You generate leads for a company. Good ones. They arrive on time, in volume, matching the profile you agreed.
The customer can't close them.
Maybe they've only ever worked referrals and warm introductions, and a cold conversation is a different job requiring different skills. Maybe their follow-up is slow. Maybe nobody there has ever run a real sales process.
That isn't your responsibility. It's outside your scope, it isn't in the contract, and you'd win the argument.
It's also completely your problem.
The Test Is Whether They Got Value, Not Whether You Delivered
Because from where the customer sits, they paid you and nothing happened.
They won't experience a scope boundary. They'll experience a bill and no result, and they will say your leads are bad. Are they? Or do they not know how to work them? It genuinely doesn't matter, because if they can't work them, then from an ROI standpoint the leads are bad. That's not a fair judgment. It's an accurate one about their outcome.
A customer who can't use what you delivered churns exactly like a customer who never got it. The distinction lives in your head and nowhere else.
I've written elsewhere about why the leads get blamed, and the short version is that blame is protective: the moment good leads arrive and don't convert, the evidence points at the buyer's own selling, which is intolerable. That's the diagnosis. This is what you do about it.
Where the Line Actually Sits
This needs a boundary or it turns into an argument for doing everyone's job for free.
There's a real difference between what you owe them and what you should influence. If what they bought doesn't work as sold, you owe them the fix and charging for it is theft. If the gap is something that was never sold and never promised, that's different, and it's usually one of two things: unbuilt inventory you could sell them later, or a capability on their side that has to exist for any of this to produce a number.
The third one is the one nobody plans for. It isn't yours to build, it isn't yours to sell, and your revenue dies without it.
What You Do About It
You influence the behavior. That's the whole answer, and it has a name.
Find out before you sign, not at month four. The capability question belongs in the sales conversation. Whoever works these, have they done cold before? What happens the day the leads land? A vendor asking that reads as competence, not as an obstacle.
Make the required behavior explicit and confirm it out loud. Name the things that are theirs to do and ask which of them they have questions about. An agreeable yes with nothing behind it is worse than a stated concern, because the uncertainty is now load-bearing and invisible.
Do the work for them where you actually can. This is where the agentic argument stops being a slide. Plenty of what customers were expected to do is work a system can now absorb. Not all of it. Some things live inside systems you'll never have access to, and someone on their side has to go get it.
And where you can't do it, build the ability to do it. Training, templates, a call review, a first-week script. Not because you promised, because your renewal is downstream of it.
The Part That Turns This Into Revenue
This is where it stops being damage control.
The capability gap you keep hitting is a description of something the market needs and nobody is providing. If most of your customers can't work the leads well, then help working the leads is a product. It's the thing they need next, it attaches to a moment you can see coming, and you're the only vendor positioned to notice it, because you're the one watching the result not arrive.
Which is the pattern underneath most held-back inventory. The next thing you sell is frequently the thing you kept having to do for free.
Scope tells you what you owe. It has never told you what you can afford to ignore.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.