Move Your Best Closers to Customer Success
In a downturn, patch the leaky bucket — put your top reps on keeping the customers you already have.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 87%
When cold outreach dries up and new deals stall, the highest-leverage move is to reassign your best pre-sales talent to customer success, because retaining existing customers becomes far more valuable than the few new logos you could win. Mansuri frames it as the dramatic but deliberate response to a market where replacing a lost customer is nearly impossible.
Origin
Sahil Mansuri's own play at Bravado during the 2022 downturn — he states he is actively moving his best people into CSM roles and advising his portfolio companies to do the same.
Core principles
- 01Cold call/email response rates and top-of-funnel are collapsing while enterprise sales cycles stretch (he cites 62 days growing to ~115)
- 02In tough times people hoard and trust what they know — retaining is easier and more valuable than acquiring
- 03Normally the best talent goes to pre-sales because new business is harder; a downturn inverts that priority
- 04Losing an existing customer now is catastrophic because replacing them is 'going to be impossible'
How to run it
- 1
Accept that new business will be hard for 6–9 months
Acknowledge that few companies want to sign multi-year contracts with untried vendors right now; deals shrink to three-month pilots.
- 2
Reassign your best pre-sales reps to CSM
Take your top account executives — your best relationship builders and closers — and move them into customer success manager roles.
Watch out Expect pushback: many will call it crazy to move your best performer to post-sales in a tough market. Mansuri concedes he can't predict the future, but is doing it anyway.
- 3
Set the mandate: lose no existing customers
Make the explicit charter 'we cannot under any circumstances lose our existing customers' rather than chasing new logos.
Pro tip Model the behavior — Mansuri notes he's not just talking, he's doing it and telling his board and portfolio companies to do the same.
In the wild
With its recruiting-marketplace business slowing, Bravado moved its best salespeople into CSM roles with the goal of maintaining every customer, and Mansuri began advising the companies he angel-invests in to do the same.
→ A deliberate bet that maximum retention gives the business the best chance of survival through the downturn.
Common mistakes
Keeping your A-players hunting for logos nobody will buy
Leaving top closers on new business when 'no one's going to sign these big accounts right now' wastes your best talent on deals that won't close while existing customers churn away.
Treating retention as a lower-status job
Defaulting your weaker relationship people onto CSM signals that keeping customers matters less — exactly backwards when a lost customer can't be replaced.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and sales leaders whose top-of-funnel has collapsed and whose survival depends on retaining a sizable existing customer base.
Not ideal for
Early-stage companies with few existing customers to retain, or healthy markets where new-logo acquisition is still efficient.
From the transcript
“take your best sales people and make them csms”
“what we cannot under any circumstances do is lose our existing customers because replacing them is going to be impossible”
“it's what we're doing I can tell you like I'm actually doing it like we're taking our best people and we're moving them into CSM…”
From the episode
How to hit revenue targets in a recession
Sahil Mansuri (Bravado)