Akeel JabberInvestment Director, Horizen Capital · Investor, Entrepreneur and Petroleum Engineer

Overcoming Post-Sale Sales Fears

6 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this monologue, the speaker highlights a key disparity between the sales development rep (SDR) funnel—where rejection is normalized through frequent cold calls—and the post‑sale customer success (CS) environment, which lacks a similar training pipeline. He points out that many post‑sale relationship managers enter the role fearful of reaching out to customers for informal meetings (lunch, dinner) because they worry about being rejected or perceived as odd. The speaker argues that to excel in post‑sale roles, CS professionals must adopt a sales‑rep mindset, embracing rejection as a routine part of the job and deliberately developing soft‑skill capabilities—such as relationship building, confidence in outreach, and handling “no” responses—that are currently under‑taught in CS organizations.

Chapters

You know, that's the great thing about sales reps, right? They come up through this funnel where they start out as SDRs making cold calls and they quickly learn that rejection is just another part of your day, right? It's not a big deal. On the post-sale side, we don't, we don't really have that funnel. So a lot of our folks come into the business very scared, you know, very fearful of, oh my God, I, you know, if I reach out to this customer and I ask them to lunch and they say no, like, are their feelings going to be hurt? And are they ever going to talk to me again? You know, or if I, If I offer to take this customer to dinner, are they gonna think that's weird? You know, like, no, like, you know, you gotta get over all that stuff if you wanna be a great relationship manager on the post-sale side. And you gotta start thinking more like a sales rep, quite frankly. So I would say, you know, kind of understanding the relationship side, the soft skills, basically all the things that are not taught, which is, you know, a big problem in, in CS land right now, right?