Are you scaling CS the wrong way?

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Hey CS Pro,

 If your company is moving upmarket and your CS team still runs like a high-volume machine, this episode is basically a mirror. Alon Ahronberg, VP of Customer Success at Atera, breaks down what actually changes when you shift from product-led growth to sales-led growth.

If your GTM team is moving upmarket than this week’s episode is perfect for you. Alon shares tons of practical tips, tricks and best practices on how to make your entire company work differently as you start to serve a new segment of customers.

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Why “just hire more CSMs” is the trap

One of the biggest callouts Alon makes is the mistake leaders default to when the business starts going upmarket: doing the same thing, just with more people.

It sounds logical at first. More customers, bigger deals, higher expectations, so you hire more CSMs. The problem is the motion has changed, and your operating system has not.

At Atera, they had tens of thousands of customers, and a CS org that was still built for scale. CSMs were managing books like 1,000 accounts, sometimes 500. That can work in a product led motion where the product does most of the heavy lifting, and CS is largely reactive, responding when something breaks, when a customer complains, when someone asks for help.

But as sales led revenue grew, Alon mentioned it was already close to 40% of revenue coming from sales. That shift brought in bigger organizations, bigger deals, and a totally different service expectation. The CS org was lagging behind, not because the team was not good, but because the model was wrong for the new customer type.

So the first shift was not “work harder.” It was “redesign how we serve.”

The rebuild starts with segmentation, health, and QBR tools

When you have an existing team and a massive customer base, you cannot flip a switch and expect everyone to suddenly run perfect customer journeys. Alon was really clear on this, it has to be one step at a time, and you have to give the team tools.

Here is what he prioritized early:

1. Redraw the book of business

   You have to draw a line between no touch accounts and managed accounts. At the beginning, their easiest starting point was ARR and account size, with a few exceptions. Later, they started refining segmentation further, including organizational size.

This matters because your “managed account” motion should not feel like a scaled support motion. It should feel intentional, proactive, and value led.

2. Define a health score, even a simple one

   They started by mapping accounts and defining what “healthy,” “neutral,” and “at risk” actually means. Even if it is imperfect at first, even if part of it is CSM sentiment, it creates a shared language and a baseline view of the portfolio.

3. Standardize QBRs, because the team needs structure

   They built QBR formats for bigger accounts and mid touch accounts. The point was not to create a pretty deck. The point was to help CSMs ask better questions, gather better data, and then use that data to strengthen health scoring and proactive planning.

4. Add forecasting so you can operate strategically

   They introduced a forecasting mechanism to understand where they would land in upcoming quarters, where risks were sitting, and how to move before things turn into fires.

The theme across all of this is simple: get out of reactive mode by creating a system the team can actually execute.

Adoption is not “use the product,” it is “use what drives renewals”

When I asked Alon to define adoption, I loved that he did not pretend it was easy. Their product is a platform with multiple pillars, and adoption is always evolving depending on customer maturity, use case, and what is new in the product.

What they did was map the platform into pillars, then identify the “sticky” features inside each pillar, the ones most tied to value and longer term retention. They looked at things like usage volume per account, license utilization, and feature usage patterns, then built a picture of what “healthy usage” looks like.

But here is the important nuance: they still anchor it in conversation. Not every product area is relevant for every customer, so success plans have to be tailored. Adoption is not a universal checklist, it is a focused plan tied to customer outcomes.

They are also experimenting with using AI and conversation intelligence to speed up insights. The goal is to move from manual dashboards toward smarter recommendations, including eventually pushing personalized recommendations to end users, not just champions. Right now it is still in experimentation, but the direction is clear: reduce friction for the team, and make value visibility more automatic.

And then there is the part that most teams skip: re onboarding.

Alon’s team rebuilt onboarding into clear packages based on customer size and complexity, with explicit goals, checklists, and a clear success definition. Then they realized something big: they had a large population of strategic accounts that never went through a proper onboarding experience.

So they proactively launched a re-onboarding initiative, before customers complained.

They identified the population, reviewed usage and gaps, and approached customers with a clear “what’s in it for you” offer. The message was basically: we noticed underutilized areas, we can assign a professional services engineer to help you implement and get more value. They pulled in extra support to operationalize it, including people from presales and tier two engineering, and called the task force “Delta Force.”

This is such an underrated lesson. Re-onboarding is not an apology tour. It is a proactive risk mitigation play, and it can be framed as additional value.

If your company is moving upmarket, check out the full episode for more tips. Keep it simple, keep it fast, and focus on momentum.

Have a listen to the full podcast:

I hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us.

Cheers to your CS success,

Anika