We’ve all seen the graph. You know the one: the beautiful, upward-sloping “S-curve” of a high-growth company. It’s the chart we show investors, the one that justifies the late nights and the high-octane pressure.
But if you peel back the glossy layers and peer into the dark underbelly of that graph, past the shiny new logos and the aggressive marketing spend, you’ll often find a ghost.
It’s the ghost of under-monetized accounts. This ghost is the direct result of overlooked opportunities, revenue leakage, and small downsells. It is hidden by industry-leading NPS scores and retention rates. While customers may stick around, yesterday’s sales pursuit never materializes into the strategic account it was promised to be. “Land and expand” becomes something much more like “land and defend.”
For a decade, we’ve poured our collective brilliance into the Pre-Sale. We built Sales Ops to turn the Wild West of selling into a disciplined, stage-gated machine. Then we built Rev Ops to bridge the gap between Marketing and Sales, ensuring the data flowed like water from the first click or form fill to the signed contract.
We brought rigor. We brought discipline. We brought data. Oh, did we bring data.
But then, the moment the ink dries? We go back to “vibes.” Account health lives in the black box of post-sales delivery. And the silent erosion of Net Dollar Retention (NDR) that happens when a company gets world-class at winning customers but stays mediocre at keeping and growing them starts to seep in.
The Relationship Fallacy
In the post-sale world of Account Management, Customer Success, and Client Services, we’ve long hidden behind a dangerous word: “Relationships.”
We’ve treated the client relationship as something too human or complex to be mapped, measured, and optimized. We track a new $50K lead through ten stages of rigorous pipeline inspection, yet we allow a $500K legacy account to drift toward churn because “the relationship feels okay.” Worse still, we let the $50K account, which should become $500K, languish.
This isn’t just a missed opportunity; it’s a failure of leadership.
The hardest truth in business is that you cannot scale a feeling. If your post-sale strategy relies on the individual heroics of a few charismatic Account Managers rather than a data-driven, repeatable process, you don’t have a growth engine. You have a ticking time bomb.
The Rise of Commercial Operations
The era of “Acquisition-Only Rev Ops” is ending. The next frontier isn’t about finding more leads; it’s about applying the same cold, hard rigor we used in Sales Ops to the entire commercial lifecycle.
We are moving toward Rev Ops for Clients – what we’ve dubbed Commercial Operations.
In this new world, the post-sale experience isn’t a service function; its purpose is to maximize the commercial value of the customer relationship. In this world:
- Customer Health is no longer a subjective red/yellow/green color code chosen by a Success Manager; it’s a calculated index of product telemetry, support velocity, and executive engagement.
- Expansion isn’t a nice to have that happens at renewal time; it’s a disciplined pipeline with stages, probabilities, and forecasting rigor that mirrors your New Business desk.
- Client Services isn’t a cost center; it’s a predictable value-delivery factory where Time-to-Value is optimized with the same intensity as Lead-to-Close.
The Architects of What’s Next
This shift requires more than just new software. It requires a new type of practitioner.
It requires people who are uncomfortable with the black box. People who believe that the discipline of the pipeline should extend through the entire life of the customer. We are looking for the architects who want to build a Go-To-Market engine that is as rigorous on day 1,000 as it is on day 1.
The silos are leaning. The old way of separating Sales from Success is cracking under the weight of modern economics.
We are building a community of forward-leaning Rev Ops leaders who are ready to stop being Sales and Marketing Support and start being Commercial Architects. We are defining the playbooks for the next generation of GTM leadership.
The question is: are you going to keep chasing the next logo, or are you ready to master the entire machine and help optimize profit?
If you’re in the latter camp, send me a quick message on LinkedIn. We’re building a community of Rev Ops leaders interested in joining knowledge sharing events for those who think differently about what Rev Ops can and should be, and we’d love to add you to our list.
