Francesca Roche sits down with Seth Marrs, Chief Strategy Officer at Sandler, part of Trilliad’s Sales Performance Solutions service line, to discuss how organizations can stop sales teams from hurting customer experience by improving what happens inside live buyer conversations.
For CX leaders, the first sales call is often where the customer relationship starts to either build trust or create problems that customer success teams must solve later.
Maars says sellers are naturally focused on winning business, but that pressure can lead to promises that are difficult to deliver once the deal moves into implementation.
He explained:
“If you don’t have the right expectations up front, then the chances of you being successful when you’re actually implementing drop significantly.”
That creates a serious challenge for organizations trying to improve customer experience, because the customer may not feel the impact of a misaligned sales promise until much later in the journey.
Maars points to one of the most common issues: buyers hear “all the things that it can do that are debatable or that don’t work or that are maybe stretching the truth of what it can be.”
For CX teams, that matters because the gap between what a customer expected and what they receive can quickly become a trust issue, a churn risk, and a source of friction across the relationship.
A key theme in the interview is the difference between what sellers know in theory and how they behave when they are actually speaking to a customer.
Maars says organizations need to evaluate sellers based on “the actual conversations you have with your customers,” because that is where training, methodology, and customer impact become visible.
He also highlights coaching as a major opportunity for sales leaders who want to improve both revenue performance and customer outcomes.
He notes:
“The real value comes from coaching and understanding what to coach.”
Maars adds that leaders should focus human coaching on higher-order skills while using AI to support base-level improvement.
That visibility can also help sales, customer success, and CX teams stay aligned around what was promised, what was discussed, and what the customer now expects.
Maars says “alignment’s never been more possible,” but the data layer behind those customer interactions is becoming the glue that helps teams understand what happened before, during, and after the sale.
As sales and customer success roles continue to overlap, the interview explores why organizations need stronger links between sales performance and customer experience if they want to build relationships that last.
