Post by Principled Selling®

"Customer Centricity" Is a Values Statement. Your Comp Plan Is the Truth. I've sat in enough pipeline reviews to know what gets celebrated. The big number. The fast close. The deal that finally came through on the last day of the quarter. But look deeper. Look at what goes on the dashboard. What earns the Slack emoji from the CRO. Meetings booked. Demos run. Pipeline coverage at three, four times quota. Calls made. Sequences enrolled. Accounts "touched." These numbers get reported, tracked, praised, turned into leader boards. And they have almost nothing to do with whether the customer in front of you will get value, or still be a customer in eighteen months. What rarely gets celebrated is the deal a good salesperson walked away from because the fit wasn't right. The discovery conversation where someone had the courage to say: I don't think we're what you need. The demo that didn't happen because qualifying revealed it wasn't time. Those behaviours are genuinely customer-centric. They're also almost entirely invisible in most revenue reporting. People aren't selfish. They're rational. They optimise for what gets measured. Jacco van der Kooij's Revenue Architecture makes it plain: the sale is not the destination. It's the beginning of a relationship that has to justify itself every renewal cycle. The real growth lives on the right side of the bowtie: post-sale. Which means the metrics that predict sustainable growth look very different from what most comp plans reward: Net Revenue Retention. Above 120% and your installed base grows without a new logo. Below 100% and you're filling a leaking bucket, no matter how many demos ran this quarter. Time to value. A customer who sees value fast renews. Still confused at month three, they're already looking at alternatives. They just haven't told you yet. Expansion ARR. Your most capital-efficient growth engine — if your comp plan rewards it. If it creates friction between AEs and CSMs instead, you're leaving your best lever untouched. Churn -- and who owns it. If salespeople aren't measured on what happens after signature, they're structurally incentivised to overpromise and move on. The CS team inherits the mess. The business calls it a retention problem. It was a sales design problem all along. So here's the question for every revenue leader: I f a new salesperson spent their first three months doing exactly what your comp plan rewarded, nothing more, would you be proud of the customer experience? Would your business be stronger for it in year two? If the honest answer is no, you don't have a customer centricity problem. You have a design problem. We work with founders & sales leaders closing the gap between what they believe in and what their commercial structure actually produces. Getting it right is the difference between a business that grows and one that churns through customers and salespeople alike. What does your comp plan actually say about your priorities?