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Welcome to
After the Close
the Blog
Thoughtful insights and honest perspectives on Customer Success and leadership, focused on the work that happens after the deal is done.
After the Close is a space for reflection, insight, and the conversations that don’t always happen in the meeting or the deck. This blog is here to share real stories, practical lessons, and honest perspectives on Customer Success and leadership.
Whether you’re a CSM, a CS leader, or an executive, you’ll find insight on what happens after the deal is signed. From navigating adoption and retention to leading teams and driving impact, the goal is simple: help you think more clearly, act more intentionally, and build work that lasts.
Article
If You Want to Grow Customers, Sales Has to Stop Giving Everything Away
If you want to grow your customers, tell your sales team to stop giving everything away. That sentence usually makes people uncomfortable. Especially when growth targets are aggressive and deals feel hard-won. But it’s a conversation that needs to happen and it usually lands squarely on Customer Success to clean up the mess when it doesn’t. Where Customer Growth Quietly Breaks Down I talk to Customer Success leaders all the time who are being tasked with growing their custome
Kristi Faltorusso
7 hours ago2 min read
Learning to Trust Your Own Timeline
I spent most of my career measuring my journey against everyone else’s. Their timelines. Their promotions. Their successes. Their failures. Even though I knew the phrase “comparison is the thief of joy,” I still compared. Constantly. It took me years to stop. Years of reminding myself that no two journeys are the same. No two people are the same. No two organizational conditions are the same. And that even when you want something badly, sometimes painfully badly, there are fa
Kristi Faltorusso
7 hours ago2 min read
There Is Such a Thing as Good Churn (And No, That’s Not as Horrible as It Sounds)
It will always sound wrong when I say it out loud, but there is such a thing as good churn. And no, this isn’t me saying that when a customer churns, it’s time to pop champagne or throw a party. Loss is still loss. But there comes a very specific moment in a company’s journey when leadership has to take a hard look at who their Ideal Customer Profile actually is… and whether the customers they currently have still align with it. That moment is uncomfortable. Necessary. And of
Kristi Faltorusso
7 hours ago3 min read
The future of CX Is contextual: AI is the new standard
Every year tons of brands rush to release their industry trend reports, and while I save most and read some, I do so with a mix of excitement and skepticism. Let’s face it, some feel completely out of touch. I literally sit there wondering who fills out these surveys. And then there are some who feel aspirational. Like yes, in some alternate universe with unlimited budget and resources that could possibly be a reality. And then there are the few that hit so painfully close to
Kristi Faltorusso
Dec 9, 20255 min read
Stop Asking More Questions. Start Asking Better Ones.
I was recently scrolling through LinkedIn and came across a post encouraging CSMs to ask more questions. At first, I barely paused. It felt harmless enough. But the more I sat with it, the more it bothered me. Do we actually need more questions? Or do we need better questions? Because if we just pile on more basic, surface level questions, we are not doing real discovery. We are filling the air with noise and still walking away without the insight we need to drive impact. Qua
Kristi Faltorusso
Dec 8, 20253 min read
The Coaching Mistake That Almost Broke Me and the Framework That Saved Me
Coaching is one of the hardest parts of leadership and I learned that the hard way. When I first moved from being an individual contributor to a leader, I thought coaching meant carrying my team. I believed my job was to have every answer, jump in at every sign of trouble, solve every problem, and of course, do it all faster and better. At least that was the story I was telling myself. In reality, all I did was exhaust myself and unintentionally signal to my team that I did n
Kristi Faltorusso
Dec 6, 20253 min read
The Hidden Risk in Customer Success That No One Is Talking About: Feature Ideas
Every Customer Success leader wants to talk about churn, forecasting, onboarding, product adoption… but there’s a quiet little monster living in the background that most teams aren’t paying enough attention to: Feature ideas. Not the ideas themselves, those are gold. The way we manage them, that’s the problem. Most companies have figured out how to collect requests: forms, spreadsheets, portals, Slack messages, emails with subject lines like “Quick thought”… even the occasion
Kristi Faltorusso
Nov 20, 20253 min read
When a CSM Resigns: How Resilient Is Your Operating Model, Really?
There is a moment every Customer Success leader knows well. A moment that feels like your stomach drops through the floor. A CSM resigns. And the first thought that hits you is the one none of us says out loud: How the hell am I going to redistribute these accounts? Because let’s be honest with ourselves. Your team is already at capacity. You are already at capacity. And while you are trying to stay composed and strategic, everyone on your team is quietly thinking the exact s
Kristi Faltorusso
Nov 19, 20253 min read
The Empowerment Gap: Why CSMs Don’t Feel Empowered (Even When Leaders Think They Are)
I’ve coached hundreds of Customer Success Managers over the years. Different companies, different products, different regions, different markets. Yet the same pattern appears over and over again. CSMs do not feel empowered. They are not empowered to say no. They are not empowered to drive change. They are not empowered to raise red flags. They are not empowered to make tough decisions. They are not empowered to prioritize for their customers. They are not empowered to deviate
Kristi Faltorusso
Nov 14, 20253 min read
The Customers You Swear Have “No Growth Potential” Might Actually Surprise You
Here is a hard truth we do not talk about enough in Customer Success. Some of the customers we write off the fastest are the ones sitting on the biggest opportunities. I know. I know. It feels easier to focus on the shiny, well-funded, “textbook” expansion accounts. They show up to calls. They read your emails. They know what they want. But not every customer is that obvious. And honestly, thank goodness, because the obvious ones are only half the fun. The real magic lives in
Kristi Faltorusso
Nov 12, 20253 min read
Customer Success Isn’t Just Growing, It’s Defining Market Value
I love when data validates what many of us in Customer Success have been saying for years: customer-led growth is the engine of modern business performance. The latest Public Market Pulse Report from Certinia analyzed more than 4,000 public company earnings reports and the findings are a massive win for Customer Success. The data shows a clear pattern: companies that talk about Customer Success are creating more value, and the market is rewarding them for it. Let’s unpack wha
Kristi Faltorusso
Oct 28, 20252 min read
Six Years Strong: Celebrating a Journey of Influence in Customer Success
When I saw the 2025 SuccessCoaching Top 25 Customer Success Influencers list drop, I had to take a second to breathe it in ... six years in a row. Six. Years. That’s wild. And honestly, it’s not something I ever expected when I started sharing my thoughts on Customer Success all those years ago. I didn’t set out to be an “influencer.” I set out to make an impact, to share what I was learning, to help others avoid some of the same mistakes I made, and to build a community wher
Kristi Faltorusso
Oct 16, 20252 min read
Where Does All the Time Go? A Candid Look at How CSMs Really Spend Their Day
Every week, I hear Customer Success leaders making the same case: “We need more headcount.” And sometimes, they’re absolutely right. The demands on Customer Success teams are higher than ever, more customers, more complexity, more responsibilities that bleed into Sales, Product, and Support. But before we make the case for more people, we have to ask an uncomfortable question: 👉 Do you actually know where your team’s time is going today? Most leaders don’t. They can tell you
Kristi Faltorusso
Oct 15, 20253 min read
Why Context Is the Missing Ingredient in Managing Product Ideas
One of the hardest parts of my job as a Customer Success leader is managing product ideas that come from customers. Every week, my team reviews dozens of requests, everything from new integrations to workflow enhancements to “nice-to-have” features that customers swear will change their lives. And while it’s incredible to have customers so engaged in shaping the product, managing these ideas strategically is one of the most complex parts of the job. Because every product requ
Kristi Faltorusso
Oct 14, 20253 min read
Why You Should Spend More Time Studying Renewals
In Customer Success, we obsess over churn. We dissect it from every angle, analyzing root causes, building churn reports, hosting post-mortems, and spinning up initiatives to fix what went wrong. But for all the time we spend understanding why customers leave, we rarely take the same care to understand why they stay. And that’s a miss. A big one. Most teams treat renewal as the ultimate validation that a customer is satisfied and getting value. The renewal happens, the contra
Kristi Faltorusso
Oct 13, 20252 min read
If Your Team Is Underperforming, It’s On You
If you’re not equipping your team to win, their underperformance is a reflection of your leadership, not their potential. That may sting...
Kristi Faltorusso
Oct 9, 20252 min read
Why Your Weekly Customer Calls Don’t Make You Strategic
Let’s clear something up: Showing up to weekly or bi-weekly calls with your customers does NOT make you proactive. And it definitely does...
Kristi Faltorusso
Oct 8, 20252 min read
If You Can’t Forecast Retention, You Can’t Lead Customer Success
Early in my Customer Success career, I made a huge mistake. I thought forecasting was just another way to “surprise and delight.” My...
Kristi Faltorusso
Oct 7, 20252 min read
Kristi Faltorusso Named a Top 10 Customer Success Thought Leaders to Follow by Retention Seekers
The Retention Seekers hosts have spoken, here are 10 Customer Success thought leaders you must follow: 1. Anika Zubair - Founder & CEO at...
Kristi Faltorusso
Aug 21, 20251 min read
The Silent Signals of Customer Risk You’re Probably Missing
In Customer Success, we’re trained to track signals. We build health scores, monitor usage, analyze surveys, and flag risks when...
Kristi Faltorusso
Aug 19, 20252 min read
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