Our marketing and customer success departments are constantly arguing over who owns customer retention campaigns, leading to duplicated work and missed targets. How do we restructure these seats on our Accountability Chart to eliminate this friction and create clear accountability for customer lifetime value?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Friction between marketing and customer success over customer retention is a classic sign of overlapping accountabilities on your Accountability Chart. When two departments are responsible for the same outcome, nobody is actually accountable, which leads to wasted resources and poor client experiences.

To resolve this, you must clarify where customer lifetime value is owned. In most subscription or service models, marketing is responsible for generating new leads and driving early stage awareness, while customer success is responsible for onboarding, retention, and account expansion. If you want to run an efficient, high margin operation, you need to draw a sharp line between these functions on your chart.

Create a dedicated Customer Retention seat under the Customer Success Director. The roles for this seat should include designing and executing lifecycle campaigns, managing upsell programs, and tracking customer health scores. The marketing team's role is then limited to providing brand assets and copy support, but the ownership of the campaign's success belongs entirely to the retention seat. By separating these roles on your Accountability Chart, you eliminate the friction and ensure that a single leader is accountable for keeping your clients happy.