At a Customer Success meetup last week, someone raised the question: "Should Sales own Customer Success?"
The argument was straightforward: CS impacts revenue. Sales owns revenue. Therefore, Sales should own CS.
I understand the logic. But it ignores a much deeper operational difference between selling and customer success.
Sales is fundamentally a discipline of decision-making. The process is: pitch value, run process, handle objections, push toward a decision.
And importantly, "no" is acceptable. A salesperson can lose 80% of opportunities and still have a phenomenal career.
Customer Success is completely different. In Customer Success, I need 90% "yes" answers over time.
Not one decision. Hundreds of decisions. Will the customer change behavior? Will executives stay aligned? Will users adopt new processes? Will departments cooperate? Will priorities survive leadership changes? Will champions leave? Will the customer continue investing attention when things get hard?
That is not persuasion. That is change management. And change management behaves very differently from sales.
You cannot "close" organizational change in a meeting or two. You cannot objection-handle your way through a broken internal process. You cannot pitch-value your way around executive disengagement. You cannot force adoption when the customer lacks operational discipline.
This is why I get nervous when companies think Customer Success is just "post-sale revenue." Because if CS becomes purely revenue pressure, it risks losing the operational rigor required to actually create customer outcomes.
And ironically, when outcomes weaken, revenue weakens too.
Now, none of this means Sales and CS should be disconnected. In strong organizations: Sales establishes the business case, Implementation operationalizes the solution, CS drives long-term value realization, Expansion emerges naturally from measurable success, and sales engages.
That's a system.
But I'm not convinced the discipline that excels at getting decisions is automatically the discipline best suited to managing long-term organizational change. Maybe the better question is this:
If Sales owns Customer Success, then who owns customer outcomes?
And if the answer is still "Sales," then we should probably ask whether the organization truly understands what Customer Success actually is.