It’s hard to be held accountable for an outcome that you don’t control. And, in customer success, it happens every day.
You’re on the hook for commitments made by the sales team. Finance reserves the authority to offer discounts. You’re defending the product roadmap to customers even when it doesn’t reflect what they’re asking for.
All of these decision points affect the NRR for which you’re responsible, and they’re all most likely out of your control right now.
However, there is a way to change things.
Better still, it doesn’t require you to ignite a turf war. The solution is to thoughtfully and strategically earn joint ownership of these critical decisions.
1. Pre-sale commitments.
The issue.
Your sales team might be responsible for securing the deal but you’re responsible for delivering what they promise.
If those commitments are unrealistic or uncommunicated, risk starts accumulating before the handoff is even complete. Onboarding becomes a scramble, expectations are mismatched, and trust starts eroding even as the ink dries.
How we got here.
Conflicting incentives are a big part of it. Your sales team lives by closed-won; you live by adoption, retention, and maybe expansion. Those goals don’t align, which incentivizes over-promising or “ICP drift”(also known as bad-fit deals).
But, on a more basic level, it’s because CS isn’t engaged early enough.
How to take a formal role.
Start simple. Get your CS team joining the last call before close to surface commitments and start the customer relationship on accurate terms.
Your sales counterpart might worry that CS will slow things down, or focus too much on what the product doesn’t do. The answer: you’re not there to kill deals but to identify risks. Unvetted commitments cause early churn, and early churn dents the CAC payback that your CFO focuses on.
Taking this first step does more than protect individual deals. It’s also your foot in the door to a bigger conversation—where you have all the data—about customer profiles.
Take joint ownership of your ICP.
The best GTM teams use signals like product usage depth, integration velocity, time to value, support interaction patterns, and NPS by segment to pinpoint their best-fit customers.
“These indicators help teams refine the ICP and proactively manage risk,” writes ChurnZero’s Sarah Kiley. “Your customer team should play a central role in this process. You’re closest to the customer experience, and you have the most accurate pulse on what success and risk actually look like.”
“As a customer leader, you can also influence the discipline it takes to walk away from bad-fit deals,” she adds. “Sharing post-mortems, quantifying the cost of misaligned wins, and highlighting the opportunity cost of distraction can help shift mindsets across sales, marketing, and the C-suite.”
2. Discounting and flexibility at renewal.
The issue.
Every back-and-forth between a CSM and an internal deal desk or finance team is a window during which a customer can disengage, find a competitor, or quietly deprioritize a renewal.
CSMs shouldn’t have to escalate every negotiation, especially right now when budgets are tight and cost-efficiency is the focus. It puts renewals at risk and makes the process difficult to scale.
How we got here.
This is an organizational design issue dating back to when CSMs were relationship managers, not commercial owners. While most CSMs own revenue in some form today, the authority structure hasn’t kept pace, and there’s little incentive for finance teams to give this aspect of their role away.
How to take a formal role.
Work with your CFO to establish a pre-approved authority band for CSMs.
“You can authorize CSMs to offer discounts up to a specified limit or to extend payment terms from net 30 days to net 45 days,” suggests CS leader Adil Dittmer. “By understanding levers beyond pricing, you can empower your organization to scale more effectively by giving people the power to decide what they can offer.”
Engage your finance team. Come prepared with a detailed, clearly defined range in which CSMs should be able to maneuver without escalation.
Speak your CFO’s language. Frame it as a revenue protection initiative geared for faster renewals, less churn, and lower renewal costs.
Tie it to specific data. How many renewals last quarter were delayed by internal escalation? How long did they take? How many ultimately closed at or below what they would have approved anyway?
Bring the numbers. Quantify the cost of delayed renewals and you’ll find common ground with your CFO.
Include robust reporting. Your finance team needs both an audit trail and the peace of mind that CSMs will be accountable for discounting carefully, not recklessly.
3. Product roadmap prioritization.
The issue.
Your CSMs hear more unfiltered customer feedback in a week than most product managers hear in a quarter. Collectively, you know which feature gaps are driving churn risk and which complaints are systemic—and yet, this information doesn’t seem to move the product roadmap.
Why it happens.
“Throughout my career,” writes ChurnZero’s Abby Hammer, “I’ve seen product teams fail to take CS feedback seriously because it’s delivered in a way that’s emotional and laden with hyperbole—where “everything is on FIRE!” As a product manager, you get engulfed by this panicked pitch and miss the significant information and priorities that are embroiled by the heat.”
In other words, your information is valid; your delivery is killing it.
How to take a formal role.
Establish a monthly CS-to-product feedback loop. You need a defined input format and a commitment from product to respond. Every submission should include at least three things:
- Who requested the feature and what they’re trying to accomplish.
- How many customers are affected.
- How much revenue is potentially impacted?
Anchor your feedback to ARR at risk and you neutralize the emotion. Now, you’re making a business case. Product teams weigh that differently. If things stall nonetheless, you’re probably looking at a C-level conversation.
Because this is a feedback loop, not a one-way flow, your team should expect to hear back. A commitment from your product team to respond—even with a “not now / here’s why”—keeps the channel alive and encourages CSMs to advocate for the current roadmap rather than resent it.
Want to go further? These CS leaders standardized their entire feedback process with shared templates allowing CS, implementation, and sales to submit feedback directly into their product’s team’s tracking tool. One GTM team is able to upvote features and attach sales or renewal opportunities with corresponding revenue values to each request. Another runs a cross-functional product review board, representing product, CS and implementation, scoring requests using the RICE framework.
How do I bring this to my CRO?
Whatever you do, don’t frame this as a request for authority.
Lead with revenue risk and back it up with data, not a request for authority. Your aim is to turn a potential turf war into a conversation about process design, which is easier to act on.
For each decision area, document:
- Who currently owns the decision.
- What it costs when that decision goes wrong.
- The specific fix required and who needs to approve it.
Now, translate the data into a revenue impact narrative that you can take to an executive sponsor—ideally a CRO who owns both recurring and new revenue.
Pick the decision point with the biggest impact (typically CS involvement pre-close) and pitch a cross-departmental fix with the relevant team. Set a 30-day review date, measure the result, and use the data to build the case for the next one.
Finally, bear in mind that some of these fixes will require executive mandate, not just buy-in.
Buy-in means your CRO agrees it’s a good idea. A mandate means she tells sales leadership that CS will be on the final pre-sales call.
Know which one you’re asking for before you walk into the room.
