Quick summary: When customer success reports to you as the CRO, treat it as a value engine. Learn the team’s mechanics before KPIs, protect CS metrics and charters, build commercial confidence without pressure, and keep the CSP for real-time risk and expansion signals.
Sarah Kiley is chief sales officer at ChurnZero.
When customer success starts reporting into the CRO, it’s not just a reporting change—it’s a strategic shift. Most CROs come up through sales, where success is measured by speed and outcomes. But owning the full customer lifecycle demands a new operating model—one built on trust, value, and long-term growth.
The most important mindset shift I made as a CRO is recognizing that CS isn’t a revenue center—it’s a value engine. Revenue is the outcome, not the input. And it only comes when customers see clear, repeated, expanding value.
From my experience of leading both functions, I can offer CROs five valuable tips on how to set their CS team up for success.
1. Misaligning your customer success team is a trap.
The CRO’s job isn’t to make CS more like sales—it’s to unlock the distinct value CS delivers and scale it.
Without intentional onboarding and exposure to CS strategy, it’s tempting for CROs to over-rotate customer success to targets, applying short-cycle KPIs that don’t reflect the dynamics of customer relationships.
When a CRO immediately layers on revenue targets or removes specialized tooling, they risk breaking the trust that CS has worked so hard to build. Things can break down not from bad intentions, but from misaligned expectations.
Customers can sense when conversations shift from support to sales. It erodes credibility and changes the dynamic from “we’re here to help” to “we’re here to close.” That can lead to lower product adoption, reduced customer satisfaction, and increased churn.
Internally, it also creates burnout. Your CSMs joined to serve customers, not chase quotas. Pushing too hard on revenue can leave both your team and your customers feeling disillusioned.
2. Go beyond the numbers to discover what makes CS successful.
When you take over a customer team, sit down with them and ask what makes them successful, what challenges they’re seeing in the business, and how they run their part of it. I recommend doing this before you go to the numbers.
Earlier in my career, I had been leading a sales organization when I stepped into manage CS. The metrics were great. We had 98% gross revenue retention, with very happy customers who loved to provide references for our sales team.
Had I not also sat down with the CS team, I would have missed a lot of the factors that allowed us to have that metric. The account managers were doing heroic work, that one rep had developed her own system to track health with five different tools. Nothing was scalable, and if I took the people out of the equation, I’d lose all insight into our customers.
Don’t just look at the metrics—interrogate the mechanics behind them. If your results are driven by heroics, not systems, you’re one resignation away from losing critical insights. The best CROs dig beneath the dashboard to understand how value is truly being delivered—and where it can be scaled.
3. Keep your CS team aligned to customer value, not just revenue.
Taking ownership of customer success isn’t about turning CSMs into sellers—it’s about scaling value delivery across your entire customer base. CS operates on a different rhythm than sales, and great CROs protect that rhythm.
Here’s how to keep CS aligned with what truly drives sustainable growth:
Preserve CS-specific metrics. Don’t let NRR, product adoption, and health scores get buried beneath bookings. These indicators are leading signals of customer value and future revenue—and they must remain visible and prioritized.
Establish clear charters between CS, sales, and AMs. The boundaries between teams should be intentional, not political. Ambiguity creates tension and inefficiency. Alignment creates velocity.
Give CS permission to say “not yet.” Sometimes the most strategic move is not to pursue an expansion. Let your CSMs prioritize readiness, timing, and trust—those are the real accelerators of long-term growth.
Balance incentives. If you only reward upsell, you get short-term thinking. Recognize and compensate for retention, advocacy, and customer health just as much as revenue.
Invest in value-building programs. QBRs are table stakes. The best CS orgs drive loyalty through customer communities, executive briefings, and ongoing success engagement. These are the moments that deepen relationships and turn customers into champions.
Customer Success isn’t the “nice” part of the business—it’s the sticky, strategic core of your recurring revenue model. When CROs protect that focus, expansion becomes the byproduct of trust—not pressure.
4. When it comes to sales skills, commercial confidence is the key.
At ChurnZero, for example, customer success team owns the full customer lifecycle, including expansion. That means commercial skills aren’t optional—they’re essential. But that doesn’t mean you need to turn your CSMs into traditional sellers. It means building commercial confidence in a way that aligns with the trusted advisor role.
Most great CSMs already know how to listen, ask the right questions, and solve meaningful problems. That’s the foundation of consultative selling. The CRO’s role is to turn those strengths into repeatable, confident commercial conversations. Here’s how:
Focus on opportunity framing—not pitching. CSMs should be able to connect additional products or features to a customer’s business goals, not rattle off functionality.
Create safe practice environments. Role plays, call reviews, and talk tracks help build muscle memory and reduce the fear around commercial moments.
Train for timing and value, not pressure. Customers don’t expand because we push—they expand when they see clear, timely value.
Give them the language. Equip your team with phrasing and positioning that makes commercial conversations feel natural, not forced.
Done right, this approach keeps your CS team aligned to their core mission—driving value and deepening relationships—while giving them the fluency and confidence to lead expansion without needing a sales assist.
5. Finally, don’t rip out the GPS—or the CSP.
The other day, I went to pick up my son from school. I knew the route by heart, so I didn’t bother checking GPS. But what I didn’t know was that there had been a major accident—and traffic was backed up for miles. Had I used GPS, I would’ve had the real-time context to reroute and plan accordingly. Instead, I showed up late and frustrated.
That’s exactly what happens when CROs remove the customer success platform (CSP) in the name of efficiency.
Sure, your team knows the customer. They can operate on experience and instinct. But without real-time data on product usage, engagement trends, support tickets, and health scores, you’re driving blind. A CRM might track the destination—but only a CSP shows you the road conditions, detours, and opportunities along the way.
The CSP is your revenue GPS—it flags churn risk early, highlights expansion signals, and gives your CS team the intelligence to act proactively, not reactively.
From the outside, a customer might look healthy—they’re logging in, not submitting tickets, and renewing on time. But if usage is declining, champions are going dark, or support sentiment is slipping, your team won’t know until it’s too late—unless they have the right tools.
You’d never ask Sales to give up their CRM. So don’t ask CS to give up their system of intelligence. If you want customer success to drive growth, not just defend renewals, the CSP is non-negotiable.
