The Commercial Skills Gap Nobody Trained CSMs For

 

I have spent a lot of my working life reading sales pitches, board decks, business reviews and investor updates that aren’t mine.

And this year, one line keeps repeating across almost all of them. Net revenue retention, not new logos, is the number that gets read out first.

Quick definitions before we go any further, since we’ll lean on this shorthand throughout: NRR (net revenue retention), MQL (marketing qualified lead), CSM (customer success manager), AM (account manager), CS (customer success), and SaaS (software as a service).

That shift matters to me for the same reason the shift from MQL counting to brand engagement matters. The metric a company leads with tells you what it actually values. Right now, most SaaS boards value the customers they already have more than the ones they’re chasing.

Which puts a lot of weight on one team that was never built to carry it.

 

Customer Success Was Hired for a Different Job

 

CSMs were hired to keep customers healthy, onboarded properly, and renewed on time (the actual job spec, more or less, that most of them signed up for).

Relationship work. Support work, in the best sense of that word.

Somewhere in the last couple of years, the job quietly changed underneath them. Expansion revenue. Upsell conversations. Commercial confidence… none of that was in the original brief.

A recent 132-company survey from Mostly Metrics put a number on the mismatch. 56% of CS teams are now paid on expansion revenue. But 63% of the time, that expansion still sits with someone else, usually an Account Manager who actually runs the conversation (and, more often than not, gets the credit for it at comp review too).

CS carries the number. Somebody else carries the skill and the seat at the table.

That’s not a CSM performance problem. It’s a training and structure problem, and it’s been quietly building for a while.

 

Why “Just Be More Commercial” Doesn’t Work

 

The obvious fix looks simple from the outside. Send the team on a sales course. Give them a script. Job done.

But it isn’t job done.

CS relationships run on trust that’s been built slowly, often over years. What happens to that trust the moment a CSM starts sounding like a rep working a quota? The customer notices first, usually before anyone on our side does.

Gainsight’s research puts a figure on how much is riding on this. Roughly 40% of SaaS revenue now comes from renewals and expansion inside the existing customer base, not new logos. That’s not a side project anymore. It’s most of the growth engine.

Which means the commercial conversation has to happen inside the relationship, not bolted on top of it.

 

The Flywheel Doesn’t Turn Without This

 

I’ve spent a good chunk of my career explaining the flywheel to people who still think in funnels.

Funnels are linear. Attract, then convert, then done, and the customer drops out the bottom while marketing goes looking for the next one.

The flywheel treats growth as circular instead. Attract, engage, delight, and the delighted customer becomes the thing that speeds the wheel back up again… referrals, case studies, reviews, and yes, expansion revenue. Friction anywhere in that loop slows the whole business down, not just one department’s numbers.

Here’s the bit that gets missed in most marketing conversations about it (it’s marketing’s favourite metaphor of the last few years, whether everyone using it actually understands the mechanics or not). The flywheel doesn’t run on marketing’s energy. It runs on customer energy, and CS stands closer to that energy source than anyone else in the business.

A CSM who can turn a renewal into a proper expansion conversation isn’t just hitting a CS number. They’re adding spin to a wheel marketing spends its whole budget trying to get moving from a cold start. A CSM who can’t have that conversation, or who damages the relationship trying, is quietly taking spin back out of it.

So this was never really a CS-only problem, whatever the org chart says. Marketing should care who’s having these conversations and how well, because a happy, expanding account throws off more referrals and more case-study material than any amount of paid acquisition ever will. It’s the same argument behind moving away from lead-volume metrics in the first place. Brand engagement over MQL counts, and now NRR over new-logo counts, are the same shift wearing two different names.

None of that changes what’s actually missing though. The skill itself.

 

What the Skill Gap Actually Looks Like

 

It’s rarely a confidence problem in the way people assume.

Most CSMs I’ve spoken with can spot an expansion signal fine. Usage climbing. A new stakeholder turning up on calls. A renewal date approaching with obvious headroom in the account.

Where it breaks down is turning that signal into a conversation without it feeling like a pivot. Framing value in commercial terms. Asking a budget question without sounding like they’ve swapped jobs halfway through the call. Handling “let me check with finance” without going quiet for six weeks afterwards.

None of that gets taught in a support onboarding programme. It’s not really taught in a sales one either, because a rep isn’t managing an existing relationship while they ask it.

(Whether expansion should sit with CS or with AMs long term is a separate argument, and one for another post.)

 

Closing the Gap Without Losing the Relationship

 

The fix isn’t more theory. It’s practice, on the actual conversations CS teams are already having.

That’s where this connects back to what we’re building. Roleplay generated from a CSM’s own real calls, not a generic script, scored against frameworks built for customer-value conversations rather than a hard close. Practising the exact moment a renewal call needs to become an expansion conversation, and being able to retry it until it stops feeling like two different jobs stapled together.

Small, structured reps between real calls. Not a two-day workshop everyone’s forgotten by Friday.

If your CS team is being measured on a number nobody trained them to hit, that’s worth raising before the next board deck goes out with the same gap sitting in it.

On your own? Start with Free Pass, no card needed, and see what that kind of practice actually looks like. If you are considering this for your team then SenPro Teams is the place to start.

Built by revenue people, for revenue people. That includes the ones whose job title says “success,” not “sales.”