Who really owns cross-sell/upsell opportunities? Everyone recognizes potential in their portfolio of existing clients, but most often expansion opportunities remain a distant dream.
Your Customer Success team thinks Sales should handle it because "it's a sale." Your Sales team thinks CS should handle it because "they own the relationship." Meanwhile, your customer just renewed, and six months from now, your competitor will sell them the expanded solution you should have offered.
Ask any executive, "Who's responsible for cross-sell and upsell in your organization?" and you'll get an immediate answer. Ask two people the same question, and you'll get two different answers. And that's a real problem.
Research shows that less than 4% of sales executives report acceptable to excellent results from their cross-sell and upsell activities. The biggest culprit isn't strategy or skills. It's that nobody has clear, unambiguous ownership of expansion opportunities.
Customer Success owns retention. Sales owns new logos. And upsell? Well, whoever spots the opportunity should pursue it.
In practice, opportunities fall through the cracks because nobody's actively looking. No one develops expansion-specific skills because it's not their primary job. And compensation doesn't align; your AE's comp is weighted toward new business, your CSM's toward retention.
Companies give CS expansion responsibility but skip a critical step: deciding whether they will sell or identify and pass.
If CS is supposed to sell, they need sales training, compensation that rewards closed deals, and time allocated away from success responsibilities. Most get the responsibility without the enablers.
If CS is supposed to identify and pass opportunities, you need explicit criteria for what triggers a handoff, a defined process, and agreement on who maintains the relationship. Most companies say "work together" and assume collaboration happens naturally. It doesn't.
Even when upsell is part of quota, it's usually a smaller percentage. Given the choice between a $200K new logo or a $75K expansion deal, AEs choose the new logo every time.
Worse, many AEs lack consistent contact with customers after the deal closes. Now they're supposed to re-engage for an upsell? The customer wonders why their CSM isn't handling this.
Pick one: either Customer Success or Sales owns expansion revenue. Not shared ownership. One team has the number on their target.
If CS owns it, they need sales training and comp structures that reward closed revenue. If Sales owns it, they need ongoing access to customer health data and regular touchpoints, not just when pursuing a deal.
If CS identifies but Sales closes, establish explicit criteria - examples include:
Document this. Put it in your CRM. Remove ambiguity.
The people who bought your original solution often aren't the people who'll approve expansion. Reps need to map new stakeholders and build relationships without alienating existing contacts.
Most companies skip this training, then wonder why upsell performance lags.
Most organizations prioritize by customer value; their largest accounts or highest NPS scores.
Wrong approach. Customers don't buy more because they're happy. They buy more because something changed.
A new executive joins. A merger happens. A new initiative launches. Change creates opportunity. Stability does not.
Train reps to identify change indicators: executive turnover, M&A activity, new product launches, organizational restructuring. Prioritize upsell pursuit based on change intensity, not account value.
Most companies measure upsell outcomes: pipeline value, close rate, deal size. Instead, track activities that generate pipeline:
Coach to behaviors, not just results.
Your upsell problem isn't lack of motivation. It's that you've never clearly answered: "Whose job is this?"
Pick a role. Train them for expansion selling. Define handoffs. Prioritize by change. Measure activities.
If you do this, you'll be shocked how much expansion revenue was waiting for someone to own it.
Clear ownership only works if your team can identify the right opportunities. The most powerful skill in expansion selling is research that uncovers change indicators and new stakeholder priorities.
We're offering free access to our 3x3 Research© from our Fearless Prospecting© training; a technique that teaches finding 3 unique pieces of research to better improve prospecting success.
What's included:
Walk into calls with research that demonstrates you understand the customer's world and you will open doors to new conversations far more often.
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