Should companies run a dedicated customer success function, or should renewals and expansion sit with sales and professional services?

Chris Degnan · Nov 10, 2023

Sales reps can own renewals and upsell themselves if given both a renewal quota and a growth quota.

It's a basic structure; if a rep is too busy to do renewals you simply take away half their accounts.

48:47 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

Reps and sales engineers should own the entire customer lifecycle — land, expand and retain — rather than handing customers off

He wanted every rep responsible from first exciting a customer about the idea through many upgrades and cross-sells, so all revenue was their concern

32:08 20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"

Matt Plank · Dec 20, 2024

Account managers must be compensated on both new revenue and retention, not new revenue alone

Rippling initially tied 100% of AM comp to selling new products assuming they'd care about retention anyway; after nine months it clearly didn't work, so they moved to roughly 70% new business / 30% dollar retention and saw outlier low churn

Scope: Rippling now uses roughly 70/30 split; applies to multiproduct account management

23:53 20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank

Chris Degnan · Oct 10, 2025

Renewals and upsells in a competitive market should be owned by the account sales team, not handed to a separate customer success or inside sales function

He wasn't willing to give the B team access to his A accounts — a million-dollar renewal shouldn't go to someone who doesn't know what the competition looks like; sales owning it produced 177% net retention

Scope: hyper-competitive markets; Snowflake context

44:14 20Sales: Scaling Snowflake from $0-$3BN in ARR | Snowflake vs Databricks: My Biggest Lessons | Why Customer Success is BS and What Replaces It with Chris Chris Degnan

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

The best go-to-market model is one where the rep who sells the deal also renews it and is compensated on net dollars.

It incentivizes selling a good deal that protects unit economics — a rep who discounted 40% has to claw it back, and a bad deal comes back as churn or contraction — and it makes the hunter secure the account against competitors fighting for the same workflows.

Scope: she has worked in full-handoff and partial-handoff models too; framed as her preference

48:05 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Chris Degnan · Nov 10, 2023

Customer success as a function should be eliminated and the budget redirected to professional services, sales engineers, or sales reps.

CS people either just handle renewals or guide product usage; they can't sell and aren't technical enough to be sales engineers, so the spend produces something you can't quantify, whereas PS is paid for and technical.

Scope: acknowledges others consider this blasphemy

47:04 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake

Harry Stebbings · May 10, 2024

Customer success as a function is unnecessary; companies should have professional services and support instead

31:33 20Sales: How to Build Vertical Sales Teams, Why No Customer Success is BS and Everyone Needs it, How to Hire, Train and Retain the First Reps and Lessons Scaling to $2.1BN Revenue and 1,300 People with Larry Schurtz, CRO @ Genesys

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

Customer success is a make-believe organization that shouldn't exist; its three real functions belong in support, sales, and paid professional services

When he asked the ServiceNow CS team what they did, it was fielding broken-product calls (support's job, which was under-resourced), adding licenses (sales' job), and hands-on configuration (a paid professional service); no CS person could ever tell him what they uniquely did in a day that made money, and he needed to fund support, sales and services instead

Scope: they had a 98%+ renewal rate so no churn problem; he later reintroduced boutique resources that customers paid for rather than got free

32:45 20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"

David Schneider · Sep 11, 2024

The companies he works with today should not have customer success teams, and many are coming to that realization

CS orgs staff by accounts-per-head or revenue-per-head rather than driving efficiency, and a leader's job is to increase revenue per sales and engineering headcount over time

34:13 20VC: Scaling ServiceNow to $5BN in ARR | Leadership Lessons from Doug Leone, Frank Slootman and Bill McDermott | VC Value Add: Is it Real and Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs"

Harry Stebbings · Dec 20, 2024

Chris Dagnon of Snowflake has argued that customer success is bullshit — there is paid professional services and customer support, but customer success is not a legitimate function

22:32 20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank

Matt Plank · Dec 20, 2024

Post-sale ownership should sit with quota-carrying account managers who own the commercial relationship and renewals, not with a support-style function

You need people who have carried a quota and want to be held accountable to one, though they still must make customers successful because unsuccessful customers buy nothing new

21:31 20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank

Matt Plank · Dec 20, 2024

For multi-product companies, customer success as a standalone function should be replaced by account management — you have to pick one or the other, you can't have both a CSM and an AM on the account

You can take people with sales DNA and teach them empathy for the customer, but you can't take a CSM and turn them into a quota-carrying rep

Scope: specific to multi-product companies; Rippling still keeps technical account managers for adoption and a separate support team

22:56 20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

Account managers, not customer success, are the right function for large accounts because they carry expansion and renewal numbers, whereas CS was designed around onboarding checklists and CSAT

Expansion and renewal were never CS's primary metric; AMs are comped on upsell and managing growth across the organization

Scope: for large/strategic accounts

18:31 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Chad Peets · Aug 23, 2024

Expansion is sales' job, not customer success's; CS should own implementation, utilization and champion value while working hand in hand with the rep

The rep landing the deal and walking away is the wrong model; CS's role is ensuring the product is implemented, used, hitting utilization rates and delivering value to the champion

Scope: he does believe in customer success as a function

26:41 20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

Chad Peets · Aug 23, 2024

Making CS responsible after the land drives bad rep behaviour and overbooked deals, creating churn risk a year later

In a consumption model a rep paid on bookings will commit a customer to 100k when they'll only consume 50k, and you can't fault the rep for chasing their comp

Scope: particularly in consumption-based models

28:22 20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

Julian Teixeira · Mar 7, 2025

CS works best positioned as an impartial trusted advisor and orchestrator focused on product usage and value, while AEs stay strictly revenue-focused

The customer doesn't see CS as someone trying to cram more product down their throat, so CS can think about usage and bring the right people in at the right time

Scope: describes how it works at 1Password

24:19 20Sales: Everything You Know About Sales Playbooks is Wrong | How to Hire and Train Your First Sales Hires | How to Crush Pipeline and Deal Reviews as a Team | How to Structure Sales Teams and Sales Comp Plans with Julian Teixeira, CRO @ 1Password

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024

The right CSM incentive is a portfolio value target — grow this book from 100 units to 105 or 110 in a year — with full autonomy on how to get there

Because both CSM and sales rep get paid on expansion, the CSM can pull in sales help when they need it and decide for themselves how to spend their time

24:53 20VC: The Metrics That Matter in SaaS Today; Why CaC Payback is Flawed & CAC Ratio is Better, Why You Need to Hire Three Sales Reps at a Time, How to Forecast in 2024 & Biggest Mistakes Made Forecasting & How to Make Customer Success Sell More with Dave K

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024

Every CS team should be a revenue-producing team and should share in the financial upside of expansion, with a base-plus-variable comp structure

If sales is rewarded for acquisition and CS is only measured on usage, CS reps who drove the expansion get no recognition and resent it

Scope: a pure account management CS team might not need sales-like recognition; some CS teams generate SQLs that sales closes

35:45 20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024

Misalignment from incentivizing CS on upsell is prevented by tying the incentive to whether the customer actually adopts and gets usage from the additional product

Lack of usage after purchase reveals the product was oversold or badly positioned by the CS rep

37:26 20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

Most customer success organizations today are effectively first-line support, reactive and unable to be strategic, because they only engage admins and operations people.

The CSM role hasn't evolved since it was created at Salesforce; CSMs sit with the same low-level users they sold to and answer how-to questions instead of driving outcomes.

25:40 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Harry Stebbings · Jan 24, 2024

ZoomInfo restructured its whole customer success team to be data-first in order to prove upsells, because customers no longer just add seats on request

23:42 20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

Customer success should be in sales (carry quota), even though most CS organizations today sit in COGS without a quota and focus only on adoption

Everyone in a company is in sales and serving the customer, and customers expect to be sold to

Scope: acknowledges his own CS org today is not in sales; the classic model keeps CS quota-free in cost of revenue

29:58 20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024

Customer success should be defined as a selling role — the CSM should introduce themselves as the account manager whose job is to get the renewal and grow the account

Of the three roles CS can play — huggers, advanced tech support, and sellers — only selling creates value; tech support work should instead be packaged and sold as premium support

19:19 20VC: The Metrics That Matter in SaaS Today; Why CaC Payback is Flawed & CAC Ratio is Better, Why You Need to Hire Three Sales Reps at a Time, How to Forecast in 2024 & Biggest Mistakes Made Forecasting & How to Make Customer Success Sell More with Dave K

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024

Companies no longer need human CS engagement for everything and should serve much of it through self-service, chatbots, academies and help content

The nature of CS engagement is changing dramatically and digital scaled motions can cover a lot of it

41:30 20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani

Chris Degnan · May 23, 2026 · hedged

Customer success is becoming a genuinely analytical function and could be largely automated once a customer is in production

There is now far more intelligence on product usage — metrics can suggest how to interact with a customer, what to raise, and can predict churn

Scope: 'to some extent'; once the customer is in production

61:49 20Sales: The $100M CRO Bubble: Why Anthropic Are Causing a Comp Crisis | Why You Should Never Hire From Salesforce or Service Now | How to Hire, Train and Forecase in a World of AI with Chad Peets and Chris Degnan

Carles Reina · Feb 14, 2026

Any ACV justifies customer success — the function should exist from the early days rather than being tied to a contract-size threshold

AEs must stay hungry hunters who close fast and hand off, because anyone can build a competitor extremely quickly, so someone else has to own the account

41:28 Cs justified at any acv so aes stay hunters

Chris Degnan · Oct 10, 2025

For a technical product, post-sale customer-facing people should be implementation engineers, not renewal-processing salespeople

46:05 Post sale role for technical products should be implementation engineers not renewal salespeople

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

Getting product usage data into the right hands at the right moment is critical, but it doesn't require a full CS restructure — instead everyone in CS or account management should be doing customer success and sales at the same time

Customers leave behavioural breadcrumbs throughout the product at all times

24:12 Csm should blend sales and success without a full org restructure

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

In enterprise, CS should come into a handoff already knowing the customer's specific top problems and personal context; in SMB that level of personalization isn't required

In the enterprise segment that level of personalization makes a real difference, whereas SMB is more automated and at scale

28:28 Enterprise cs handoffs need deep customer context smb handoffs do not

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024 · hedged

The easier a product is to adopt the less customer success headcount it needs, so a heavily human-oriented CS organization can be a red flag to buyers

Product innovation determines how much human hand-holding adoption requires

31:08 High touch cs headcount signals weak product adoption ease

Larry Shurtz · May 10, 2024

Every company needs the customer success function even if it carries a different title; someone must own correct technical architecture aligned to use cases while someone else owns growth and expansion

Salespeople asked to ensure customer success will instead chase new use cases and applications, which is selling; the architectural foundation work still has to be owned by someone

31:47 Cs function is always needed regardless of title

Shaunt Voskanian · Mar 21, 2026

Educating existing customers on doing more with the product is a hunting motion, not a customer success or account management function — which is why Figma has no traditional CS team

succeeding requires winning over new prospective champions and executives who haven't heard the new story, not just servicing existing relationships

10:11 No cs function because expansion is a hunting motion

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024

CS teams should still exist in modern SaaS, except in true enterprise where reps own one or a few very large accounts and can grow them alone

With $100k-$1M+ deals and a rep dedicated to a single account, the growth job can be pushed back to sales; the less a business looks like that, the more it needs CS

20:43 Cs teams are needed except when reps own large enough accounts to grow them alone

Harry Stebbings · Jan 31, 2024 · hedged

A CS person compensated on expansion is not truly aligned with the customer, since they will push to sell more seats than the customer needs

Their incentive is to squeeze every dollar out of the customer, which may not be in the customer's interest

21:48 Expansion based cs comp misaligns csm incentives with customer interest

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024

The mission of customer success is to keep customers happy, secure renewals and spot upsell opportunities — not to squeeze every dollar out of each account

A CSM manages a portfolio, so not every customer needs to expand to 120% — some expand a lot and some just need to stay on as customers

21:59 Cs mission is renewal and upsell spotting not maximum extraction

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

The hunter-farmer model breaks down in a down market: account managers who only maintain relationships with the original buying group produce downgrades rather than expansion.

AMs kept hanging out with the same people they sold to, and when those teams shrank, customers downgraded seat counts instead of adding licenses.

22:19 Hunter farmer split breaks down in downturns