How to Break Down Silos Within Your Revenue Team: Playbook

Silos aren’t always obvious, but they can be costly.

They show up when work moves from one team to another, but the necessary context doesn’t move with it. A deal is closed, but the onboarding team doesn’t understand the nature of the client. A marketing campaign runs, but sales ignores the leads that came in. A contract is renewed, but no one told customer success that the account was at risk.

Often, these breakdowns are not a result of people not caring. It’s just that key details are getting lost in the shuffle. When everyone’s moving fast and without a clear handoff process, important signals slip through the cracks.

The result is fumbled handoffs, mixed signals, missed opportunities, and, ultimately, lost revenue.

We made this playbook for the people sitting in the middle of all this, including sales leaders, customer success managers, marketing and ops owners. The goal is to help create better shared systems across teams.

What are silos?

But first, let’s start with the basics.

Silos in business happen when teams start operating separately from each other, each from their own playbook, with their own goals, tools, and priorities.

On a revenue team, this usually shows up when sales, marketing, and customer success aren’t aligned, aren’t communicating properly, and aren’t sharing the proper context with each other throughout the buyer funnel. This leads to gaps in communication, disjointed workflows, and data silos (fragments of important information stuck inside different systems or teams).

And this can be a silent-but-deadly problem for businesses. Data silos can be problematic for businesses because they disrupt efficiency, create duplicate work, and block collaboration, which are all fundamental to having a healthy revenue team.

And a large part of this has to do with the technology each team is using.

Where and why silos happen

Let’s get specific. These four collaboration points are where silos most often show up. Chances are you’re currently suffering from one of these or have seen one of these play out in your company.

1. Sales → CS / Implementation

Reps close the deal. CS opens the ticket. But somewhere in between, context dies.

What breaks down:

• Client goals aren’t captured or shared
• CS teams spend week one wondering “What did the rep promise?”
• Onboarding feels reactive, not intentional
• Expansion opportunities are missed because CS lacks commercial context

Symptoms:

• “I didn’t realize this part of our product was crucial to their business goals.”
• “I didn’t know they were expecting X by next week.”
• “Why are we talking to the same account twice with different messaging?”
• “The renewal conversation started with ‘Who are you?’”

2. Sales ↔ Marketing

Marketing runs campaigns, brings in leads, and sales doesn’t use them or want them.

What breaks down:

• Marketing sends leads, but sales thinks they’re junk
• Marketing brings leads in with certain promises but sales doesn’t follow up with the same messaging
• Marketing creates sales enablement materials but sales doesn’t want to use them
• Sales doesn’t follow up fast enough and marketing stops investing
• There’s no shared visibility on campaign performance post-MQL

Symptoms:

• “We ran a killer campaign and no one touched the leads.”
• “Marketing doesn’t know what a qualified lead really looks like.”
• “Sales keeps going rogue with messaging so what’s the point of enablement?”

3. CS ↔ Finance / Billing

Often overlooked, this breakdown in proper communication is one of the most damaging when mishandled.

What breaks down:

• Inconsistent subscription info
• CS and finance teams have different sources of truth for contract terms
• Refunds, overages, and adjustments happen without context

Symptoms:

• “They said they were on quarterly terms, so why did we invoice annually?”
• “No one told us they were pausing next month.”
• “Finance renewed an account that CS flagged as churning.”

4. Sales ↔ Leadership

This one’s about trust and transparency. Execs don’t just want numbers, they want to know whether the numbers are real.

What breaks down:

• The wrong metrics are shared with leadership
• Pipeline is padded or sandbagged
• There’s no shared definition of forecast stages
• Strategy is built on assumptions reps don’t agree with

Symptoms:

• “Why did this deal vanish from the forecast overnight?”
• “That number looks great, but what’s the quality behind it?”
• “Leadership is chasing ARR targets that don’t reflect reality.”

How to avoid fumbling the handoff

Did any of the above look familiar? Well, that could be because your teams are lacking a handoff process that is defined, succinct, and mandatory.

As Mike Villalobos explains in The Bottom Line: “The health and hygiene of [the CRM] is contingent on the last person passing the baton. So you make it a baton system where I can’t move forward unless you hand me the baton in the right manner.”

A handoff is more than a status update. It’s the transfer of context, ownership, and expectation and it’s the most common place where momentum dies.

Here’s what a bad handoff sounds like:

• “I think CS has it.”
• “Did we tell them about the custom terms?”
• “Wait, who’s responsible for next steps?”

Let’s fix these.

1. Sales → CS / Implementation

What to transfer:

• Commercial context (who signed, why they bought, key stakeholders)
• Any promises or timeline sensitivities
• Deal risks or open threads
• Key documents (proposal, SOW, contract)

How to run it:

• Use a “Closeout Handoff” board in monday CRM with required fields
• Automate a kickoff doc creation after the deal is won
• Include a 15-min sync if any red flags are presentPro tip: Add a “Rep Notes” field inside the CRM that follows the deal into onboarding tasks. Not everything needs to be structured. Sometimes nuance travels best as a quick sentence.

2. Marketing → Sales

What to transfer:

• Campaign messaging, source, and CTAs
• Lead activity history
• ICP match data (if applicable)
• Recommended first touch (email or talk track)

How to run it:

• Bundle leads into pre-qualified “lead packages”
• Pair with a video explaining the campaign’s intent and nuances
• Log all lead actions in monday CRM, not just marketing automation tools

Pro tip: Create a shared lead scoreboard where sales can quickly mark leads as “hot,” “meh,” or “not relevant.” This will lead to quality feedback loops instead of finger-pointing.

3. CS → Finance

What to transfer:

• Renewal/expansion forecast
• Overall sentiment, like account health or any flagged risks
• Changes in scope, usage, or promised deliverables
• Timing preferences for invoicing

How to run it:

• Schedule a monthly review of upcoming renewals
• Use a shared monday CRM board filtered by renewal window
• Include a notes section specifically for “Finance context”

Pro tip: A simple “Churn Risk” column (green/yellow/red) can save thousands in billing mistakes or awkward renewals.

4. Sales → Leadership

What to transfer:

• Forecast summary by stage
• High-risk/high-impact deal notes
• Deal velocity trends (especially if slipping)
• Team sentiment (what’s working, what’s dragging)

How to run it:

• Weekly forecast review board filtered by “confidence level”
• Tag deals with specific blockers (procurement, legal, no champion)
• Include a field for “Leadership Ask” — what reps need to move it forward

Pro tip: Don’t overcomplicate. One well-maintained CRM dashboard with tight filters beats 20 slides in a pipeline review deck.

Sharing the metrics that matter

Silos thrive in ambiguity. If every team tracks different KPIs or interprets the same ones differently, you’ll always be chasing consensus, and you won’t ever know what’s actually important.

What doesn’t work:

• Sales measures pipeline velocity, CS measures NPS, and neither connects to revenue
• Marketing reports MQLs, but no one ties them to closed deals
• Leadership gets five different forecasts depending on who they ask

Metrics that matter across teams:

How to align:

• Use shared dashboards where everyone sees the same data
• Schedule monthly KPI reviews that only review metrics that impact more than one team
• Create a “Revenue Metrics Map” inside monday CRM that shows where each KPI comes from, how it’s tracked, and who owns it

Pro tip: Don’t overbuild from the outset. Start with 2–3 metrics that naturally cross departments and create rituals around them.

Creating rituals to prevent silos

Even with clean data and good intentions, alignment breaks without rhythm. Rituals keep teams honest, coordinated, and human.

Ritual #1: Weekly revenue sync

Attendees: Sales, CS, Marketing, Finance
Duration: 30 minutes
Format:

• Quick wins
• Key accounts at risk
• Cross-team blockers
• Asks or decisions needed

Tools:

• monday CRM dashboard
• Metrics board
• Shared board view with filters by team/account stage
• Notes field for follow-ups, tagged by the owner

Ritual #2: Monthly cross-team retro

Purpose: Spot patterns before they become problems

Questions to answer:

• Where did we drop the ball?
• What handoff felt smooth?
• What do we wish we’d known sooner?

How to run it:

• Anonymous form before the meeting
• Use real account examples
• Rotate the facilitator (so it’s not always CS or Ops)

Ritual #3: Quarterly collaboration check-in

Audience: Team leads, managers, owners of cross-functional flows
Goal: Improve the process, not just the result

What to include:

• What’s changed in the business that affects workflows?
• Which rituals are still working? Which need a refresh?
• Are there tools we’ve outgrown or underused?

Pro tip: Treat this like a product team would treat a sprint retro and zoom out to adjust based on real usage and feedback.

How to kill shadow workflows without pissing people off

Not all silos are visible. Some live in the shadows: spreadsheets no one shares, Slack threads that become CRMs, custom templates passed down like folklore.

These workflows exist for a reason: they solve a local pain. But they usually create downstream confusion.

What shadow workflows look like:

• A sales tracker in someone’s Google Sheets because “the CRM’s too messy”
• A CS playbook saved in Notion but never linked in onboarding tasks
• Finance’s revenue model uses different close dates than the CRM
• A 10-step renewal workflow in someone’s head

Why they stick around:

• They work for the person using them
• They’re fast (for that person)
• They naturally evolved based on need and weren’t forced down anyone’s throats
• No one owns centralization
• Everyone’s too busy to fix what “kind of works”

How to fix them:

1. Start with visibility, not judgment
    → Ask: “What’s helping you do your job that no one else sees?”
   → Run a quick Shadow Workflow Audit (3-question form, shared doc)
2. Centralize one at a time
    → Move one tracker into monday CRM with automations
   → Turn a static doc into a shared board
   → Add permissions to reduce confusion, not create bottlenecks
3. Keep the creator involved
    → Most shadow workflows were created by someone trying to be helpful. Bring them into the transition and make their system part of the solution.
4. Don’t rush it
   → Some shadow workflows can be crucial to the team’s current success. Don’t move them out of the shadows until you have a surefire way to replace them.

Pro tip: In monday CRM, use custom item views to replicate the personal feel of a doc while keeping everything centralized and structured.

Changing the culture to support collaboration

You can build the workflows, the boards, the dashboards, and the perfect handoff process, but still hit friction. That’s because underneath every system is a set of assumptions, incentives, and habits.

If your teams believe:

• “I’ll get blamed if I flag a risk”
• “They’ll figure it out without me needing to communicate”
• “No one reads the notes anyway”
• “That’s their job, not mine”

…no amount of tech, processes, or templates will save you.

Signs of a siloed culture:

• Work is assigned, not co-owned
• Feedback is late or withheld
• People build “side systems” because they don’t trust the main one
• Wins are celebrated individually, not cross-functionally

How to shift it:

1. Model curiosity
    → Ask questions across teams: “What’s hard about your part of this?”
   → Default to transparency in decision-making
2. Reward visibility, not heroics
    → Give credit for process improvements and documentation
   → Highlight great handoffs, not just great deals
3. Tie metrics to shared outcomes
    → Instead of just “CSAT,” try: “Time to first success milestone”
   → Instead of “Leads generated,” look at “Revenue from campaign-driven accounts”
4. Cultivate cross-team bonds
    → In many companies, people in different teams barely know each other. Use group activities to build real connections and help teams understand what each other does and each other’s challenges.

Slow and steady wins the silo race

Fixing silos is less about launching an initiative and more about changing how teams work together. This is not done in one fell swoop. It’s changed habit by habit, week by week.

If you try to rebuild everything at once, it won’t land. The trick is to start where the pain is loudest and the fix is clearest.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to determine where to start:

Step 1: Pick a handoff

• Which transition causes the most confusion or delay?
• Where are the stakes high (churn, missed revenue, escalations)?

Step 2: Map the flow

• What info needs to move from team A → B?
• When does the handoff happen?
• Who owns “done”?

Step 3: Build a shared view

• Create a shared board in monday CRM
• Define the must-have fields
• Add 1 automation that closes a common gap (e.g., auto-assign owner)

Step 4: Review and refine

• Add a quick question to your next team sync: “What’s missing?”
• Update based on actual usage
• Rinse, repeat — then move to the next silo

Break silos and make world peace

Silos and team divisions don’t come from bad people or bad intent. They come from speed, scale, and survival mode. They come from employees doing their best with the processes they have.

But working in a siloed world doesn’t cut it. The teams that win in 2025 will be the ones who understand that collaboration is crucial to their infrastructure.

Use this playbook to strengthen your team’s collaboration skills one system, one habit, one team at a time.

You don’t need to wait for alignment. You can lead it.

BONUS: Included templates & starting points

You can recreate these inside monday CRM or adapt them to your own system. Each is designed to be copied, tested, and improved with real use.

1. Clean Closeout Sheet (Sales → CS)

Purpose: Transfer essential context post-deal to ensure smooth onboarding.

Format: Drop-down + free-text fields (monday board or form)

☑️ Account Name

☑️ Primary Buyer Persona(s)

☑️ Key Stakeholders (Names + Roles)

☑️ Buying Reason (short summary of the “why”)

☑️ Critical Timeline Info (go-live date, contract deadlines)

☑️ Promises Made (pricing, features, custom terms)

☑️ Risks Identified (budget, timeline, internal politics)

☑️ Notes for CS (tone, preferences, strategic goals)

☑️ Attachments: Proposal, Contract, SOW

☑️ Sales Rep Name + Handoff Date

Optional Automation:
When “Handoff Complete” is marked → auto-assign CS owner + trigger onboarding checklist.

2. Lead Intel Package (Marketing → Sales)

Purpose: Give SDRs/AEs a quick, structured snapshot of campaign-driven leads.

Format: Weekly bundle (Notion/GDoc/email), or embedded in CRM lead view

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🧩 Campaign Name

🧩 Lead Source (e.g. LinkedIn ad, webinar, content download)

🧩 Offer/CTA Presented

🧩 Why Now (intent signal or event-based trigger)

🧩 Recommended First Touch (copy block or talk track)

🧩 Lead Score (if applicable)

🧩 Ideal Persona Match (Y/N + why)

🧩 Notes from Marketing (performance trends, objections we saw)

🧩 Link to Campaign Creative / Landing Page

🧩 Link to Full Lead List

Optional Add-on:
Scorecard link — reps mark lead quality post-outreach: ✅ Hot | 😐 Meh | ❌ No fit

3. CS-to-Finance Renewal Tracker

Purpose: Ensure Finance gets contract context before renewal/invoicing.

Format: monday board or spreadsheet view by renewal month

📅 Account Name

📅 Renewal Date

📅 Contract Type (monthly / annual / custom)

📅 Expansion Potential (Y/N)

📅 Sentiment Score (Green / Yellow / Red)

📅 Risks or Notes (churn flags, usage issues, sentiment shifts)

📅 CS Owner

📅 Billing Notes (discounts, contract changes, special terms)

✅ Final Renewal Status (Confirmed / Paused / Pending Discussion)

Optional Workflow:
Color-code rows by sentiment; trigger finance review for Yellow/Red accounts 30 days pre-renewal.

4. Weekly Revenue Sync Agenda

Purpose: Keep sales, CS, marketing, and finance aligned in one fast, focused meeting.

Format: Template agenda + optional board/dashboard view

🗓️ WEEKLY REVENUE SYNC

📍 Duration: 30 mins

📍 Attendees: Sales lead, CS lead, Marketing lead, Finance/RevOps

—

🧩 1. Quick Wins (5 min)

– One win from each team

– Highlights from the week (closed deals, onboarding completed, great campaign)

🧩 2. At-Risk Accounts (10 min)

– CS shares any yellow/red accounts with risk tags

– Sales adds context if involved in expansion

– Finance reviews billing implications (if relevant)

🧩 3. Pipeline Review (5 min)

– Review top 3 deals (>$X or strategic)

– Highlight new blockers, legal delays, etc.

🧩 4. Cross-Team Blockers (5 min)

– Where are we stuck across teams?

– Any tech, data, process issues?

🧩 5. Asks + Next Steps (5 min)

– Any requests (e.g., campaign support, CS bandwidth, pricing input)

– Who owns each action before next week?

5. Shadow Workflow Audit Checklist

Purpose: Find and address processes happening outside the official system.

Format: Simple survey or audit worksheet to send to team leads

🔍 SHADOW WORKFLOW AUDIT

1. Are there any spreadsheets, docs, or templates you use regularly

that aren’t connected to our CRM/workflow tool?

☐ Yes

☐ No

➡ If yes, list them:

2. Do you manually track or report on anything for your team that

isn’t visible to others?

☐ Yes

☐ No

➡ If yes, describe briefly:

3. Are there important steps in your process that live in your head or that only a few people know how to do?

☐ Yes

☐ No

➡ If yes, list examples:

4. Is there anything you do in Slack/email that you wish were easier to track or share?

☐ Yes

☐ No

➡ If yes, list examples:

Optional Output:
Summarize in a doc/board → Prioritize top 3 to migrate into monday CRM boards or dashboards.

6. Silo Mapping Worksheet

Purpose: Visualize where collaboration breaks down between teams.

Format: Collaborative doc or whiteboard session

🔗 SILO MAPPING

STEP 1: List the key transitions in your revenue cycle

(e.g., Lead → Sales, Sales → CS, CS → Finance)

STEP 2: For each one, answer:

1. What information is handed off?
2. How is it currently transferred? (tool/process)
3. Who owns the handoff?
4. Where does it break down?
5. What happens when it does?
6. What would a better version look like?

STEP 3: Prioritize

Choose 1–2 handoffs to improve next quarter based on:

☐ Impact on revenue

☐ Frequency of friction

☐ Readiness to fix