The tech industry has created many new roles over the years, each designed to address specific challenges or opportunities. Chief Revenue Officers (CROs), for example, have proven effective by bridging gaps between sales, marketing, and customer experience. However, other roles, while promising in theory, struggle to deliver meaningful outcomes. At the top of this list is Customer Success (CS), a department intended to drive customer satisfaction and retention, yet often falls short due to misalignment with its core purpose.
The issue lies in how Customer Success is utilized within most companies. Too frequently, CS becomes a dumping ground for problems that other departments don't want to address. When Sales oversells a feature, it falls to CS to manage expectations. When a product has a bug or instability, CS becomes the intermediary. When Support encounters a problem they cannot solve, they turn to CS for guidance. This approach places undue pressure on Customer Success teams, asking them to take accountability for problems they didn't create—problems for which they may lack the necessary expertise. In the process, the customer's needs become an afterthought, and CS teams lose focus on their actual mission.
So, how do we realign Customer Success to ensure it delivers on its promise? Here are five steps we've taken at Readymode™ to redefine and elevate CS, making it a strategic, revenue-driving function:
1. Define Customer Success as a Revenue-Generating Role
The first step is to clarify what Customer Success should accomplish. CS needs to be a sales-oriented role with a direct mandate to drive revenue through upselling and cross-selling. Instead of serving as a catch-all for unresolved issues, CS should be a focused, proactive team working to expand revenue from existing customers by identifying and delivering value-aligned solutions. By narrowing CS's scope and concentrating on revenue generation, companies can better direct team efforts and measure success.
This doesn't mean abandoning customer-centric values; it means reorienting CS activities toward measurable outcomes that contribute directly to business growth. When CS professionals have clear goals tied to revenue, they can prioritize efforts that will have the greatest impact, building deeper, more strategic relationships with customers and delivering solutions tailored to evolving customer needs.
2. Establish Clear Input and Output Metrics
Once CS is defined as a revenue-driving team, it's crucial to track performance through input and output metrics. Input metrics might mirror those used by Account Executives (AEs), such as the number of calls, meetings, and opportunities created. These KPIs keep CS accountable for proactive engagement with customers, ensuring they maintain a healthy sales funnel of potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Output metrics should focus on account health and product usage, which are vital indicators of customer engagement and satisfaction. By analyzing these data points, CS teams can tailor product recommendations to specific customer needs. This approach not only aids in building trust but also enables CS to make data-driven decisions that add tangible value to the customer experience. Ultimately, these metrics foster a more disciplined and goal-oriented CS function, where performance is measured, refined, and optimized continuously.
3. Integrate CS into the Sales Organization
To support this revenue-focused approach, Customer Success should be embedded within the sales organization. Currently, CS often functions as an isolated department, separate from Sales and, therefore, detached from broader revenue goals. By integrating CS under the sales umbrella, companies can create a more seamless experience for customers, with AEs and CSMs working closely together to address customer needs and opportunities.
In this integrated model, CS would own a monthly recurring revenue (MRR) target, holding them accountable for generating incremental revenue. Instead of competing or clashing over responsibilities, AEs and CSMs can leverage each other's skill sets, transitioning between roles when necessary. The result is a team that moves fluidly and collaborates in ways that enhance customer satisfaction and drive revenue growth.
4. Develop a Customer Marketing Strategy
An effective Customer Success function should be supported by a strong customer marketing strategy. Much like marketing attracts new leads at the top of the funnel, it should also target existing customers, prioritizing engagement, satisfaction, and product inquiries. By encouraging product awareness and interest among the current customer base, customer marketing can help CS maintain a robust pipeline of upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Customer marketing also allows for more granular targeting of existing accounts, ensuring that campaigns are specific, relevant, and valuable. And, because existing customers typically convert at a higher rate and lower acquisition costs, the budget for these efforts can be more economical. Customer marketing should be measured on its ability to generate leads and product inquiries within the base, working hand-in-hand with CS to ensure these efforts are coordinated and strategic.
5. Realign Support Functions and Create a Professional Services Team
One of the biggest barriers to CS success is the burden of managing issues beyond their control, such as onboarding, training, and escalations from other departments. These tasks dilute the focus of CS teams and distract them from their primary goal of driving revenue. The solution is to build a Professional Services (PS) group specifically focused on onboarding, training, and ongoing support. In time, these services could even become billable, adding an additional revenue stream for the company.
Support teams, on the other hand, need to take full accountability for product-related issues and escalations so that CS isn't caught in the middle of challenges they are not equipped to resolve. By ensuring that product bugs, billing issues, and technical escalations are managed by the right teams, the organization frees up CS to focus on customer growth and satisfaction.
Customer Success leaders should no longer serve as the catch-all escalation points for the entire company. Support should manage their escalations, and accountability must lie with those equipped to solve specific issues.
Conclusion
For Customer Success to fulfill its potential, we must reframe it as a sales-driven, revenue-generating function with clear goals, defined metrics, and targeted responsibilities. By integrating CS into the sales organization, implementing a strong customer marketing strategy, and redistributing tasks related to support and onboarding, companies can empower CS to make a meaningful impact. When properly aligned, Customer Success can not only drive revenue but also strengthen customer loyalty, making it a pivotal part of any successful organization.
In sum, when we stop using CS as a dumping ground and start positioning it as a proactive, revenue-centric function, Customer Success can finally live up to its name—and make a lasting difference for both customers and the bottom line.
Co-authored by:
Rob Auld, CRO, Readymode
Rob Auld is the Chief Revenue Officer at Readymode. He is a results-oriented leader with a proven track record in developing and executing data-driven sales strategies that elevate customer experiences and fuel business expansion. Rob's forward-thinking approach and "friend of failure" mentality have been instrumental in driving transformative projects, from large-scale business overhauls to continuous iteration of product and process improvement. As an avid golfer and dedicated youth sports coach, Rob brings his collaborative spirit and drive for success to all aspects of his life. He is poised to lead Readymode into its next phase of growth through innovative product development, operational scaling, and market expansion.
