What Pre-Sales Can Teach Us About Customer Success Excellence

During a recent webinar I moderated, “Should Marketing Own the Entire Sales Funnel?,” I had a surprising realization: the biggest challenges in pre-sales are often mirror images of what Customer Success teams face every day.

The discussion was more nuanced than the intentionally provocative premise suggested, but what struck me most was how applicable our pre-sales strategies are to post-sale customer engagement.

Here are the four key takeaways and how they translate into stronger, more scalable customer relationships after the deal closes.

1. The Proactive Imperative: Don't Wait for the Call

The best CS teams don’t wait to be needed. They anticipate it.

As one CRO put it during our buyer research:

“I expect them to be constantly coming to me saying, ‘Hey, you’re not using it as well as you might. Let me show you how.’”

In the webinar, we discussed how Marketing’s job is to “warm up” accounts before Sales engages. That same proactive approach is critical post-sale. Are you waiting for your customer to flag a problem, or are you identifying where they could be getting more value and showing them how?

In my experience, the most effective CS leaders operate like strategic partners. They don’t just react. They guide.

👉 In Practice:

• Schedule regular “value check-ins” that aren’t tied to problems or renewals
• Use data to surface underused features that could deliver specific value
• Frame outreach around their wins, not your roadmap

2. Personalization That Resonates: Ditch the Generic

A CMO we interviewed said it best:

“It’s not generic. It’s specific. They’ve done the work… The most effective is when they customize it for my use cases.”

Generic QBR decks and one-size-fits-all updates fall flat. True personalization means understanding each customer’s unique goals, context, and language, then shaping the conversation around that.

During the webinar, we explored how AI promises deep personalization, but too many current implementations stop at surface-level tokens. Effective CS personalization isn’t about automation for its own sake. It’s about relevance.

👉 In Practice:

• Before your next QBR, ask: “What are this customer’s top 3 strategic goals this quarter?” (And if you don’t know, ask!)
• Map product usage to how it supports those goals
• Include broader business context: their role, industry pressures, or recent company changes

3. Bridge the Product-Value Gap: From Features to Outcomes

One of the most eye-opening webinar moments centered on the gap between product and customer-facing teams.

My co-founder Sumeet often shares a story from his time at Google Maps: a Sales rep asked for a feature that had already shipped six months prior. No one had told them.

I’ve lived a similar mistake. We lost a key customer because we assumed they saw the value in a feature we built specifically for them, but we never explicitly told that story.

It’s not enough to know what your product can do. You need to communicate how it drives outcomes clearly, consistently, and in the customer’s language.

Creating Effective Value Translation

Here's a simple framework that I’ve seen work well:

❌ Instead of: "We launched a new dashboard feature"

✅ Try: "You can now get immediate visibility into [specific metric], enabling you to make [specific decision] X% faster"

❌ Instead of: "Our API now supports bulk operations"

✅ Try: "Your team can now process your monthly data imports in X hours instead of X days, freeing up time for strategic analysis"

👉 In Practice:

• Encourage frequent communication between CS and Product
• Capture and share customer use cases internally to inform roadmap messaging
• Develop “value statements” for every major feature that focus on impact, not specs
• Create easy-to-customize templates for different customer segments

4. Cultivate a Holistic View: See the Entire Journey

In our webinar, we emphasized how Marketing must maintain a full-funnel view. For CS, a similar mindset is essential.

When Customer Success operates in a silo, context gets lost. Customers feel it, and so does your retention rate.

Understanding where a customer came from (initial pain points, expectations set during sales) and where they want to go (their strategic vision) is what allows CS to be a trusted guide, not just a reactive service function.

👉 In Practice:

• Ensure your CRM and CS platforms share a unified customer record
• Regularly revisit sales handover notes and align on the customer’s original “why”
• Create feedback loops by sharing CS insights with Sales and Product

The Role of AI in Scaling Personal Touch

Delivering this level of proactive, personalized, value-centric engagement isn’t easy, especially at scale. It’s labor-intensive, time-consuming, and risky to rely on gut feel alone.

That’s where we believe AI can make a real difference.

At Korl, we’re not trying to replace the human element in CS. We’re building tools that amplify it by combining deep product knowledge with account-specific context to surface timely insights, guide conversations, and deliver tailored value without burning out your team.

Building Indispensable Partnerships

By focusing on proactive engagement, meaningful personalization, clear value translation, and a unified customer view, CS teams can build relationships that last and grow.

These aren’t just “best practices.” They’re becoming table stakes in a world where customer expectations are higher than ever and loyalty is hard-won.

This is the exact challenge we’re tackling at Korl: helping CS teams deliver personalized value at scale without losing the human touch that makes great relationships possible.