CS vs. Sales 2 - Poetry and Prose

Sales teams do their job using poetry, with (ideally) a healthy amount of prose. They put the product in its best light, connect it to what the customer says they need, and make commitments that sound like certainty in the room. Most of the time this is well intentioned. But we all know sales reps who stretch the truth too far. Either way, by the time the gap between what was promised and what's actually deliverable shows up, the client is no longer sales's problem. They're in the hands of the customer success manager.

Customer success teams do their work by delivering in prose, with a touch of poetry. They're the ones fielding the complaint when the feature that was "basically there" turns out to be six months away. They're the ones having the harder relational conversation, the one that involves back-and-forth rather than a confident close. I don't condone lying to a client to get a deal done. But I think CS managers need to understand what's actually happening when this gap opens up. The salesperson is doing the job they're paid to do, presenting the product in the best possible light and connecting it to a need. That's not a character flaw. It's the incentive working as designed.

CS is paid to do something different: to make the customer a success, which usually means absorbing friction as well as generating excitement. Those are two different jobs with two different emotional registers, and CS people frequently resent sales for doing theirs well.

There's a pattern underneath this worth naming honestly. Customer success professionals, by and large, are people pleasers. It's a large part of what makes them good at the job, patient, attentive, genuinely invested in the client staying happy. But the same instinct that makes someone excellent at managing a relationship often makes them reluctant to push a product recommendation, because recommending something that costs the client money risks the very rapport they've spent months building. This isn't a judgement. It's simply what it is, and it means a lot of CS people are mismatched to any expectation that they'll behave like a salesperson when the moment calls for it. The irony is that the opposite tends to be true. The courage to make a recommendation that genuinely serves the client, rather than the one that keeps the peace, is usually what earns the rapport and the standing they were trying to protect in the first place.

This matters because it changes what "stepping up commercially" actually requires. It isn't just permission or incentive. For a lot of CS people, it's a genuinely different set of instincts to the ones that made them good at the role in the first place, and pretending otherwise sets people up to fail.

The harder truth, for CS managers who want the commercial upside, is that closing that gap means being comfortable doing some of what they resent in sales, presenting an idea persuasively, tolerating the discomfort of asking for money, accepting that not every client will say yes. For organisations, it means recognising that not everyone in a CS seat wants or is suited to that work, and building the role, and who fills it, accordingly.