Most CS leaders know this is true.

They just don’t say it out loud.

Your CSMs are great at building rapport. They’re great at QBR decks, adoption reviews, and being liked. But when the conversation turns commercial, renewal pressure, expansion opportunity, pricing friction, something breaks down.

They go vague. They defer to sales. They end the call with “I’ll follow up on that.”

And revenue walks out the door.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a training gap. CS for too long was built to be relationship-first, and most teams were never given the commercial skills to go with it. The good news: those skills are learnable, borrowable, and already being used by the best sales teams in the world.

Here’s how to close the gap.

The Core Problem: Three Breakdowns Most CS Teams Have

Before you can fix it, you have to name it clearly.

In most CS orgs, commercial conversations fall apart in three specific ways:

1. They talk usage instead of outcomes.

CSMs report on logins, feature adoption, and support tickets. But the economic buyer doesn’t care about any of that. They care about revenue saved, risk reduced, or growth enabled. If your CSMs can’t translate their customer’s activity into a business outcome narrative, they have no commercial credibility.

2. They treat expansion as an event, not a process.

The expansion conversation happens at renewal. That’s already too late. If your CSMs aren’t continuously qualifying growth potential throughout the customer lifecycle, the way a good AE qualifies a deal, you’re leaving revenue on the table every single quarter.

3. They assume value instead of articulating it.

This one is quiet and deadly. CSMs believe the customer understands why they’re valuable. The customer doesn’t. Value gets eroded every day it goes unspoken. If your CSMs aren’t actively constructing the narrative of impact, someone else will,  usually a competitor.

What Sales Gets Right (That CS Can Borrow)

Here’s what I said at a recent talk for the Customer Success Collective, and I’ll say it again here:

“Sales isn’t a dirty word.”

CS isn’t becoming sales. But we need to borrow sales discipline, without losing our values. Three specific behaviors transfer directly.

Behavior 1: Value Articulation → Outcome Narratives

Sales reps are trained to tie every feature back to a business result from the first conversation. CS tends to do the opposite, we explain how the product works and hope the customer connects the dots themselves.

Stop hoping. Start narrating.

The format is simple:

“Because of [what the customer did], you achieved [specific result], which means [business impact].”

Example: “Because your team activated the automation workflows in the first 30 days, they reduced manual prep time by 40%. That has lead to an increase in prospect calls by 30% leading to an increase in revenue of $850,000. It’s time your reps are now spending in front of buyers instead of building slides that nobody loves to do.”

That’s a renewal. That’s an expansion. That’s a conversation an exec remembers.

Behavior 2: Deal Qualification → Expansion Discovery

Sales qualifies continuously. They’re always asking: does this customer have a problem we can solve, urgency to solve it, and budget to act?

CS can run the same process,  just translated:

The key question every CSM should be asking in every meaningful conversation: “What changes for you if we solve this?”

Discovery should be done on every call. There are always things to continually evaluate with your customers and expand upon your point of view into their business problems, what their current KPI’s are and how they are changing. 

Make discovery part of every step within the customer journey. 

That question opens expansion. It also tells you where churn risk is hiding.

Behavior 3: Deal Control → Conversation Control

Sales controls next steps. They set agendas. They book the next meeting before leaving the current one. They use mutual action plans because they know that decision momentum is a commercial asset.

CS teams too many times have “nice conversations with no decisions.”

That needs to stop.

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

The Mindset Shift That Makes All of This Work

Frameworks without mindset are just checklists. CSMs who are great at commercial conversations don’t just use different words, they think about the relationship differently.

The old mindset:

The modern revenue driven mindset:

Here’s the line that reframes everything:

“Trust isn’t built by avoiding commercial conversations. It’s built by handling them well.”

A customer who respects you trusts you more than one who simply likes you. When you confidently prescribe a solution, even a paid one, because you understand their business deeply enough to know it’s right, that’s not selling. That’s advising. That’s the difference between a vendor and a commercial trusted advisor.

Where to Start: Three Questions Every CSM Should Ask Before Every Renewal

Don’t overhaul your whole playbook at once. Start here.

Before any renewal conversation, your CSMs should be able to answer:

A simple bonus question to ask is “How would our stakeholder speak about the value of our product to their CFO”. Even if you think there is great value you have created, you need to make sure the internal stakeholders can justify this to the CFO.

If your team can’t answer all three, that’s your coaching agenda for the next 90 days.

Commercial skill in CS isn’t about turning your team into salespeople. It’s about giving them the tools to protect the value they’ve already created, and the confidence to talk about it.

The CSMs who get this right don’t just retain customers. They grow them.

And that’s how CS becomes a revenue engine.

Found this useful? Forward it to one CS leader who needs to hear it.

And hit reply, I’d love to know: where does your team struggle most in commercial conversations?

Onwards,

Mark