Your VP of Sales should get paid more than your post-sale leader. They deserve it.
Every few months somebody posts the comparison again, and the comments split into the same two camps. One says post-sale is criminally underpaid. The other says selling to strangers is harder, so of course it pays more.
Both camps are arguing about effort. Pay doesn't follow effort. It follows what a job is allowed to produce, and that's where the gap actually comes from.
Two jobs, two shapes
Sales is an upside job with downside risk. It creates growth that didn't exist yesterday, and missing the number gets you fired. So the pay has both halves: a base, and real upside when you win.
Post-sale, the way most companies run it, is a downside job with downside risk. Its job is to prevent loss. Too much loss gets you fired.
All the risk. None of the upside.
Picture a perfect quarter for each of them. Sales books new logos and the revenue line goes up. Post-sale renews every customer at exactly what they already pay, with no churn and no contraction, and everyone calls it a win. Revenue from that base moved by zero.
The best possible outcome in that job is that nothing happens. I've walked through the arithmetic behind that before, so I won't redo it here. The point for this argument is narrower: you can't pay someone for upside their job isn't allowed to produce.
So the gap isn't unfair. It's accurate, for a job that was designed wrong.
It wasn't built that way
Post-sale started as a revenue mission. Customers stay longer and buy more. Both halves of that sentence are revenue.
Then it got turned into "keep the customers happy." Nobody can put a number on happy, and when happy didn't stop churn, the job turned into a mad scramble to save them.
Listen to the vocabulary that came out of that. Saves, rescue plans, at-risk lists, revenue protected. Every one of those words assumes you're about to lose something. It's a scarcity vocabulary, and a team that only talks about losses was built to produce the absence of them and nothing more.
Nobody decided that on purpose. It happened one reasonable step at a time, and the comp plan followed the job description all the way down.
The fix isn't a raise
Give your post-sale leader a raise and change nothing else, and you're paying more for the same downside job. That's harder to defend next year, not easier.
The fix is an upside.
Your customers are already approaching points where the next thing you offer becomes useful to them. Count them. Use your own history for how many take it when they get there. Put a dollar figure on it. That's a measured expansion number, and it's the upside this job has never had.
Then give that forecast to someone and make it their job. They orchestrate the readiness gates it's built on, and they move customers through the progress milestones until they reach them. Hold them to the forecast the same way you hold Sales to quota. Hit it, get rewarded. Miss it, and there's a downside.
Once that number exists, it's a miss somebody can be asked about, which is exactly what the job never had.
"So you want to give post-sale a quota?"
That's the sharpest pushback I get on this, and it's fair, because the version most companies have tried went badly.
No. A quota is a number somebody worked backward from what the business needs. This one's measured: which customers will reach a gate this quarter, and what the expansion attached to that gate is worth. That difference isn't semantic, and it changes what people do on a Tuesday.
Chase a quota and you show up with offers before customers are ready, because the quarter's ending and the number doesn't care. That's how a team that exists to prevent churn starts creating it.
An account sold before its gate isn't hitting the forecast. It's breaking the job. The conversation happens when the customer gets there, not a week early because the quarter is ending.
The shape of the pay matters as much as the number. A strong base with uncapped variable on top says grow with the company. Everything on the book says suffer with it.
And the argument ends
Hit that forecast quarter after quarter, by moving customers through progress milestones and readiness gates, and your post-sale leader will have earned more than Sales.
Nobody had to admit the job was hard. It finally produced something you could pay for.
And the argument ends.
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.