Customer success teams should be treated as a revenue function, not simply a help desk or a relationship management department

When I took the role of Chief Growth Officer at Claxon, an award-winning advertising agency, I asked the founders for something unusual. Not more money. Not a cooler title. I asked to own two departments that had never belonged to one person.

I'll come back to this conversation.

Over the last 15 years I've worked inside businesses across very different industries: media, brand and marketing, energy, commercial food service, ecommerce and retail. Wildly different products and different customers and different scales of companies. And in almost every one of them, the same invisible little wall ran through the office.

Sales on one side, forever chasing new business. Customer success and retention on the other, answering questions and keeping people happy, but nobody owning the space (and issues) between them.

What customer success usually becomes in a business

It becomes a complaints desk with a nicer name. The team answers questions, runs the monthly meetings, sends the follow-up, books and pays for the lunch and checks NPS.

All of it matters and none of it should stop, but none of it carries a revenue number. When a client starts thinking about downgrading, sales teams often find out after it's happened, usually because their quarterly target has just increased.

Your customer success people hear things first. The client who's gone quiet. The internal champion that is moving on. The budget is about to shrink. The CEO that's making a new market pivot. Behind the invisable dividing wall, that intell stays inside the team or dies in the CRM system under the “client file”.

Customer success should generate revenue for every business, and if it doesn't, that's not a criticism of the people in it or how well they do their job. 99/100 its because the function / department was never set up to.

This brings me back to my conversation with the founders at Claxon. As I mentioned earlier, before I even accepted the role, I asked to own both sides. That consisted of the new business sales and customer success teams, both reporting up to me. They agreed and from day one I oversaw both departments, so the invisible dividing wall couldn't survive, thrive, or even occur.

One of the first things I did was to give the customer success team sales targets and KPIs for cross-selling and upselling existing clients. They kept doing everything a high-performing team does - monthly meetings, touching base, taking clients to lunch and building real rapport, but now they were also seeking out revenue opportunities.

It changed the conversations inside our business too. Sales and the client team sat in the same weekly meetings, looking at the same accounts, comparing what each of them knew. A downgrade stopped being a surprise and became something we worked on together, weeks earlier, while there was still time to change the outcome.

Did I get pushback? Absolutely

The pushback I got early on was that sales targets make the team pushy and wreck the relationships. In my experience it's the opposite. A cross-sell done properly isn't pressure. It's the people who know the client best saying, we can see what's next for you before you can, and what's really going to build your revenue. The trust built in those monthly meetings and over those lunches is exactly what earns the right to that conversation.

If you take one thing from this, take the structural fix. Put existing customer revenue under a single owner alongside new business. Give customer success a real target for cross-selling and upselling.

And if you're about to hire someone to grow your business, and they ask to own both sides of that invisible little dividing wall before they've even started - say yes.