Should you be charging for customer success? CS strategist and leader Donna Weber says you should.
“Why not take customer-facing services as seriously as our products?” Donna asked in her recent ChurnZero webinar. “You can charge for it and turn it into a product.”
In Donna’s experience, charging for CS leads to higher customer engagement, stronger internal investment, and more influence and CS budget, she says, especially in companies where CS is still viewed as a cost center.
It’s also a major strategic shift that comes with plenty of challenges, including internal and customer resistance. Without the correct positioning and structuring, Donna says, treating CS as a premium package will fail.
Charging for customer success: the pros and cons.
Should your company consider monetizing CS? Let’s explore the pros and cons, as well as Donna’s tactics and tips for getting it right. You can also watch her webinar in full at the end.
The pros: more resources, engagement, and control.
“When you charge for CS, you can go from being a cost center to being maybe a break-even center or ideally even a profit center,” Donna explains. “Now, you’re a service—you’re not the main product—so you’re never going to bring in tons of revenue. It’s always going to be a drop in the bucket, but it really changes the story when you are bringing revenue in.”
A paid model also drives customer accountability, faster time-to-value, increased adoption, and ultimately long-term retention she says.
“Customers become more engaged because: guess what? When they pay for something, they’re more likely to show up. They’re more likely to take the action. When customers subscribe to services that help them succeed, they’re invested in using them.”
The cons: internal resistance and customer expectations.
Internally, sales teams are the most likely to object to introducing paid CS services, due to concerns about slowing down new deals.
“They’re always worried the price is increasing, and that it’s going to slow the sale down,” says Donna. “And time kills all deals.”
If you’re planning to monetize CS, therefore, you’ll need a solid sales enablement strategy to position paid CS as a competitive advantage, not an extra cost.
Otherwise, customer expectations are your main challenge. Many are used to getting CS services for free, and suddenly introducing fees can create friction. If you decide to charge for CS, expect this friction as part of the journey, and manage the change strategically and deliberately.
How to charge for customer success and make it work.
1. Structure your premium CS packages carefully.
What should a premium CS package include? The key is bundling everything customers need to succeed, says Donna. Study your most successful customers and build from there.
“You want to move from using hope as a strategy—hoping customers purchase training, hoping sales reps sell a dedicated CSM—to just providing customers everything they need to thrive,”
This means integrating services like onboarding, implementation, premium support, dedicated CSMs, and training into a single, structured offering.
“When you create this ‘happy meal’ of services,” says Donna, “you eliminate friction and ensure customers get the resources they need without them having to figure it out piece by piece.”
You can also consider packages that drive value at different levels, offering tiered support, training, and advisory services to match different customer needs.
2. Plan for internal and external resistance.
Sales teams resist premium CS services because they fear slowing deals down. Customers push back because they’re used to getting things for free. Overcoming this requires a clear strategy.
“One of the biggest challenges is that sales reps are often giving CS away,” Donna noted.
The solution is to treat CS like a product and equip your sales team to sell its value.
“You need to create a business case and define how you’re going to market and sell this internally before you bring it to customers,” says Donna.
For your sales team, you’ll need to provide a strong value proposition, sales collateral, and clear messaging on why premium CS benefits the customer.
For customers, Donna suggests piloting with a small segment, collecting feedback, and refining your offering before a full rollout.
Related: Get ChurnZero’s guide to cross-functional alignment for CS leaders here.
3. Build a sophisticated go-to-market plan
“If you build it… they will not necessarily come,” says Donna. “So, think like a product manager. You have to define the who, what, why, where, when, and how, otherwise, it’ll just sit there and no one will sell it.”
This means identifying your audience, refining messaging, enabling sales teams, and marketing the offering—in other words, treating your premium CS service like a product, and equipping others to sell its value.
4. Choose your success metrics carefully.
Once you start charging for CS services, how do you measure success? It’s not just about revenue; it’s about impact too.
“You need to know what your leadership cares about,” says Donna, “whether that’s expansion, retention, or product adoption—and align your metrics accordingly
Track activation rates, onboarding time reduction, and net promoter scores, before and after launch, to whether customers are truly benefiting. Ultimately, however, you’ll want to showcase business impact.
“One of my projects revealed that well-trained customers were 150% more likely to renew,” Donna says.
