Who Should Own the Post-Sales Customer Journey

This session brought together Kristine Kukich, Jamie McDermott, Alison Bukowski, Angela Sutton, Erin Felton and Diana Gabroveanu to work through a question that keeps coming up for post-sales teams: who actually owns the handoff from sales into onboarding, adoption and renewal, and what authority should that person or team have.

The panel largely agreed that a customer experience function, with customer success at its center, is the right home for this role. Alison Bukowski argued she would not place it anywhere else, having seen it work reasonably well in enablement but struggle in marketing or sales, and she made the case for a chief customer officer who oversees customer success, advocacy and support together. Diana Gabroveanu described the CSM as a kind of family doctor who holds the full history of a customer relationship, and noted that even a small team, she mentioned one company with four CSMs across twenty four staff, can make this model work if someone owns the continuity.

Erin Felton reframed the question away from org charts and toward mandate: whoever holds this role needs visibility into what happened presale, authority across functions when handoffs break down, and a shared view of growth metrics, regardless of company size. She also described the role as glue rather than a boss, stepping back once something falls clearly inside one team's territory.

Angela Sutton grounded the conversation in data, pointing to activation research showing most drop-off happens in the first seven days and most churn in the first three months, which is why someone needs to actively shepherd a customer through that early window rather than leaving it to chance.

On metrics, the group pushed back on single-number thinking. Kristine Kukich argued that no one metric holds up across the whole journey, and Alison Bukowski added that teams should keep asking "so what?" of every number they track. It is easy, she said, to fall into vanity metrics that only look good on a report or dashboard. Her fix is to ask customers directly what they want to achieve with the product, build at least one goal around their answer, and then work out how to measure it.

One thing to check this week: list the metrics on your team's dashboard and write next to each one the customer goal it tells you about. Any metric with nothing beside it is worth questioning.