Feature Story
A few years ago, one of my onboarding managers came to me genuinely concerned. Not frustrated, not venting. Concerned.
"Hey. How did we close this customer?"
It wasn’t just what he asked but how he asked it. I knew there was something wrong. When your Onboarding Manager is questioning a closed deal before implementation even kicks off, you stop what you're doing and you dig in.
So we did.
What we found was interesting. The AE had done everything right on paper. He followed the process, asked the right questions, captured the answers, and moved the deal forward. By every measurable standard, he did his job.
But when I read through the notes myself, I saw red flags everywhere.
Flags that he may not have been trained to catch, but when I looked they were obvious.
And in all fairness, they were flags to CS but not to sales cause they wouldn’t impact their process to sell, but create a nightmare for us to support.
So I went to the sales leader and asked a straightforward question: why did we close this knowing what we knew?
He didn't have a good answer. And honestly, I don't think he was acting in bad faith. I don't think anyone was. But what became very clear in that conversation was that there was no governance. No process to validate the quality of a prospect before they crossed the finish line. No one whose job it was to look at the totality of what was captured and say "wait, stop, this isn't going to work."
The AE followed the playbook. The playbook just had no guardrails built into it.
I had to go back to my Onboarding Manager and tell him it was a great catch. And then I had to tell him that now we had to go have a really uncomfortable conversation with a customer about realigning expectations and figuring out how to make the best of a situation that probably should have never happened.
That sucked.
But it opened a door to one of the most important conversations I've had as a CS leader: what does it actually look like to govern a sales process well? And whose responsibility is it to build that?
Takeaway: The AE who closes a bad fit deal isn't usually the problem. They're working within a system that was never designed to stop them. If your CS team keeps inheriting customers who shouldn't have closed, the answer is not to get louder about it in Slack. The answer is to fix the process that allowed it.
THE RESOURCE
A starter framework for Sales Governance: The 4-Layer Model
If you're building governance from scratch or trying to fix a broken process, here's how to think about the layers. You need all four. Partial implementation is how you end up back where you started.
Layer 1: CRM Requirements Define the fields that must be completed at each deal stage. Fields that are not optional … required. This includes use case clarity, stakeholder mapping, implementation complexity, budget confirmation, and any known risks. If the field isn't filled, the deal doesn't move.
Layer 2: Stage-Gate Criteria At each stage transition, define what "ready to advance" actually looks like. Not activity-based, but rather outcome-based. Completing a discovery call is an activity., but getting clear answers about timeline, decision authority, and success criteria is an outcome. Build your gates around outcomes.
Layer 3: The Red Flag Review Build a joint Sales and CS review into your process for any deal above a certain size, complexity, or risk threshold. CS leadership should have a seat at that table, not as a rubber stamp, but as an actual voice. If CS raises a concern, there should be a defined process for what happens next.
Layer 4: The Feedback Loop Every quarter, review what's working. Pull the customers who churned or struggled in the first 90 days and trace them back through the sales process. What did the notes say? What flags were there? What got missed? That quarterly audit is how the framework gets smarter over time.
This isn't about slowing down Sales. It's about protecting the revenue you worked hard to close.
AI IN CS
Here's where it gets interesting, because AI is actually a legitimate solution for this problem.
Most sales governance breakdowns happen because the signals are there but no one is synthesizing them in real time. Calls get recorded, notes get logged, and CRM fields get filled in, but then someone like me has to manually read through all of it after the fact and piece together what went wrong.
AI changes that.
A few places where it's already showing up:
Call intelligence tools like Gong or Chorus can be configured to flag specific language patterns during discovery that indicate poor fit. Integration complexity questions answered vaguely. It can identify stakeholder gaps or uncover budget ambiguity. Instead of waiting for CS to inherit the problem, these signals surface during the sales cycle, automatically.
CRM automation can enforce stage-gate requirements. If certain fields aren't completed with qualifying information, the deal can't advance. No manual review needed, the system just doesn't let it move.
Churn analysis at scale. This is the one people aren't using enough. You can feed your AI tool every churned account from the last two to three years, and ask it to identify the common threads that appeared during the presale phase. Look at things like industry, company size, implementation complexity, stakeholder access, or use case fit. That pattern library becomes the foundation of your qualification framework.
The data has always been there. AI just makes it faster to find, easier to act on, and harder to ignore.
PODCASTS
The Accountant turned Chief Marketing & AI Officer at 2X featuring Lisa Cole
From retail cell phone sales to Chief Marketing & AI Officer, Lisa Cole's 25-year career was shaped by one recurring problem: marketing wasn't being taken seriously. She joins the show to talk reinvention, leadership, AI, and what it actually looks like when marketing becomes a company's primary growth driver.
EPS 10: Churn So Good: When Losing Customers is Actually Winning
Not all churn is bad. Sometimes losing a customer is actually a win. Dannah Vaughan, Director of CS at Silverline Solutions, joins me to break down good churn -- what it is, why it happens, and why it might be your smartest retention move yet.
THE SERVICES
I work with CS leaders and organizations who are serious about getting Customer Success right.
Advisory
Strategic partnership for CS leaders who need a thought partner, not another framework.
Coaching
1:1 coaching for CS professionals who are ready to lead with more clarity and confidence.
Education & enablement
Workshops and programs built for teams who want to level up, not just check a box.
Speaking
Keynotes and sessions that challenge how your audience thinks about Customer Success.
THE QUESTION
Does your company have a formal process that gives CS a voice in deal qualification before the contract is signed?
A FINAL NOTE
CLOSING WITH KRISTI
AEs are not the enemy. They are doing exactly what they were hired to do: close deals. The problem is that most companies have built a sales process with no system of checks, no meaningful guardrails, and no real accountability for fit.
And then they wonder why CS is always cleaning up the mess.
The good news is this is fixable. It requires cross-functional trust, a willingness to slow down a few deals in service of long-term retention, and leadership that sees qualification as a revenue protection strategy, not a Sales obstacle.
If you want to stop blaming your AEs, start by building the process that makes it impossible for bad fits to sneak through.
That's where the real work is.
See you next week,
Customer Success. Revenue Follows.