When Two Teams Fund One Event, Whose Goals Win?
A Case Study in Aligning Sales and Customer Success Around a Shared Objective
200+ Attendees | $75M Pipeline Generated | 97% Attendee Satisfaction |
The Situation
A global software company was preparing for the executive track of its annual user conference, an invite-only experience for 200+ senior leaders, running alongside the main event. The track was co-funded, split evenly between the sales organization and the customer success organization.
On paper, that shared investment should have meant shared goals. In practice, it meant two teams pulling the event in different directions, each convinced the previous year's version had failed them specifically.
Sales was frustrated. Prospects attending the executive track were being seated next to existing customers who had had rocky experiences, and deals were stalling as a result. From their seat, the event was actively working against new business.
Customer success had the opposite complaint. Their goal was to build traction with executives at strategic accounts, many of whom had been sold a vision that didn't quite match what they received. It wasn't that the service was bad, it was a four-star experience against a five-star promise. Every touchpoint with those executives was colored by that gap, and the event wasn't helping close it.
Customer success had the opposite complaint. Their goal was to build traction with executives at strategic accounts, many of whom had been sold a vision that didn't quite match what they received. It wasn't that the service was bad, it was a four-star experience against a five-star promise. Every touchpoint with those executives was colored by that gap, and the event wasn't helping close it.
The Problem: Frustration
Two different teams funding the event. Two sets of metrics. Two versions of what success meant for the same 200 people in the same room.
The Diagnosis: Alignment Needed
Before touching the agenda, the venue, or the invite list, I went to each team separately, not to plan logistics, but to understand what they were actually trying to accomplish, and why.
What came out of those conversations wasn't a logistics problem. It was a strategy problem: sales and customer success weren't aligned on what this event was for. They had been co-funding it for years without ever agreeing on a shared objective, and every planning decision, from who got invited to what got presented to how success got measured, was being made against two different, sometimes contradictory, definitions of success.
I brought that disconnect back to both teams directly.
The Intervention: Shared Objective
The next step was a joint session with the heads of both teams and the business unit President, not to negotiate a compromise event, but to land on one shared objective the event would actually be built around.
We landed on the event existing to accelerate deals.
That single decision resolved several fights at once:
- Budget followed benefit. Since deal acceleration was the primary objective, sales agreed to fund a larger share of the event, since they stood to gain the most from it.
- The invite list got a filter. Only customers in good or neutral standing were included. This directly addressed sales' core complaint, that prospects were no longer sitting across from detractors.
- Content shifted toward the roadmap. As a deliberate compromise, we built in more product roadmap content, giving customer success a legitimate reason to bring strategic accounts even though the event's core objective wasn't about them.
- The invite filter paid off on stage. Because the room was now filled with customers in good standing, those same customers could be put front and center as speakers, sharing their own stories from the stage. They became the experts in the room, both for prospects deciding whether to buy and for peer customers deciding whether to expand. That credibility was only possible because of the earlier decision to filter the invite list.
- Customer success's real problem got its own venue. The disconnect between what customers were sold and what they had experienced wasn't something a single conference could fix, and trying to solve it inside this event was part of what had made prior years messy. So we created a customer advisory board, meeting separately, dedicated specifically to surfacing and addressing the issues driving that expectation gap. That last move mattered as much as the joint objective itself. Not every stakeholder need belongs in the same room. Sometimes alignment means building a second mechanism instead of overloading one event to do two incompatible jobs.
The Results
With a single, agreed-upon objective driving every decision, including audience, content, and budget, the event stopped being a tug-of-war and became a genuinely cohesive experience:
Roughly half of pipeline opportunities closed within the following year and new opportunities were created during the conference itself, each year the event ran. The advisory board proved just as valuable as the event itself. What started as a way to address the customer success team's relationship repair needs grew into a standing council of 30+ members and became a durable source of advocacy:
- 200+ attendees from enterprise organizations
- $75M+ in pipeline generated
- 97% attendee satisfaction, the highest rating in the event's history
Roughly half of pipeline opportunities closed within the following year and new opportunities were created during the conference itself, each year the event ran. The advisory board proved just as valuable as the event itself. What started as a way to address the customer success team's relationship repair needs grew into a standing council of 30+ members and became a durable source of advocacy:
- Member accounts saw a combined $6M increase in contract value
- The council generated 11 new client testimonials in a single year
- Members went on to participate in co-marketing campaigns and were featured in company thought-leadership moments, including at analyst events and the flagship user conference
The Takeaway
Executive events with multiple internal funders rarely fail because of bad content or poor logistics. They fail because the teams behind them never agreed on what the event was actually for, so every decision downstream gets made against conflicting definitions of success.
The fix wasn't a better agenda. It was a single, shared objective everyone could plan against, and the discipline to build a separate solution for the problem that objective couldn't solve.
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