The deal was signed on a Friday afternoon.

Champagne was popped in the sales department. High fives were exchanged. It was a massive contract with a client the company had been chasing for six months. The commission checks were going to be substantial. The sales rep, let’s call him Mark, went home feeling like a hero.

On Monday morning, the ticket arrived in the support queue.

The new client was asking how to configure the custom API integration that Mark had promised them. They needed it live by Wednesday.

There was just one problem.

That integration did not exist.

The support rep, let’s call her Lisa, stared at the screen. Her stomach dropped. She knew exactly what was about to happen. She would have to be the bearer of bad news. She would have to tell the client that the feature they bought was a fabrication. The client would scream. Mark would get defensive and say it was on the roadmap. The founder would get a furious email.

Lisa did not feel like a hero. She felt like a janitor cleaning up a mess she did not make.

Does this dynamic sound familiar?

It is the silent killer of company culture.

In many growing businesses, there is a cold war being fought between the people who bring the money in and the people who keep the customers happy. It is the war between Sales and Support.

It is not because Mark is a liar. It is not because Lisa is difficult. It is because they are living in two completely different realities within the same building.

This is the problem of the silo.

When these two functions operate in isolation, you get a business that over-promises and under-delivers. You get high churn. You get burnout. And as the business owner, you end up spending your days playing referee instead of building your vision.

We need to dismantle the wall.

We need to look at why these silos form and how to build a nervous system for your company where the left hand actually knows what the right hand is doing.

The Biology of Tribalism

To fix the problem, we have to understand the incentives.

Human beings are tribal by nature. We form groups based on shared language, shared goals, and shared enemies. In a business, departments become tribes.

The Sales Tribe is incentivized on speed and volume. They are hunters. They are optimistic. Their survival depends on saying yes. To a salesperson, a maybe is just a yes waiting to happen.

The Support Tribe is incentivized on stability and resolution. They are farmers and medics. They are realists. Their survival depends on accuracy. To a support person, a maybe is a potential disaster.

These two tribes speak different languages.

Sales speaks in the future tense. We will do this. It will be great.

Support speaks in the present tense. This is broken. This does not work.

When you separate these tribes physically or digitally, you create an echo chamber. Salespeople pump each other up about how great the product is. Support people commiserate about how broken the product is.

Over time, they stop viewing each other as teammates. They view each other as obstacles.

Sales thinks Support is lazy and blocks deals. Support thinks Sales is reckless and creates work.

How do we break this biological drift toward tribalism? We cannot just tell them to get along. We have to change the environment in which they operate.

The Shared Source of Truth

The most common cause of the silo effect is a discrepancy in information.

In many companies, Sales is trained using a pitch deck and a competitor analysis sheet. Support is trained using a technical manual and a knowledge base.

They are literally studying different textbooks.

If you want your teams to be aligned, they must consume the same information. This brings us to the concept of the Shared Training Platform.

Instead of having a Sales Academy and a Support Academy, you should just have a Company Academy.

Your salespeople need to go through the technical training. They do not need to be able to code the product, but they need to know exactly how it works. They need to see the limitations. They need to know what the error messages look like.

Conversely, your support team needs to go through the sales training. They need to understand the value proposition. They need to know why the customer bought the product in the first place. They need to understand the dream that was sold so they do not accidentally crush it with technical pessimism.

When you centralize your knowledge, you remove the excuse of ignorance.

A salesperson can no longer say they didn’t know a feature was missing if they took the module on current capabilities.

A support person can no longer say they don’t understand why a client is frustrated if they understand the ROI the client is chasing.

Creating a single, accessible repository of knowledge–video modules, searchable documentation, recorded use cases–acts as a neutral third party. It is the objective truth that both sides can reference.

The Power of The Ride-Along

Shared documents are good. Shared experiences are better.

There is no faster way to build empathy than to walk a mile in someone else’s headset.

If you want to solve the friction in your business, implement a mandatory rotation program. It does not have to be long. It just has to be consistent.

Once a quarter, every salesperson should spend four hours in the support queue. They should not just watch. They should answer tickets. They should have to explain to a customer why something is not working.

The first time a salesperson has to apologize to a client for a feature they personally oversold, their behavior changes forever. The abstract concept of a bug becomes a very real, uncomfortable conversation.

Similarly, support staff should sit in on sales calls. They need to hear the objections. They need to hear the desperation in a prospect’s voice. They need to see how hard it is to get someone to open their wallet.

This cross-pollination does two things.

First, it builds respect. The salesperson realizes that support is hard intellectual work. The support person realizes that sales is hard emotional work.

Second, it creates a feedback loop. When a support person hears a prospect ask for a specific feature, they might say, “Hey, we can actually do that if we configure the settings this way.” Suddenly, a deal is saved because the knowledge gap was closed.

Aligning the Incentives

You can train all you want, but if your paycheck tells a different story, the behavior will not stick.

In most businesses, sales commissions are based on the close. Once the contract is signed, the salesperson gets paid. The consequences of a bad deal–the churn, the refunds, the anger–fall entirely on the support team and the business owner.

This is a moral hazard.

If you want to break down silos, you need to align the financial incentives with the long-term health of the customer relationship.

Consider a clawback period or a retention bonus. If a customer cancels within ninety days because of a misalignment in expectations, the commission should be impacted.

Suddenly, the salesperson is very interested in making sure the customer is successful. Suddenly, the salesperson is asking the support team, “Hey, is this actually a good fit for this client?” before they sign the deal.

On the flip side, reward your support team for upsells and retention. If a support interaction leads to a client upgrading their tier, the support rep should see a piece of that action.

When you make everyone responsible for the entire lifecycle of the customer, the walls come down. You are no longer hunters and farmers. You are all gardeners, tending to the same crop.

The Unified Customer View

Finally, we have to look at the tools.

Are your teams working in different software stacks? Does Sales live in a CRM while Support lives in a ticketing system, and never the twain shall meet?

If a support rep cannot see what was promised in the sales notes, they are flying blind.

If a sales rep cannot see that a client has an active, critical support ticket before they call to try and upsell them, they are walking into a landmine.

Integration is not just an IT project. It is a cultural project.

Your goal should be a unified view of the customer. Anyone in the company should be able to pull up a client profile and see the entire narrative. They should see the initial pitch, the contract, the usage data, and the support history.

When information flows freely, anxiety drops.

The support rep doesn’t have to guess what the client expects. The sales rep doesn’t have to guess if the client is happy.

Building the Nervous System

Breaking down silos is not about forcing everyone to be best friends. It is not about trust falls or company retreats.

It is about system design.

It is about acknowledging that your business is a single organism. If the stomach is fighting the mouth, the organism starves.

By creating a shared knowledge base, forcing experiential empathy through job shadowing, aligning financial incentives, and integrating your data, you effectively rewire the nervous system of your organization.

The result is a drop in noise. The frantic emails stop. The blame game ends.

Instead of “Sales vs. Support,” you get a team that says, “How do we solve this for the customer?”

And for you, the business owner, it means you can stop being a referee and start being a leader.

It means you can trust that the promises made are promises kept.

And that is the foundation of a business that lasts.