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Insightful Experience
Post-Sale Operating Model Design
A diagnostic framework for growth-stage leadership teams
Leaders at growth-stage companies need to understand what their post-sale organization can actually deliver right now, and what's quietly costing them retention as they scale. That starts with an honest diagnostic: what's actually in place, where retention is leaking, and what needs to happen next. The operating model behind this work was built inside-out from more than 15 years of running the customer operations that retention depends on.
The Problem
A VP Customer Success at a $60M ARR company watches her team work harder every quarter while NRR stays flat at 105%. CSMs own adoption, but Services handles onboarding. Support escalations interrupt account planning. Renewals live with Sales, but CS carries the relationship. When the board asks “Why aren't we expanding faster?” she knows the answer: nobody owns the goals that drive expansion at each stage of the customer journey.
As companies scale, post-sale complexity compounds faster than structure can keep up. Renewal ownership blurs. Forecast precision declines. Expansion becomes inconsistent. Support, Services, and CS compete for the same capacity.
From the outside, growth looks healthy. Inside, leaders feel friction. Board conversations get harder, and confidence in retention metrics weakens.
This work is structural. It's also human. Operating models succeed when people understand their role, trust leadership decisions, and see how change supports performance, not just efficiency.
Why This Matters Now
Boards are watching retention more closely than ever. Gross and net revenue retention have become the read on whether the business is durable, and “do more with less” is the standing expectation. When the operating model underneath is ambiguous, that pressure lands on your team.
The team absorbs the gap: firefighting handoffs, re-litigating who owns the renewal, rebuilding forecasts by hand. Every quarter you run on an unclear operating model, the next fix gets bigger, and the people holding it together get more tired.
The cost of unclear ownership doesn't stay flat as you scale. It compounds.
Where This Comes From
For over 15 years, I've built and led customer operations teams inside companies like Zapier, Zendesk, and ServiceMax. I've seen what happens when efficiency is pursued without structural clarity, and what's possible when performance and people are aligned intentionally. When the right foundations are laid, results follow. I've led teams that:
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Increased Net Revenue Retention 4% year over year
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Reduced onboarding time by 75%
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Decreased support costs by 22%
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Improved employee Net Promoter Score by 20+ points
I don't arrive with a one size fits all framework or playbook. I work inside-out, using your team's knowledge and your customers' insights to design an operating model that fits your business and holds up in reality.
From Guesswork to Predictable Revenue
When everyone agrees on what the post-sale journey looks like for your business, the hard problems get easier. Defining those stages is part of the work, because they aren't the same for every company. Once they're set, people know which stage of the journey a customer is in, who owns them there, and what the goals of each stage are. Ownership stops blurring, and handoffs stop slipping.
A shared model also tells you what to measure. At each stage, you track the early signals of where retention is heading, the leading indicators of NRR, so you can act now instead of waiting for renewal. (The concept of leading indicators of NRR comes from Winning by Design's revenue Bowtie.)
That's the shift from hoping retention holds to knowing where it's heading, early enough to do something about it. It's how post-sale revenue becomes reliable and predictable instead of a quarter-to-quarter guess.
What the Engagement Covers
How It Works
This starts as a focused diagnostic, not a six-month transformation. Over about three to four weeks, we work with the people who live in the work and your cross-functional stakeholders, through interviews and working sessions, to define the customer stages and assess your current state across the five dimensions, so you can see what's working and what's straining as you scale.
You leave with an executive-ready operating roadmap:
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Customer lifecycle stages by segment
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Clear accountability structures
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Foundational requirements for intelligent automation
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A prioritized action plan, including quick wins you can act on right away
A Faster First Step
Not every team is ready to commit to the full engagement on day one. Some are dealing with one problem that is loud right now: handoffs that leak, a renewal nobody clearly owns, or expansion that works in some accounts and not others. For those situations, I offer a Rapid Assessment. It is a focused, one-week engagement that goes deep on the single dimension causing the most urgent friction, rather than assessing all five.
In one week, we run a short diagnostic on the problem you name, get to the root cause, and put clear options in front of you. You leave with:
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A written assessment of the problem, its root cause, and where the friction is actually coming from
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Two or three recommended paths forward, with the trade-offs of each
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Quick wins you can act on in the next 30 to 60 days
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A live working session with your leadership team to walk through it all, plus 30 days of follow-up access for questions as you put it into motion
The Rapid Assessment stands on its own, and it is also the natural first step into the full Post-Sale Operating Model Design engagement. If the deeper work makes sense, we already share a read on where you are, and we pick up from there.
Who This Is For
This is for CEOs, CROs, and heads of Customer Success at growth-stage B2B companies (roughly $35M–$150M ARR) who are scaling faster than their structure can keep up.
It's a fit if retention is under board scrutiny, roles overlap, renewal ownership is unclear, and handoffs between teams are starting to slip. If your team is working hard but the outcomes aren't showing up, and you want to move from reactive firefighting to a post-sale organization that runs with clarity and delivers reliable, predictable revenue, this is the work.
