesting case study to share.
Her team started implementing three mandatory pre-close questions in Salesforce as a way to stop the mismatch between what sales committed to and what CS could actually deliver. They were able to identify churn at the three-month mark, which had been running high, dropped significantly afterwards.
Johannah Coffey
What needs to happen to improve alignment
The 2026 data suggests the shared KPI conversation is still largely at the level of aspiration rather than practice.
Talking about alignment is easier than building the incentive structures, measurement frameworks, and cross-functional cadences that make it real. The 6.3% who were unsure whether any shared metric existed in their own organization suggests that even where formal alignment has been attempted, it hasn't always been communicated clearly enough to land.
NRR is the natural starting point for most organizations – it's a number both functions can influence, it reflects the combined outcome of selling well and retaining well, and it doesn't require restructuring the entire go-to-market model to implement.
Getting to a point where sales and CS are both asked about NRR in their respective performance conversations is a meaningful step even before any structural change.
The 35.4% without a shared KPI aren't necessarily failing at customer success. But they are making alignment significantly harder to achieve, and significantly harder to sustain when leadership pressure increases.
This article draws on findings from the State of Customer Success 2026 Report and perspectives shared at Customer Success Summit events.
Become a CSC Insider
Thank you for subscribing
Get exclusive insights, frameworks, and strategies from customer success leaders driving real business impact.
An email has been successfully sent to confirm your subscription.
Follow us on LinkedIn
Start the conversation
Become a member of Product Marketing Alliance to start commenting.
Sign up now