Confident & Proactive
Commerciality
WHAT?
We give your Sales Team a run for their money.
When customer success teams are equipped with both the skills and confidence to own retention and drive cross-sell, they can keep customers longer while generating new revenue through upselling and cross-selling. This dual focus helps businesses strengthen relationships and boost growth simultaneously.
However, while CSMs are motivated to grow their accounts and deepen customer engagement, they often lack the commercial background - and therefore skills and confidence - to do so effectively.
We partner with CS leaders in tech companies to develop their teams’ commercial mindset. By building skills, providing tools, and boosting confidence, we help CSMs become more proactive and effective. This approach not only strengthens customer loyalty and retention but also drives meaningful revenue growth, creating a direct impact on company performance.
Put another way - we make your CS Team so commercially proactive, your Sales Team will start getting nervous.
WHY?
Stable, predictable revenue provides the Organisation with the energy for long-term success.
‘New money’ doesn’t just mean new customers. The Customer Success function came into being because Sales Teams can’t effectively acquire new business and retain existing business simultaneously.
But in our experience, the following are typical challenges that hold the organisation back from achieving greater levels of proactive and consistent commercial activity.
Confidence - The CS professionals are not sales professionals. This means that they do not identify with ‘sales’ as being part of their role. This affects confidence in a commercial setting, and so will prevent proactive application of any new commercial skills invested in, and certainly prevent any consistent proactive commercial effort.
Capacity - With no prior commercial experience, it is difficult for the team to know where to begin with building a structured, consistent and proactive pipeline above that which already exists.
Structure - Some of the team do attend networking events in an attempt to generate new business. However, this practice is not standard, and there exists little in the way of formal structures for new business generation.
We do what we do because people don’t need to feel uncomfortable with the commercial realities of their role, and companies that rely on non-commercial professionals to defend and grow their revenue can’t create the legacies they want to make.
HOW?
We strengthen your
CS Team’s commercial confidence, skills and culture.
Next Level uses a blend of Coaching, Mentoring and Training to achieve the organisation’s strategic goals, it is always our goal to establish a Coaching relationship with our participants.
Since the coaching relationship is the most collaborative, Coaching instils the greatest ownership by the participants of the solutions identified. Participants do not feel like the performance improvement is being inflicted upon them but rather provided for them, which means higher motivation to change, allowing for greater and longer lasting change to take place.
We work with CS Teams and Individuals on three key components of their performance:
Mindset - When it comes to high performance, mindset is everything. The way we think is the way we perform. If we believe we can do something, we tend to find a way to get it done. A more commercially confident mindset facilitates a more proactive approach to client retention and expansion.
Skills - New ideas, techniques and skills are fundamental to high performance. The right combination of hard and soft skill training can take even the most seasoned professional to new levels of success. Skills give the capacity to make more out of more opportunities throughout the lifecycle of customer accounts.
Culture - The right culture determines whether (or not) change actually happens and lasts. It determines how much effort your people put in. It determines whether or not your top talent stays with you or not. Culture ensures consistency of performance, because a CS culture that is commercial makes proactive retention and upsell an ‘every day and always’ activity.
WHO?
We help CS transition from a ‘reactive support’ to a commercially proactive mindset.
“James ran four sessions with our Account Management team; each based on Commercial Mindset and Renewing contracts. Each session was broken down in very digestible chunks for a large team, and he made the content specific to our needs working in such a unique market. The outcomes were very tangible and my colleagues and I were able to walk away with changes in how we do things day-to-day, as well as plan better for the future in our department. James was super-friendly and each session was open, conversational and informative, with some laughter as well! I'd highly recommend James and the team at Next Level and will be using him again in future.”
Paddy McShane, Head of Customer Success
STATSports
“I have worked with James on two long term coaching projects, both spanning the best part of a year. To say this made a big impact on me would be a massive understatement, and I would highly recommend him. Our work has spanned both professional and personal coaching, as of course the two domains do very much overlap.
James' greatest strengths (to me, at least) include:
providing clarity and structure, helping focus on what actually matters to me as an individual, both consciously and subconsciously. He brings and encourages balance and perspective.
challenging (in a good way), so that the personal learnings and takeaways are devoid of jargon and actually relevant to, and resonate with, me as the coachee.
being a fantastic listener - he structures his sessions in a way that the coachee has a safe environment to explore and organise all sorts of thoughts, concerns, ambitions, desires and doubts. Most of the time what we cover is not really what we/I thought we would at the start, and that adaptability is part of the success.
recommending proactive takeaways, whether this is instilling positive behaviours and mentality, related reading or listening, or just simply 'things to really keep in mind' in between sessions.
awareness and self-awareness - clearly all coachees will be very different, and I am confident James' skillset and experience means he can provide a stellar service regardless of who he is working with.”
Michael Manby, CS Team Lead
Qubit & Slack
“James has done some brilliant work you've done with our team which resulted in a massive shift in how we think and talk about business development. I'm super grateful for James' passing on some of his wisdom to us!”
Nadeen Haidar, Senior Strategy Manager
Nesta