Cross-Functional Teams: A Blueprint for Strategic Customer Engagement

By Gordon Galzerano, President & CEO, SAMA

Organizations today often face a paradox: they pride themselves on being customer-centric while simultaneously operating in silos that hinder collaboration. When companies first come to SAMA, they often express excitement about joining our membership — even as they acknowledged internal divisions. This scenario is common across industries, and overcoming it requires dismantling barriers through three key best practices — or “big rocks”:

1. Cross-team planning around the most important customers or clients you serve.
2. Having a strategic or client account manager adopt a true general manager mindset. In other words, they act as the quarterback within their organization, leading a cross-functional coalition to engage their executive sponsor — all in service of the customer or client.
3. How clients recognize value through the innovation they aim to advance, and how the supplier or company remains relevant to that innovation by bringing new streams of value.

These three best practices, or “big rocks,” are central to what we do in program assessments. If you consider the five main categories in our program assessment model — where we benchmark across companies and industries — these categories are the predictors of success.

SAMA Program Assessment Model

1. C-level and executive sponsorship
2. Account selection or deselection and segmentation: Who belongs in our strategic account program?
3. Internal organization: Focusing on internal design, structure, and alignment.
4. Strategic customer alignment and relationship management: How we engage, with customers and partners.
5. The playbook: What plays are we running and how are those reflected in the strategic account planning and execution process?

The three big rocks I mentioned really focus on the bottom three aspects of the SAMA program assessment model. These factors are the predictors that ultimately reveal where the real value comes from. That’s not to say the other two aren’t important — they are, and I’ll refer to executive sponsorship as we go.

Looking at the first rock: like most companies, we have various functions — sales, solutions, marketing, advisory project teams, engineering — very typical. What’s also typical is that these functions often work somewhat autonomously. They don’t always collaborate intentionally, either because of how they’re organized, how they’re measured, or how they prioritize tasks. Unfortunately, this can create stranded value that could otherwise benefit the customer if teams worked together and innovated collaboratively. Good ideas emerge from that synergy. But if they’re siloed, they don’t know what they don’t know — the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

Best practice number one is learning how to intentionally create cross-functional, interdisciplinary teams — bringing together the best and brightest to serve your top-tier customers or clients: your strategic customers. It’s not just about grouping people together; it’s about doing so with purpose, aligning them around common objectives, common outcomes, and shared measurements such as KPIs and MBOs. It’s measurable, accountable, and intentional. That’s the most important aspect when it works — and works well.

Another key point, as I mentioned, is the executive sponsor or executive leader and their role in this process. Often, it’s not just about buying into the idea as an executive sponsor; it’s about being an integral part of it. You become a member of that cross-functional, interdisciplinary team in service of the strategic customer.

Typically, this approach translates into enhanced collaboration and increased efficiency for the company — particularly in resource-constrained environments. It often creates a situation where one plus one equals three. You gain efficiencies and effectiveness by working together more closely, leading to faster problem-solving and decision-making, along with improved innovation and creativity.

It also fosters agility and adaptability, because what’s true today may not be true tomorrow. How does the organization flex to support that client or customer? From the client’s perspective, it means higher-quality products and services because you’re bringing the best of your organization and capabilities to bear. You’re improving service delivery models where it makes sense. And, given one of SAMA’s mega trends around personalized experiences, you’re also creating an environment for customization and flexibility — which then leads to increased value, and ultimately, stronger relationships and stickiness for the customers and clients you serve.

Moving on to the second point — the SAM or client account manager adopting a general manager mindset. What they focus on daily falls into two key categories: client engagement and business strategy execution. These are distinct areas for obvious reasons. When you look at what “good” looks like, or a best practice, a SAM or client account manager should spend about 50 to 70% of their time with the customer. That implies the remaining 30 to 50% is dedicated to internal business strategy execution.

Customer or client engagement, breaks down into three key categories.

1. Relationship building: Identifying the customers on your radar, understanding the relationship you have with them, driving new ways of communicating and collaborating, and staying attuned to shifting needs so you can adapt accordingly.
2. Account management: Are they consuming the services you sold them? Are they getting value from the products, services, and solutions you provided? You need to stay on top of the experience they’re having today. Together, these two activities account for 20 to 30% of the total 50 to 70%, and they represent the “run-the-business” aspects.
3. Transforming the business: Engaging in strategic discussions with your customer or client about where the puck is going, what’s coming next, where they aim to innovate or differentiate, what their expectations are, and how you need to respond to create a new experience for them. If client leaders spend 10 to 15% of their time on these forward-looking conversations, that’s where real value emerges.

A key arrow in that quiver, particularly regarding executive sponsors or executive leaders supporting that client, is ensuring they are part of these strategic discussions. We don’t want executive sponsors fighting fires or dealing with tactical execution. We want them involved in conversations that help us expand up and across the organization, forging new relationships that are strategic in nature.

Shifting to the internal or business-strategy execution portion, which is 30 to 50% of their time, there are also three key components:

1. Internal coordination, which might occupy 10% to 20% of their time focused on that cross-functional, interdisciplinary team. Are we meeting objectives? Are we continuing to understand the customer’s needs and deliver value accordingly?
2. Bringing the strategy development discussions we just had with the customer back into the organization — communicating them and working through our interdisciplinary teams to create tangible actions.
3. Performance analysis: Are we meeting our company’s objectives in service of our clients? Are we hitting revenue and margin targets? Are we exceeding KPIs and MBOs where appropriate? This is essentially the performance management component of their role.

In most organizations, this is not the norm — it’s the aspirational state. I often tell leaders they’re accountable for helping their client leaders achieve this by removing barriers, eliminating redundant tasks, and automating processes so their teams can become more efficient. This frees up time to spend with the customers they serve.

The third “big rock” is how clients recognize value through innovation. At the core is how we conduct strategic account planning, but it’s not only about the plan itself — it’s about executing that plan. Equally important is the question of who owns it. Traditionally, we might say, “Well, the sales team leads this effort.” They’re the ones who ultimately develop the plan. In reality, though, if you’re building this model around cross-functional, interdisciplinary teams, everyone contributes to the strategic account planning process. We all bring the best of our organization to support where the customer wants to go.

Hence, when I talk about client-led innovation or co-creation, I mean truly understanding what they aim to accomplish during discovery — where they are today, where they want to go, and how our help can make a difference. This insight feeds into the strategic account planning process, which is then amplified by the cross-functional, interdisciplinary team to create a more robust, meaningful, and relevant plan that everyone can get behind and execute.

Another key best practice is not just having the cross-functional team contribute, but also inviting the customer and partners to participate at certain stages. Put simply, the more we know, the more accurately we can gauge our customer’s needs, priorities, and desired outcomes. That knowledge better positions us to create a plan that makes sense. We run the right plays at the right time, drive the right outcomes in the right way, and achieve better efficiency from our cross-functional teams in the process.

The final piece of the recipe for success is again the role of the executive sponsor or executive leader — not just signing off on the process, but actively participating. They’re involved in quarterly business reviews, they influence the cross-functional, interdisciplinary team, and they speak with the customer’s executives to ensure we truly understand their priorities and how we can be relevant to those outcomes. At the same time, the sponsor or executive leader removes internal barriers within their own organization to make sure the plan can come to fruition.

Of course, much depends on the customer, the complexity of their environment, the industries they support, and the outcomes they seek. It varies by company, often influenced by whether they operate in a seller-centric or buyer-centric industry. In a seller-centric industry, the company sits at the center of where the puck is going, so business naturally comes to them — they have more demand than they can handle due to technology, innovation, and transformation. In a buyer-centric environment, it’s much tougher. This is precisely why the strategic account planning and execution process is critical, ensuring it’s fit for purpose in either scenario.

What clients often want to know is: “What are the use cases relevant to my industry? What have you done with peers in my field? Beyond use cases, what lessons were learned — what should I be aware of as I build a case for change and a business case in my organization?” They’re looking for the “why” and the “how-to” behind the “what,” along with stories about where we’ve done this before with other clients, what it meant in terms of outcomes, and how it moved the needle for them.

I typically leave with three key calls to action around these best practices when we work with organizations at SAMA:

1. Create that one overarching strategy, which can then be implemented with the cross-functional, interdisciplinary team during the planning exercise.
2. Consider how you plan for and engage with your executive sponsor or executive leader assigned to your client. How do you involve them strategically to drive outcomes and open new doors?
3. Consider how you can foster a culture of innovation and co-creation within your organization by taking examples that have already proven successful and replicating them — sometimes in entirely different lines of business.

Make no mistake: in the current environment, you either disrupt or risk being disrupted. These best practices create differentiation and build customer stickiness by keeping you attuned to where they’re heading and what they’re doing. They enable agility and flexibility to respond as your clients’ needs evolve. Ultimately, it’s in every organization’s best interest to think, organize, and act this way, because it drives greater relevance with clients.