By Sagar Shukla, Co-Founder, Foresight
Why Post-Sales, Not Sales, Should Be Your Profit Center 💸
It’s time for a contrarian perspective on SaaS growth: Sales isn’t the engine driving your business forward—Post-Sales is. And the faster you realize that, the sooner you’ll unlock the true profit potential of your organization.
Let’s face it. Customer Success (CS) is often seen as a cost center. Why? Because CS teams are constantly in a scramble to justify their existence. We’ve been treating post-sales like a necessary evil, spending more on expensive resources to patch product gaps and maintain relationships just to squeeze renewals out of customers. In this environment of shrinking software margins and increasing price pressure, it’s no wonder many CEOs are cutting CS investments—they aren’t seeing the return.
But here’s the kicker: Post-Sales is where the profits are hidden. If your SaaS business is focused solely on revenue generation from sales, you’re missing the bigger picture.
Sales generates revenue. Post-Sales generates profits.
And if you don’t start viewing it through this lens, your company is going to keep running in circles, chasing the next deal while profits slip through your fingers.
The Value Gap Is the Real Villain 🦹
If you’re measuring your Customer Success team by NPS scores, usage metrics, or sentiment, you’re doing it wrong. These internal metrics are just that—internal, based on your own biased assumptions. It’s an “inside-out” view that focuses on what you think is important. But value is external. It’s driven by the customer’s perception—an “outside-in” view. And here’s the harsh truth: perception is reality.
The real battle lies in closing the value gap—the difference between the rosy picture your sales team painted during the deal and the actual value your customer experiences post-sale.
If that gap widens, you’re staring down the barrel of churn, not renewal. Customers have countless options in today’s market, from cheaper alternatives to sticking with an incumbent like Microsoft. So, why would they stay if you’re not delivering on the promise?
Post-Sales Drives Profit—But Only If You Evolve 💵
To turn Post-Sales into a profit center, you need to rethink the entire operation. First, you need to address the revenue side: Revenue is a byproduct of value. If you close the value gap and deliver on the customer’s expectations, revenue will follow. The key is ensuring that your post-sales team has the skills, technology, and processes to actually deliver value—not just measure internal metrics that don’t correlate with renewal or expansion.
Now, let’s talk about the cost side. We all know the mantra: do more with less. But in the world of enterprise SaaS, where a single customer might have 10, 50, or even 100 stakeholders, this becomes an operational nightmare. The reality is, most of these stakeholders are not hands-on users. Yet they’re the ones making the decisions. So how do you efficiently engage all these stakeholders without burning through your resources?
The answer lies in scaling through technology. You need to be able to engage multiple personas across the organization, track their perceptions of value, and understand how the value gap changes over time. What mattered at onboarding may shift entirely by renewal. Without real-time insights into this evolving gap, your CS team will be shooting in the dark.
Heroic Efforts Aren’t Enough—Hope Is Not a Strategy ❌
Here’s the brutal truth: You can’t rely on heroic efforts from individual CSMs to save the day. Sure, some of your CSMs might be rockstars, but heroics aren’t scalable.
What you need is a systematic, technology-driven approach that empowers every CSM to engage efficiently with multiple stakeholders, measure the value gap at scale, and close that gap in time for renewal.
This is how you reduce the cost of customer management while increasing revenue. Fewer CSMs managing more accounts and more stakeholders efficiently? That’s a formula for higher profits.
Post-Sales Is the New Powerhouse 🚀
When you master this, post-sales becomes your biggest competitive advantage. Now, post-sales drives valuation. Now, it’s spitting out positive cash flow to reinvest in sales, not the other way around. Post-Sales isn’t just supporting Sales anymore—it’s leading it.
It’s time to shift your thinking. What got you here won’t get you there. It’s time to stop viewing post-sales as a cost center and start treating it as the profit engine of your SaaS business.
The future belongs to those who understand this. Do you?
