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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
As your customer base grows into the hundreds or thousands, more substantial specialization of success and support roles may make sense. For example, you might split out inbound response support versus implementation versus ongoing success versus account management and renewals. The benefit of this is that you can get efficiencies of specialization and scale. You can provide a better level of service to folks who are chatting on your support chat widget or sending in tickets if people are staffed purely to deal with those; otherwise, they’ll be left waiting until a customer success manager gets off an implementation call and can turn her attention to tickets. Or you can have more senior, more skilled, and thus more expensive customer success staff focused purely on implementation, quarterly business reviews, and project management of success activities, while more junior (and less expensive) staff focus on first-line ticket response—not dissimilar from the specialization of SDRs and AEs in a pre-sales environment.
Regardless of how deep you get into customer success in your company’s earliest days, the most important thing is to think about it at all. The biggest error founders and other first-time revenue leaders make, aside from the inability to sell at all, is insufficiently investing in the success of customers once they have been sold.
If at very minimum you have a success mindset, and choose from the approaches above, you will already be far ahead of the game.