Training Details
Upselling & Commercial Customer Success Training
Your best growth engine is your existing customers. Our training helps CS and account managers spot expansion opportunities, renew with confidence, and upsell naturally—boosting retention and predictable growth.
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Common Challenges
Customer Success and Account Managers often feel they must choose between helping customers and selling to them. This mindset leads to missed opportunities for expansion. Teams either avoid upsell conversations entirely or bring them up too late, making them feel forced. Without a clear strategy and confidence, growth stalls—even when customers are ready to buy more.
Low Upsell & NRR Performance
NRR targets are missed due to low upsell numbers. CSMs often spot opportunities too late, rely on reactive signals, or hesitate to upsell for fear of harming the relationship.
Lack of Commercial Confidence & Skills
Many CSMs are uncomfortable with commercial conversations. They know how to support customers but struggle to pitch value, close deals, or prepare clients for handoff to sales.
Poor Outcome Alignment
CS teams struggle to uncover and align with customer’s desired outcomes, resulting in missed opportunities, limited influence on vendor behavior, and accounts underutilizing the product.
Competing Priorities & Reactive Approach
CSMs are overloaded with onboarding and support tasks, leaving little time for proactive, revenue-driving activities. A structured, prescriptive upsell and renewal strategy is missing.
What’s Included
An eight-hour program designed for Customer Success and Account Management teams ready to own expansion revenue. Covers how to spot upsell opportunities, introduce them naturally, and position them as value-driven solutions. Includes upsell conversation scripts, QBR integration templates, pricing objection responses, and lifecycle-based playbooks for sustainable growth.
Foundations of Commercial Customer Success
Learn why Customer Success is a revenue driver, not just a support function.
Activities & Content:
• Clarify the role of CS in driving expansion and retention
• Define Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQLs)
• Discuss when CS owns commercial responsibility vs. Sales
Customer Journey & Key Touchpoints
Map the full customer journey and align every touchpoint with measurable outcomes.
Activities & Content:
• Build Joint Success Plans with customers
• Identify key moments for value delivery
• Track and measure leading indicators of success
Discovery & Kickoff Conversations
Turn onboarding and early conversations into a foundation for expansion.
Activities & Content:
• Run impactful kickoff calls
• Conduct structured discovery to capture business goals
• Set expectations and timelines for adoption & value realization
Driving Upsell Opportunities
Activities & Content:
• Identify and qualify buying signals that match a client's desired outcomes
• Upsell as a logical consequence, not a commercial push
• Build business cases and practice upsell conversations through roleplays
Renewal Strategies & Risk Management
Create a proactive renewal process that removes last-minute surprises.
Activities & Content:
• Health scoring and early risk detection
• Renewal playbooks and negotiation prep
• Stakeholder mapping and QBR/EBR planning
Saving Customers at Risk
Equip teams to spot and rescue accounts before churn happens.
Activities & Content:
• Early warning systems for risk accounts
• Escalation playbooks and retention tactics
• Communicating value to re-engage champions
Other [optional] topics to focus on:
1. Customer Health scores
2. Objection handling
1
Analysis of current situation
Based on a 16-part pre-filled questionnaire, we hold a 1–2 hour session to discuss your current process, key challenges, target personas, and desired outcomes.
2
Training and activity customization
The insights from the analysis phase form the foundation for tailoring the training materials and creating realistic, team-specific role-play scenarios.
3
Group training
If delivered online, the training is split into three sessions of 2.5 hours each to prevent fatigue and ensure reps can absorb the content effectively. For in-person training, we run two sessions of approximately 3.5 hours each. Between sessions, participants complete short, practical homework assignments to reinforce learning and prepare for the next module
4
Knowledge embedding sessions
Research shows that 83% of training knowledge is forgotten within 30 days. The best way to counter this is through practice and repetition. That’s why we schedule deep-dive sessions and assign role-play homework to reinforce key concepts and embed them in the sales team’s day-to-day behavior.
FAQs
Everything You Need to Know
Find answers to your most pressing questions about SaaS growth and AI compliance.
Suited for both. However, Account Managers should be comfortable embracing customer success as the north star of their efforts, as this focus will ultimately lead to more upsell opportunities.
As we explain in the training, Customer Success Managers should view upsells as a primary objective in customer interactions. A successfully upsold client is far more likely to renew their service, whereas a client without an upsell has a much higher likelihood of not renewing (around 50%). Proactively guiding customers toward an upsell is therefore the strongest predictor of renewal success.
No. Beginners can take this course and use its essence as guiding principles for effective CSM work. We cover most facets of a CSM’s role, always with a focus on maintaining a commercial and proactive approach to the customer–company relationship — ultimately benefiting the customer as well.
Past training participants have measured success using KPIs such as:
Manageable:
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More than 75% of participants agree that the training increased their confidence in upselling.
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More than 50% of accounts (over 100k) have clear desired outcomes and white space maps by the end of the year.
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Of the 3–4 accounts named/discussed per key account manager, 75% have new revenue-creating activities or agreements set within three months of the training.
Revenue-focused:
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25% increase in CSQLs within three months.
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50% increase in upsell revenue within six months.
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The minimum number of training participants is 5, which is an amount that also justifies the tailoring of content and preparation for the training for Nils. The maximum classroom size is around 12 participants. For larger groups, we'd simply split the groups.
FAQs
Everything You Need to Know
Find answers to your most pressing questions about SaaS growth and AI compliance.
Not at all. It’s valuable for anyone conducting early-stage conversations — SDRs and even founders. However, since I believe the discovery phase is the most important part of the sales process, I personally advocate designing sales processes so that AEs own the majority of the discovery phase, while SDRs focus only on a light pre-qualification.
Yes, we align our framework with your preferred methodology for seamless adoption. MEDDIC and similar frameworks are primarily about data collection, but the discovery process still relies on certain evergreen skills. That said, we will also address specific topics — for example, how to ask about the competition and how to clarify the decision-making process — as these questions can be challenging for some.
Definitely. Reviewing playbacks from such tools enhances learning and helps pinpoint areas for improvement. Nevertheless, Gong and Chorus still require manual setup to define which questions should be tracked in the first place — which is why, in this training, we first need to establish what we want to ask those systems. Moreover, I believe in using role-plays as a kind of sandbox environment, a safe testing ground for new questioning techniques that won’t cost thousands of dollars if a sales rep makes a mistake. That’s why AI role-play tools like Jam (affiliated) are also highly recommendable.
FAQs
Everything You Need to Know
Find answers to your most pressing questions about SaaS growth and AI compliance.
No, the Discovery course and the Demo course are closely linked, simply because a good demo should focus solely on the pain points uncovered during the discovery call. Moreover, in many real-world sales processes, discovery and demo calls are often merged. This training provides guidance for handling those situations — which, while not ideal from a sales theory perspective, occur frequently enough that they cannot be ignored.
This training focuses on delivering the most relevant information in a memorable way. It covers techniques such as storytelling (stories stick 22x better than facts), anchoring, repetition, prioritizing pains, engaging customers to maintain their attention, and many more.
The minimum number of training participants is 5, which is an amount that also justifies the tailoring of content and preparation for the training for Nils. The maximum classroom size is around 12 participants. For larger groups, we'd simply split the groups.
FAQs
Everything You Need to Know
Find answers to your most pressing questions about SaaS growth and AI compliance.
The minimum number of training participants is 5, which is an amount that also justifies the tailoring of content and preparation for the training for Nils. The maximum classroom size is around 12 participants. For larger groups, we'd simply split the groups.
AI SDRs flood all channels with noise, making it more difficult to stand out. Luckily, the best-practices taught in this training are evergreen and prevail in times of increasing white-noise. We will make use of AI for lead research and automation of non-essential task, but keep the outreach human.
Account executives and SDRs in B2B SaaS companies.
Outbound is most effective for companies with an annual contract value (ACV) above €7.5K. For lower ACV brackets, the focus should be on efficiency and scalability through streamlined processes and automation. For higher, enterprise-level ACVs, the emphasis shifts to deeper account research, developing buying hypotheses, and highly targeted engagement strategies.
As part of the analysis we look at current tooling, incentives, focus and also individual performances. An expert advice on the current setup and improvements thereof are also included.
What Our Clients Are Saying
Our partners trust us to drive real, measurable growth—and we deliver.
Nils has supported us in building a data-driven outbound process that fuels the growth of our business.
Mike Keyzer
Scalability & Growth Manager - Taxibutler 🇳🇱
The sales team enjoyed the training and got both new ideas and confirmation.
Michel Rasing
Michel Rasing - Channable 🇳🇱
I really loved how real world examples were brought forward in the training.
Matthias Wolf
CCO/Co-Founder - Firstbird 🇦🇹