When Collaboration Helps—Until It Hurts: Rethinking Sales–Service Dynamics

Calibrating Sales and Customer Service Collaboration for Better Performance

In B2B environments, sales and customer service teams often support the same clients. Both play a critical role in building trust, ensuring continuity, and responding to client needs.

But how often do they truly operate in sync—and what gets missed when they don’t? Or equally important, what happens when they collaborate too much?

Even before the rise of hybrid work and increasingly customer-centric ecosystems, a 2018 study published in the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management (Schrock et al., via Taylor & Francis) offered an important insight:

collaboration between sales and customer service isn’t just a question of more or less—it’s a question of how much is just right.

The Inverted U-Shaped Effect

The study found that the relationship between sales performance and internal collaboration follows an inverted U-shape when it comes to sales–customer service ties.

Sales performance improves as the connection between the two functions increases—but only up to a point. Beyond that optimal level, performance begins to decline.

Interpreting the Findings: What We See in the Field

While the study doesn’t pinpoint causes, its data suggests that excessive service collaboration may divert sales reps from high-value activities—a pattern we’ve observed in practice.

In simple terms:

• Too few connections often lead to siloed thinking. Sales misses out on the frontline insights that CSRs hear every day—valuable feedback about shifting client expectations, pain points, and those small but decisive moments where trust is built or lost.

• Too many connections, on the other hand, can blur the lines between roles. Salespeople risk becoming overly entangled in operational or service-related matters, which can dilute their strategic focus and, more subtly, weaken their authority in negotiations.

In our experience, the highest-performing teams are those where sales reps maintain a broad network of light-touch ties with customer service—enough to stay aligned and informed, without getting drawn into day-to-day service execution.

What the Sweet Spot Looks Like in Practice

This "light-touch" approach to collaboration is not about distance—it's about deliberate design.

The goal is sustained visibility without constant involvement. Practically speaking, this might include:

• Joint preparation before key client meetings (but not every customer email)

• Debriefs after service escalations (without micromanaging the follow-up)

• Shared dashboards or feedback loops that maintain alignment

• Quarterly cross-functional workshops or reviews (rather than weekly syncs)

At the heart of this model is the idea of calibration. Collaboration should support client success and sales performance—not overwhelm it.

Different Functions, Different Rhythms

One of the most striking insights from the study is how collaboration dynamics vary across functions. While sales–customer service ties followed an inverted U-shape, the pattern with marketing was different—and equally revealing.

Sales–marketing collaboration showed a U-shaped effect: performance was highest not with moderate engagement, but at the extremes—either very few or very deep ties.

Surprisingly, both limited interaction and deep, strategic collaboration outperformed in-between levels of engagement.

In practice, we see strong sales–marketing relationships take shape through:

• Co-developing account strategies

• Aligning on messaging and positioning

• Executing joint campaigns with clear ownership

The highest sales growth, according to the study, was achieved by reps who combined:

• A broad, shallow network of ties with customer service, and

• A narrow, deep set of ties with marketing

  
  

This contrast underscores a crucial point: effective cross-functional collaboration is not one-size-fits-all. Different functions demand different rhythms—and the most effective sales organisations design those rhythms with intent.

The Leadership Question

For sales leaders, this insight is more than theoretical. It raises a practical, strategic question:

Are your team’s cross-functional relationships helping them sell smarter—or just adding noise to their day?

The answer often lies in whether you're optimising for connection quantity or connection quality—and understanding which approach is right for each function.

In high-performing teams, alignment isn’t overlap—it’s intentional rhythm. And that rhythm looks different for every function.

A Note on Context

The referenced study (Schrock et al., 2018) was conducted within a B2B chemical manufacturing environment, using objective sales performance data. While we don’t claim universal causality, the dynamics it highlights offer valuable insight into cross-functional collaboration across many sales-driven organisations—particularly those operating in complex, relationship-based markets.