Picture a leadership meeting. Whiteboard out. Markers uncapped. One question on the board:

After the contract, who owns the account: sales or customer success?

Sounds easy, right?

Some would say, “Well…sales closes, then CS owns everything after.” And everything after means…adoption, retention, renewal and expansion. (Whoaaa…that’s a lot to swallow in one bite!)

That’s one way to play. And it works especially well for smaller teams. But as companies grow, it rarely stays that clean.

And getting it right matters. Because after the contract is where so much of your growth lives… renewals, more licences, usage expansion, new products. Profitable growth from customers you’ve already paid to land.

So…where should the line between sales and CS go?

Honestly? It depends. On your product. On your team. On your market. And the resources you have right now.

Which is exactly why this debate can go in circles…for weeks. Sales keeps accounts over 50 licences. No, erase that. Over $100K a year. Actually, let’s change that. Anything above a certain deal size.

Draw the line. Then redraw it. And again. (Meanwhile, customers keep moving. And nobody’s quite sure whose move it is.)

But every version has one thing in common: wherever you draw the line between sales accounts and CS accounts, some signals fall through the cracks.

And by signal, I mean something a customer does that tells you it’s time to act. It’s not a metric, like a health score that sits on a dashboard. A signal is a specific moment that should trigger a specific action.

You know it’s a signal when you can finish this sentence:

When ___ happens, someone should ___.

And when a signal falls through the cracks, nobody acts. Not because they can’t. Because nobody owns the signal.

But there’s good news.

The leadership team can erase the question on the whiteboard:

Who owns the account?

And write a better one:

Who owns each signal?

In a hybrid product-led motion, you lead with signals, not accounts. The product tells you when it’s time to act.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

When a high-intent user goes quiet? Risk signal. CS acts.

When an account is close to its licence limit? Routine expansion. CS acts.

When a customer is ready for something new, like a product you’ve just launched or a bigger enterprise deal? Complex expansion. It needs a business case. Sales acts, brought in by CS.

Notice what happened. CS owns the relationship. Sales steps in when a specific signal says it’s time. No debate. No confusion. No stepping on toes.

Giving every signal an owner is step one.

Step two? Making sure that owner can actually act.

At Google, I was asked to analyze cross-sell and upsell opportunities on its programmatic media buying platform. I discovered a huge opportunity hiding in plain sight.

And nobody was going after it.

The products were complex. Sellers couldn’t easily tell which customer was ready for what. They didn’t have a clear way to have the conversation. And nothing in how they were rewarded made it worth trying.

The signal was there. The owner was there. Nothing was set up to help them act.

So I designed the fix, and it fed into Google’s global sales strategy.

So when I work with B2B SaaS leadership teams on this, these are the questions we answer together:

Which behaviours count as signals for your product? Who owns each signal? How fast do they respond? How does the hand-off work? And does acting on it count in how they’re measured?

Get these right, and the growth you’ve already paid to land stops slipping through the cracks.

CS knows when to call sales in. Sales knows when to step up. And your customers keep growing with you.

Portia

P.S. If your sales and CS teams are working out who owns what in your hybrid motion, this is exactly the work I do: turning signals, owners and hand-offs into one clear system, so nothing falls through the cracks. Just reply, and let’s talk.

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