According to a survey we conducted among the customer success community in Israel, a significant percentage of customer success professionals carry quotas for renewals, upsells, or both.
But what is the importance of carrying quotas for customer success professionals, and why does the percentage of those carrying quotas increase as the company stage progresses?
Carrying a quota as a customer success professional means being commercially responsible for the end-to-end renewal and/or upsell process. While having a single person familiar with everything can be advantageous, it also has its downsides, such as the risk of interrupting the customer success manager (CSM) from focusing on nurturing relationships, product adoption, and value, as well as the need for different skillsets to negotiate and seal deals.
The data revealed that Seed Stage companies had the lowest percentage of customer success professionals carrying quotas, while companies in Series A, B, and C/D Funding had higher quotas. However, in companies with Series C/D Funding or more, the percentage of quotas for renewals and upsells dropped, and more customer success professionals carried quotas for both renewals and upsells.

Possible explanations could be:
- As the company stage matures, the customer success teams become more experienced and better equipped to handle their regular role and the commercial aspect of carrying quotas.
- As companies mature, they may have more complex product offerings, which require identifying use cases and working closely with customers to understand their evolving needs and requirements. Moving it to Sales might be a lost-lost for all sides.
- As companies mature, there may be greater pressure on revenue growth, which may drive the need to focus the customer success teams on commercial aspects. This may be particularly true for companies that have already achieved a certain level of market penetration and are looking to expand their customer base or increase revenue from existing customers.
But, carrying quotas can also present challenges for customer success professionals, such as the risk of damaging customer relationships by being too sales-focused and the need to balance competing priorities. To address these challenges, companies can:
- Support their customer success teams by providing ongoing training and development, focusing on commercial skills.
- Setting KPIs that combine both growth and retention/adoption elements.
- Hire a cross-department function to work alongside the CS and/or CSM and be responsible for the operational aspects. (Renewal/Account Manager)
In conclusion, It is obvious that as companies mature, they feel more confident with giving their CS teams end-to-end responsibilities and ownership of the customer lifecycle. There is no right or wrong, the decision should fit the company culture, functions skills, market and product elements, and more.