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 customer base. Expansion. Upsell. Cross-sell. More value, more revenue, more impact.

So they do what they should do.

They dig into opportunity analysis.

And almost every time, usually through a painful, manual process, they uncover the same thing: the ability to grow their customers is slim to none.

Not because the product lacks value.

Not because the CS team isn’t capable.

But because customers already have everything.

You Can’t Re-Sell What Was Free

It’s incredibly hard to change a customer’s perception of value when something has always been free.

When features, usage, support levels, or integrations are bundled in during the sales cycle, customers don’t see them as expansion opportunities later. They see them as table stakes. As entitlements.

And no amount of great Customer Success can undo that expectation.

Once value is framed as “included,” trying to monetize it later feels like a bait and switch, even if the product has evolved and the value has increased.

This Isn’t a CS Problem, It’s a GTM One

If you’re a CS leader and you’re noticing that sales continues to bundle everything in, this isn’t something to quietly absorb or work around.

Raise it.

But don’t do it emotionally. Do it with data.

Run the numbers:

What was bundled at sale?

What’s actually being used?

Where is expansion supposed to come from?

What opportunities never existed because everything was given away?

This isn’t about pointing fingers. It’s about surfacing a structural issue in your go-to-market motion.

Because when this continues unchecked, the outcomes are predictable.

What Happens When Everything Is Given Away

If sales keeps giving away value upfront, here’s what you can expect downstream:

Pricing objections when it’s time to expand

Expansion blockers because customers don’t see incremental value

Renewal issues when price increases feel unjustified

And inevitably, Customer Success gets blamed for not growing revenue, despite having no levers to pull.

Alignment Is the Only Way Forward

You can’t expect Customer Success to grow revenue if sales continues to give away the very things that should fuel expansion.

Growth requires alignment.

Clear packaging.

Clear value framing.

Clear ownership across Sales, CS, and Leadership.

Without it, growth isn’t just hard, it’s unrealistic.

If expansion is truly a priority, this conversation has to happen. And it has to happen before the deal closes, not after CS inherits the account.

Because once everything is free, growth is no longer an option.