Strategy

As a buyer, we’ve all been there. You fill out a form, wait to hear from sales, and then maybe you receive a piece of content that isn’t relevant to you, or you find yourself repeating what you shared in the form later on a call. And what happens? You find yourself starting to feel less and less confident about the brand because your experience hasn’t been seamless. What we don’t think about as buyers is what the seller is probably experiencing in the CRM and how the data, or the lack thereof, is impacting their interactions with you. 

When the CRM is a roadblock rather than a revenue driver for sellers, it negatively impacts the buying experience in addition to sales performance. In today’s modern era, where buyer expectations are rising and marketing, sales, and customer success teams are under more pressure to drive growth with tighter budgets, it is critical that they prioritize optimizing core functions to deliver the best experience possible for buyers. An essential piece: optimizing the CRM seller experience.

To get the highlights on how to approach this, continue reading below. To get the full deep dive, watch Part III: A Better CRM for Sellers = A Better Experience for Buyers, of the Built to Buy series.

Why the Seller Experience Must Be a Growth Priority

For marketing, sales ops, and revenue teams, optimizing the seller experience isn’t just a nice-to-have operational fix. It is a critical growth lever.

• Impact on Sales Performance: Unfortunately, the majority of a seller’s day is not spent selling. Only about 28% of their time actually is. (Salesforce) The rest of their day is consumed by manual data entry, hunting for siloed information, and navigating non-optimized processes. When the CRM experience is clunky, difficult for sellers to find what they need, not aligned to their sales process, or not reinforcing their training best practices, it slows them down, continuing to hinder the time they do have to sell, acting as a roadblock to their performance.
• Impact on the Buying Experience: Buyers are not thinking: Am I in a marketing, sales, or customer success experience? They see one singular brand experience. When a CRM is friction-heavy, sellers can show up to calls sounding unprepared, while buyers find themselves forced to repeat information they already gave to marketing, making the brand seem not in tune with their specific needs. According to Gartner, 77% of B2B buyers reporting that their last purchase was very complex or difficult, it shows that these experiences are happening more often than growth teams probably realize. Any internal friction added erodes their trust.

To empower sellers to achieve higher performance and deliver the best buying experience possible for customers, optimizing the seller experience in the CRM is a must.

Through the Seller’s Eyes: How Marketing Can Help

The buyer’s experience is everyone’s responsibility, and marketers can play a pivotal role in helping to improve the seller experience. For marketers, when the CRM is aligned to core sales processes and optimized to how sellers actually work, it makes it easier to collaborate, streamlines the marketing to sales handoff, and ensures fewer leads fall through the cracks and more of the right leads form meaningful connections with your brand.

To fully understand what a seller’s experience is in the CRM, the strategy needs to be approached from the seller’s perspective and knowing what matters to them.

To a seller, more data does not always mean more value. When a lead hits their queue, they are looking for clarity on two simple questions: Who are you, and what should we be talking about?

Marketing can significantly improve the seller experience by shifting focus from data quantity to context quality. Instead of throwing more data over the wall, marketing should provide the connective tissue that tells the buyer’s story. This includes:

• Prioritization: Is this a “hot” hand-raiser or someone in an explorative phase?
• Relevant context: What specific content did they consume? Knowing if a prospect looked at a pricing sheet versus a top-of-funnel blog post changes the entire sales approach.
• Laser-focused data: Provide only the key data points needed to frame a strategic conversation rather than overwhelming the seller with noise.

Having a conversation with sales to understand what questions they are asking themselves when a lead comes through, how they prioritize follow-up, and how they are gathering resources and data to create a strategy that will guide future sales conversations can help the marketing team focus on the right data when passing over leads and collaborating with sales to improve the seller experience.

A Strategic Approach to a Better CRM Experience

Aside from the initiatives that marketing can take, optimizing the seller experience in the CRM requires a mindset shift around how the technology is approached. Is it only seen as a database for sellers to enter information about their deals for reporting and forecasting, or is it seen as a powerful productivity engine that can support sellers in their sales process: arming them with insights for impactful conversations, streamlining and automating mundane admin tasks, and reinforcing sales training best practices?  

As Siso Ntuli, Senior Engagement Manager at Sercante, puts it: “The goal isn’t just to generate numbers. It’s to facilitate meaningful conversations”.

To turn your CRM into a growth accelerator, teams should take the following strategic steps:

1. Map the processes: Outline every step of the sales process alongside the buying process to see how it currently aligns with your CRM setup to see where there is misalignment.
2. Spot the silos: Identify swivel-chair work: tasks that force sellers out of the CRM and into spreadsheets or disparate systems.
3. Identify opportunities for AI & automation: When thinking through the steps in the sales process, highlight the repetitive and mundane tasks that could be streamlined with AI and automation. This can free up time and brainpower for sellers, so they can focus more on the customer.
4. Approach with a customer-centric mindset: As the team considers what improvements could be made to the CRM for the seller’s experience, ask: What will the end experience feel like to the buyer? Keeping this in mind will guide CRM optimization initiatives to be designed not just for internal processes, but for the experience the buyer expects.  

Shifting the mindset to approach the CRM as a system that can be a revenue driver rather than a roadblock for sellers, and keeping the buyer’s experience at the forefront, is the beginning of optimizing the CRM. The next step is understanding the current state of the CRM seller experience.

The CRM Seller Experience Scorecard

Getting a baseline from your sales team on what their experience and sentiment are with the CRM allows teams to identify in which areas they may want to improve first. 

Ntuli introduced the CRM Seller Experience Scorecard to evaluate the CRM across five key criteria:

• Level of Adoption: Is the system easy to use, or do sellers dread logging in?
• Level of Data Visibility: Is the must-have data readily available at their fingertips?
• Level of Automation Use: Is automation being used to eliminate manual tasks?
• Amount of Manual Data Entry: How much manual data entry is being done?
• Data Reliability: Do sellers trust the data in the CRM?

Each area is rated on a scale of 1 – 10. Anything from 1 – 4 is the sign of a roadblock. Anything from 8 – 10 is considered optimized.

Download the CRM Seller Experience Scorecard to do this exercise with your team.

Any area that is identified as a roadblock shows teams where they might want to focus first. To ensure CRM optimizations are effective, Sercante’s Strategy Director, Jenna Packard, and Change Enablement Director, Debra Engels, recommend using a phased roadmap that considers the level of impact on the business, the level of effort to implement, and the effect it would have on the people involved. Tune into Part VI: Tech That Grows With You (Not Against You), of the Built to Buy series to hear their approach.

A CRM Seller Experience That Drives Growth

A CRM that works against your sellers is a CRM that causes friction for your buyers. When sales can easily get what they need in the CRM, spend less time and brainpower on mundane tasks, be supported with reinforced training, and access key insights to have meaningful conversations, they have a seller experience in the CRM that supports meaningful conversations, building real connections that drive lasting growth. Giving today’s buyers the experience they expect.

Clunky handoffs between marketing, sales, and customer success are one of the most common ways teams lose momentum, drop leads, and tank trust—costing you customers. Whether it’s a hot prospect that never makes it into a rep’s queue or a new customer who has to re-explain everything they shared in discovery, these gaps compound. Which is why aligning sales, marketing, and customer success for seamless handoffs is so critical to delivering the smooth journeys today’s buyers expect.

The Sercante team shared their insights about how to approach aligning across teams for efficient transitions in Part II, Stop Dropping the Baton: Fix Your Handoffs, of our series, Built to Buy Designing the B2B Journeys Your Buyers Actually Want. The highlights from the conversation are below. Watch the full episode to get all the details.

Clunky handoffs are stunting your growth

When a buyer is easily transitioned from one department to the next, it breaks down their trust in your business. This loss of trust ultimately hurts the longevity of their potential relationship with you, impacting customer lifetime value before it has a chance to grow.

Other statistics show the impact on revenue when the teams don’t have strong cross-team collaboration for smooth handoffs.

• 10%+ of annual revenue is lost due to poor cross-team alignment (Demandbase)
• 70%+ of leads are wasted because of delayed response times (Credofy)
• It’s 5x cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one (Forbes)—yet many teams fumble the transition from sales to customer success, weakening loyalty and shrinking lifetime value.

You have probably seen the above statistics before, so why does this matter now? In today’s modern era, buyer expectations are higher than ever. People don’t have the patience anymore to wait around to be followed up with, repeat themselves over and over, and if they feel like a company isn’t in sync with them, they’ll move on to the next option. 80% of buyers say that the customer experience is as important as the product itself (cropink.com, 2025), while 77% of buyers said that their last purchase was very complex or difficult (Gartner). 

Therefore, creating stronger alignment and fixing your handoffs isn’t something that can be ignored.

Approaching alignment with a customer-first mindset

Approach these conversations through a customer-first lens. Think about it, if you were your buyer, what does the journey feel like today? What could be done to make it better? Answering these questions will help to focus your marketing, sales, and customer success teams around the same outcome: a seamless buying process. As you identify your areas of opportunity, write them down, and then soon you’ll be able to start digging into the customer lifecycle and the processes happening internally.

In Part I, Walk Your Funnel Like a Customer, of the series, the Sercante team shared their expertise on how to approach this exercise and then map your customer lifecycle to think about how you can define your stages, establish who owns what, improve data visibility, and create feedback loops.

Walk your funnel like a customer.
Take one of your latest customers and look at every touchpoint they had with you. How long did it take before they were followed up with? Were they waiting at all? At any point was the handoff clunky? Write it down and you’ll most likely find a few areas for improvement.

Map your stages and define ownership of each stage
Internally, what are all the stages of the customer lifecycle? Who’s responsible for what? What’s the entry and exit criteria for each stage? What happens during the transition? Make it clear.

Get the right data in front of the right people.
Visibility is everything. If customer success can’t see sales notes, or sales can’t see marketing engagement, your buyer is repeating themselves.

Build feedback loops into your process.
Alignment isn’t one and done. Create recurring meetings and shared reporting to stay in sync and fix issues before they grow.

Establishing this customer-first lens and starting to map your customer lifecycle helps to set your team up for success for the deep-dive alignment conversations throughout the different areas of the funnel.

From marketing to sales: clarify expectations with an SLA

There are several aspects that go into having strong cross-team collaboration across marketing and sales: accountability, trust, shared definitions, metrics, and reports. It can be overwhelming when looking at it as a whole. Therefore, one of the best ways to get started, as Angelica Cabral said, “Put it on paper.”

That’s where a Service Level Agreement (SLA) comes in. This doc helps teams define shared definitions, response expectations, and metrics for success. It doesn’t have to be fancy. But it does have to be clear.

Here are a few guiding questions to get started:

• How do we define a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)? A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?
• What triggers the lead handoff from marketing to sales?
• What will marketing and sales do during the handoff?
• What’s the expected response time from sales once a lead is handed off?
• How many touches should sales make?
• What metrics are both teams tracking (e.g., conversion rates, speed to lead)?
• Where will shared reports live? How often will we review them?

You can use Sercante’s SLA planner to help organize all your thoughts and use that as a base for starting to build your roadmap.

From sales to customer success: it’s a hand-hold

The customer lifespan doesn’t end at conversion. As a result, the collaboration between sales and customer success should act more “like a hand-hold” as Sara Hernandez put it, rather than a hand-off, to continue to grow the customer relationship.

To keep the experience connected, similar to the SLA exercise, the Sercante team shared the Post-Conversion Customer Alignment Guide that your teams can use to help approach the critical alignment conversations of how you’ll continue to coordinate in sync as the buyer converts.

Here are some guiding questions to get started:

• What information needs to be shared from sales to customer success and vice versa?
• What is the ideal timeframe to bring customer success into the loop?
• Where should the deal context live (and how do we keep it updated)?
• What KPIs are we tracking across sales and customer success (e.g., retention, upsell, NPS)?
• How often are we meeting to review customer progress?

Having these conversations gives your team a starting point to understand where your gaps are, where you may already be aligned, and how you can start making improvements to deliver a better buyer experience.

Don’t stop at the planning phase

A word of caution to keep in mind is: after your teams have these alignment conversations and document everything, your alignment strategy then needs to be executed. According to the 2025 Trilliad Sustainable Growth Study, where 350+ senior B2B go-to-market leaders were interviewed, 1 in 3 admit that their alignment stops at the planning phase.

Without actually executing your alignment strategy, change won’t happen, and your buyer will continue to feel clunky handoffs in the buying process.

Therefore, after you have your alignment strategy all set, take the next step and bring it into your technology, the systems that your go-to-market teams use every day, such as your CRM and marketing automation systems, to ensure that your SLA and Post-Conversion Alignment plans actually get put into practice for sustained alignment.

Seamless handoffs lead to scalable growth

At the end of the day, this isn’t just about process hygiene. It’s about the full experience your customer has with your brand and whether they choose to keep investing in that relationship.

By improving your internal handoffs, you can:

• Deliver the buyer experience, your buyers actually want
• Increase retention, loyalty, and customer lifetime value
• Reduce lead leakage and missed opportunities
• Strengthen cross-functional trust and accountability
• And make it a whole lot easier to hit those revenue targets

Because when your teams are aligned, your buyer feels it. The experience is smoother. The trust is stronger. And the results? They start compounding. 

To bring in an expert resource and a strategic partner to help put your alignment goals in motion and build scalable processes that deliver seamless customer experiences, reach out to the Sercante team. We’ve helped thousands of teams succeed and bridge the gap between vision and reality for buyer experiences that build real connections and drive lasting growth.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed with AI at your organization, you’re not alone. In fact, during our recent webinar, AI Roadmap: The Strategy to Drive Growth with AI, 85% of attendees said they were either leading or supporting AI initiatives at their organization. And 70% of them admitted they had more questions than answers. Therefore, we’re sharing our proven approach for creating an AI roadmap that results in meaningful impact, to be a guide for growth leaders who are navigating AI for their organizations.

Why an AI roadmap matters

Just like any other solution, implementing AI without a set strategy and a plan for how it will be used, the goal you’re after, the dependencies to consider, and enablement for your team, is only going to hold you back from maximizing its value. If anything, diving in without a strategy will most likely highlight your gaps in processes, data, and alignment.

According to RAND, 80% of AI projects fail due to a misalignment of the problem being solved, not having adequate data, or a lack of infrastructure and readiness. These causes for failure can be avoided if teams take the time up front to think through their strategy. As the CMO of Mogli, Christina Scarmeas, shared from her episode, Using AI & Agentforce to Make it Easier to Text on Salesforce (Watch here), “The biggest thing that we learned was it’s okay to take a crawl, walk, run approach…if you put that infrastructure together and actually have a team that’s dedicated to the strategy behind [AI], the results come fast.”

Therefore, when navigating AI and rolling it out in your organization, don’t skip the important step of defining your strategy and building your roadmap. When considering how to start thinking through your strategy for AI, use the steps below from our proven approach to get started.

And if you’re ready to take action to start creating your customized AI roadmap with the guidance from our experts, check out our AI Workshop: Building Your Roadmap for Real Impact.

The Proven Approach to Create Your AI Roadmap

When thinking through your strategy for how to get started with AI, you want to start with your use cases and the goals you want to accomplish. Then, using your use cases and goals as the foundation allows you to tie to the business value and consider the data needed, the dependencies, and the impact it will have on your people for change management, so your first step is to frame your vision.

Start with the vision

To get the ideas started, think about your team’s daily workflows. Where are the friction points in their day? What repetitive tasks are slowing people down? Where is your time being taken, or where are you missing opportunities? That can start to highlight a few efficiency gains you could get from implementing AI for internal use cases.

Most importantly, you also want to think about your customer journey. Where are the friction points for the customer? What transition points could be made more seamless if AI were used? Taking this customer-centric approach will then highlight use cases where AI could be deployed for externally facing engagements.

As you identify your use cases, start defining the goals you want to accomplish. For example, if you implement AI to assist with lead qualification, what is the desired result you want to come out of that? What is the problem being solved, and what will success look like?

Then combine everything into one vision statement. The vision statement should capture:

• WHO: The people involved who will benefit from the implementation
• WHAT: The capabilities that will be added to your organization
• WHY: The impact that is expected as a result

This is the most critical step, and leaders who have started down this path of approaching AI for their organization agree. The Director of Marketing Innovation & Technology at Zebra Technologies, Johanna Lehner, shared on her episode, Future-Proofing Technology Through Impact-Driven Use Cases (Watch here), that“The use case is the most important thing you want to define…so that you’re thinking about what that process looks like in order to meet that goal or accomplish that use case in the most efficient and effective way possible. I would say that’s the most important thing, everything else should follow and be aligned with those goals that you’re trying to accomplish with the tool.”

Your vision becomes your north star that guides your team through the rest of the AI roadmap process.

Anchor it to the business value

This is where we shift from “wouldn’t it be cool if…” to “here’s why it matters.” For every use case you consider, think about what value it would add to your organization. Does it drive revenue? Improve customer satisfaction? Shorten the sales cycle? Some use cases will be mission-critical, while others might be helpful but not game-changing. For each use case, frame if it would be a high, medium, or low level of value. 

• High: Critical to the organization’s strategic goals
• Medium: Important and contributes to the organization’s goals
• Low: Has a minimal direct impact on the organization’s strategic goals, financial performance, or overall operations

Framing the level of business value will help guide the team’s decision-making later when choosing which use cases to prioritize first. But, in addition to the level of business value, you also have to consider the level of impact on your people.

Evaluating the impact on your people

Let’s be clear: AI is a people thing. Yes, it’s tech. But adopting it requires real humans to shift how they work. That means you need to map the impact. Will an initiative completely overhaul someone’s role? Or just take a few manual tasks off their plate? The more disruption, the more intentional you need to be about change enablement. Low-impact projects might require just a little training. High-impact ones? Those need a communication plan, champions, and a solid support structure. Therefore, for each use case, you’ll also want to define the level of impact on your people.

• High: Many roles are impacted, many processes will change, and roles will be redesigned
• Medium: Some roles are impacted, some processes will change, and roles might change slightly
• Low: Very few roles are impacted, minimal process changes, and no role restructuring will be needed

As you consider the level of business value and how your people will be affected by the AI solution implemented, this thought process will highlight the level of effort that would be required for rollout. This is where finding the ideal sweet spot comes in for all three when considering which use cases to prioritize first on your roadmap.

Finding your sweet spot

Every use case you explore should be evaluated based on three things: the value it delivers, the impact on your people, and the level of effort it will take to implement. Think of this like a chart where you’re looking for where the ideal points intersect. The sweet spot with medium to high business value, relatively low people disruption, and feasible to get off the ground. We’ve seen many organizations start with internal processes to get some efficiency gains as a starting proof of concept. However, these small efficiency wins are not to be overlooked as they add up to greater impact and make the customer experience feel that much more seamless.  experience feel that much more seamless. 

For example, Advanta Health partnered with Sercante to implement Agentforce to help scale their member services team and address the needs of their growing customer base. The solution surfaced answers to FAQs faster, using their Knowledge articles, assisting the service team, and cutting down on their handle time, while making responses more consistent across the board. As a result, members reaching out with inquiries experience a more streamlined engagement that gets them the answers to their questions faster.

Therefore, when considering which use cases to start with first on your roadmap, use the “sweet spot” to guide you, and don’t underestimate the impact that can come from small efficiency gains. 

Once you start to get an idea of the use cases you might want to start with, based on where they land among the level of business value, people impact, and effort to deploy, the other important piece you need to consider, which will impact your level of effort, is your dependencies.

Map your dependencies

This is the part of the roadmap where things can get messy if you don’t slow down and look under the hood. Before rolling out anything new, you need to assess what it’s going to take to support it. Do your systems talk to each other? Is your data accessible and clean? Do you have a governance structure in place? Do your people have time and capacity to manage the shift? These aren’t roadblocks—they’re flags that help you build smarter. Ignoring them can cause your AI project to fail.

Here are some starting questions to ask yourself to help identify your dependencies:

Technology

• What technologies do you already have?
• Do you have gaps in technology needs based on the use cases?
• What will it take to close these gaps?

Data

• What data will AI need access to?
• Do you have data sources that are not integrated today?
• Do you have data quality issues?

People

• What teams/roles are impacted by these AI use cases?
• What amount of time will AI unlock for these teams?  What can they focus on instead?

As you think through the dependencies for each use case, this can help give you a clearer idea of the level of effort it would take and then better inform which use cases truly fall in the sweet spot.

Then last, but certainly not least, if you didn’t already think through the metrics you’ll use to measure success when defining your goals in the first step, this is where you’ll want to do that.

Define your success metrics

If you want to prove AI is working, you need to measure it. Tie every use case to a clear outcome. That might be lead conversion, campaign ROI, sales cycle length, or something else entirely. Pick metrics that matter to your business and are realistically measurable. And don’t wait until you’ve rolled something out to start tracking. Get benchmarks in place now so you can show progress early and often.

A final word of wisdom

The final and last piece of wisdom when thinking about your approach to AI is your unique AI path is the only one that matters. Now is not the time to be a copycat with AI. The chatter I keep hearing is, “What are other companies doing? What are their use cases?  How quickly can we implement those use cases at our organization?” And frankly, it feels dangerous.

Why? Because the last decade has left every single company with a unique technological fingerprint. We all have our own way of working, our own internal processes, and a pile of tech debt and data quality issues to go along with it.

Thinking you can just copy someone else’s AI strategy is like trying to replicate a recipe with totally different ingredients. The output is destined to be different. The truth is, the successful path isn’t about looking outward. It’s about looking inward.

Therefore, when thinking through your AI strategy, don’t be so concerned about what everyone else is doing, focus on what will drive value for your customers and your business.

Getting started on your AI Roadmap

Creating an AI roadmap is about solving real problems in a way that supports your people, your business goals, and your vision. It is your guide to rolling out a successful AI solution that empowers your people to focus on the most important initiatives and deliver a seamless experience for your customers.
If you’re ready to dive in to start building your AI roadmap and would like an expert guide to take you through step by step, of defining your vision and use cases and creating your prioritized roadmap, reach out to the Sercante team. We’ve helped many organizations get on the right path to maximizing AI for their organization and driving meaningful business impact with our AI Roadmap offering.