One of the most common and important questions TSIA is asked is, “Should our customer success (CS) team take on commercial responsibility for expansion and renewals?” For companies who aren’t as mature in their customer success capabilities, that can be a difficult pill to swallow. But how do you decide what the sales organization should do and what the customer success organization should do? What duties can be offloaded to CS and what should sales continue to own, and why? What capabilities must a CS organization possess to effectively manage these responsibilities?
This paper will directly address how to set up and manage the handshake between the sales and the customer success organizations around upsell, cross-sell, and renewal responsibilities. It will give you guidance on which types of transactions customer success can handle, and how to set them up for success in driving them. It will clarify when to involve sales and how to manage the relationship between the two functions. The goal is to help you leverage your customer success organization to not only grow revenue at a lower cost of sale, but to help your sales team stay focused on their core competency and main job: Landing big, new customers and selling complex cross-sell deals to existing customers.