Who owns customer success?
Every go-to-market team and success organization is going to answer this differently. Hand-offs are really messy. It’s true when we talk about deal attribution, and it’s true when we talk about the post-sale journey.
In the early days of Sangria, I spoke with a former professional services leader at a major software company, and she told me her first job was to qualify the project and find out “what the customer expects us to do vs. what we can actually do.” That’s a huge problem, and it speaks to a fundamental misalignment between buyers and sellers: where buyers see a project, sellers see a deal. Deals end at signature, and projects end at success.
It makes sense, then, that the ownership of customer success becomes a fraught handoff. Sales is rarely well-versed in the how of a project, and (like Kenneth in 30 Rock) professional services and customer success “never know why.”
There is an answer, though. There’s someone who knows both why and how: the customer. What if we took the radical step of giving the customer ownership over their own success? It would take transparency, collaboration, and commitment from day one. It would take a deep commitment to understanding and effecting the buyer’s vision that starts long before virtual ink is dried. Above all, it would take alignment to the reality of a project and eschewing the artificial barriers we’ve created for ourselves.
There’s a principal in geopolitics that geography is undefeated. You can create artificial borders and spend billions to reinforce them, but geography and natural borders will always regain definition of a region. You can’t out-politic the reality of nature, and you can’t out-segment the reality of a project: it has a singular beginning, goal, and outcome, and all of those are a journey taken by the buyer.
It’s time for sellers to bet big on customer success, and the only way to do that is by betting on buyers by helping them take control from day one. “Ownership” requires ownership, and it’s time for sellers (and CS) to let go. Who owns customer success? The customer does, and it’s time for us to help them win.
