The landscape of post-sales is shifting as both tools and personnel face increased scrutiny under the ROI microscope. Companies have fewer resources, while customers demand immediate value from the software they purchase. Adopting new tools has been challenging for many organizations. In response, some companies are deprioritizing the Customer Success function, while others are downsizing these teams to cut costs. Despite these reductions, the expectation to deliver value to customers remains. Strategic engagement and customer management are still essential to drive revenue, retention, and growth for the business.
Regardless of who delivers value, customer success remains a top priority. So, let’s outline how to adopt the right post-sales strategy for your business.
Ensuring Customer Success: What Needs to be Done and Who is Responsible?
For customers to quickly derive maximum value from a product, several critical tasks must be completed, including:
Onboarding the customer
Capturing and reporting feature and bug requests
Creating adoption and success plans
Hosting semi-regular QBRs
Ensuring the renewal process is seamless
Ensuring the product is fully adopted and provides value
These tasks must be completed, but the key question is: who will handle them? There are two main options:
Distribute the work across existing teams
Create a dedicated Customer Success function
Distributing Post-Sales Work Across Teams
Customers expect to derive value from the software product they purchase. One approach to ensure this is by offering professional services, engineering support, upgraded customer service, and discounts to facilitate product functionality. With these touchpoints, the customer may be satisfied with the process and outcome. Sometimes, this approach works, but it often becomes an unsustainable drain on company time and resources, distracting teams from their core objectives and overwhelming customers.
As products become more complex and technical to implement, a dedicated team is needed to ensure successful adoption. Relying on borrowed capacity from other departments to cover post-sales responsibilities becomes increasingly challenging as the company grows.
Creating a Dedicated Customer Success Function
A dedicated Customer Success team ensures that a business covers all its post-sales needs. However, establishing such a team is often time-consuming, costly in terms of staffing and tools, and typically takes six months to a year to fully operationalize.
When setting up a Customer Success team, companies face many choices—from software selection to team structure and methodology—which makes finding the right starting point difficult. Current tools often offer a mix of customization and standardization, placing a heavy administrative burden on Customer Success team members without providing the efficiencies they need to excel in their roles.
A Third Option: Fractional Customer Success
Fractional Customer Success offers an excellent solution for smaller companies or those uncertain about where to begin. It enables companies to launch a strategic post-sales practice without committing to long-term resources. This model allows businesses to determine what works best for their customers while still reaping the benefits of a Customer Success function—customer engagement, retention, and growth.
Here’s how it works: The company gains access to experienced professionals who provide all the operational requirements for a Customer Success function, including templates, coaching, models, and strategies, all tailored to fit within the company's existing framework and budget. This foundation allows the company to build on its initial success and eventually hire a dedicated Customer Success team. After analyzing key metrics and receiving feedback, the fractional team customizes deliverables and begins executing the necessary work, all aligned with the company's product and customer needs.
If the company later decides to build a full-time Customer Success team, the fractional team can assist with creating hiring plans, compensation structures, and career development paths. The core advantages of Fractional Customer Success are speed, customization, and flexibility—providing businesses with what they need, exactly when they need it.
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