Two post-sale professionals on why the role is more important than ever

This isn’t the SaaS world of the past—that’s right, there are tokens now, even if no one is sure what that’s supposed to mean.

Regardless of what tokens mean for SaaS, the shift away from seat-based models to usage-based and other models is an undeniable trend.

• According to a January 2025 survey from Metronome and Greyhound Capital, 85% of companies have adopted usage-based pricing models.
• A 2025 study from Monetizely showed that 61% of companies had adopted some form of hybrid pricing, up from 49% the previous year.

This means that the job of customer success, tasked with handling clients post-sale, is fundamentally changing. No longer just a trusted advisor, a skillful CS professional can be a true back-end revenue driver. Revenue Brew spoke to two post-sale employees on how the job is changing, and the opportunities it can offer.

Toeing the line: Rachel Gurman is a manager of growth strategy at go-to-market platform Clay. In the last few years she has noticed an emphasis on usage-based models.

For post-sale employees, the task is to tastefully suggest token usage to drive revenue, but not let the customer feel like they are being misled.

“A lot of what my team is doing is getting the customer to trust us in the sense that if I’m telling you to spend credits, it’s because it’s valuable for you. I would never try and get you to do something just so you spend the credits,” Gurman said.

An outcome of this new relationship dynamic Gurman pointed us to is that CS professionals are expected to be more knowledgeable about their clients’ business. This means even more research and filling a role that is closer to being a third-party employee for the client.

“We have dashboards that show us: This customer bought a million credits. They’re four months in. They’re pacing at 100%,” Gurman told Revenue Brew. “That usage is something I am looking at every single day because customers do rely on us to alert them if they are spending too much.”

A friendly (human) face: Sloane Kolt is vice president of client services at AI-powered revenue automation platform Tabs. She said that because AI is taking over parts of the sales cycle, human touchpoints, like CS relationships, are becoming even more important.

“The human part of it was already important, but it’s become extra important. I think everybody is now used to getting a lot of AI junk,” Kolt said.

This isn’t to say that Kolt doesn’t think that post-sales shouldn’t be using AI; she believes they should. However, overengineering personal relationships can have damaging consequences and could also open the door for your work to be replaced.

“Anybody could send off an AI message. Why do they care that it’s coming from you? And what are you doing to further your relationship with that person who’s on the other side that you’re interacting with? Your whole goal when you’re on this side of it is: How do I make your life better?” Kolt said.