Should Customer Success teams carry sales quotas? The speakers explore when it makes sense, weighing factors like team experience, product complexity, and whether CS must negotiate with enterprise procurement departments. The decision hinges on your specific team's capabilities.
I always try and do a lot of context setting for our teams and as a leader.
So when I look at that question,
I think the immediate kind of response that comes to mind is like, where are we today in the market and why would we need to be making changes around comps and quotas and moving things? And I think if you look at the shift that's happening in the financial
markets and you look at what businesses
are trying to move towards, it's a
lot around profitability, it's a lot around
how do I reduce burn, how do
I reduce cash, how do I make
sales and marketing more efficient is generally one of the levers that you try and pull.
And if that's the case, then this
conversation is coming up right now a lot. Because if sales and marketing are trying to offload costs, one way that we could do that is to move the
upsell, cross sell, net revenue retention kind
of motion into a CS team to really spread out the cost of that kind of customer acquisition.
So that's what I think of as
like the shift that's happening now that is forcing this conversation more and more is that, you know, how do we reduce the sales marketing costs, how do we focus on profitability? And that generally means that you're shifting a responsibility somewhere. So I like that context setting for the team. And then I would go back in terms of is the quota right for the team or not? You know, to a lot of it's going to, it's going to depend. Right. But I think in by and large, I think the thing that I think
about is the tenure and the skill
set of the team and the complexity of the product are the two things
that I kind of look at often
when we're kind of asking this question
and trying to gauge, you know, is it something that we feel that they can take on as part of their
work in terms of their skill set and their tenure as well? Does it kind of match up to things that they've done before? Is it something that we can easily
add motion around that we can track
and do in the right way? And again, I think there's a lot
comes with product complexity. A lot comes with kind of your
team and where they are in terms of their careers and the types of things that they've done.
And then lastly, a thing that I
think about quite a bit too is
who, when we are going through these renewal or upsell and cross sell conversations,
who are we coming up against a lot? Usually if you're in enterprise type orgs or enterprise type motions it's like our CSM might be going up a procurement department, and that is a losing proposition in my mind. Right. You have somebody in procurement who's doing this on a daily basis, who's very
good at negotiating and trying to find angles against the csm, who is, you
know, doing this as a part of their job and might not have that skill set. So I also think about where you're selling into. It kind of matters to me on how you think about, you know, does the team need to carry a quota? Do we need to kind of put more commercial responsibility on the csm? So those are a couple. Just some initial thoughts around context and
how I think about some of the parts of the problem, maybe that you're trying to answer.
