When Trig introduced Lee Beddows as the first Head of Customer Performance, our goal was to offer the world of post-sales a new, and better approach to account management.

By leading and living through the change ourselves, we wanted to show that it’s possible to deliver stronger outcomes for both customers and the business with a simple shift in mindset.

Customer success has always focused on building relationships and keeping customers happy, but it’s struggled to connect those efforts directly to business value.

Customer performance fills that gap. It gives post-sales teams what they’ve been looking for: an approach that centers account management on driving revenue growth through deeper product use and expansion.

It’s an idea that immediately resonated with Romeen Sheth, Co-founder and CEO of Workstreet, a leading AI-powered cybersecurity company. When he read our announcement of Lee’s hire, he saw the same pattern we had: traditional customer success was falling short. Teams were busy, customers were ‘happy’, but it was a struggle to show measurable impact.

So Romeen made a change. He introduced the customer performance model at Workstreet by hiring their first Senior Director of Customer Performance, Nicole McBride, to help his team prove value.

We sat down with him to talk about what led to that decision, how his team made the shift, and what he’s learned since putting it into practice.

“In the era of SaaS 1.0, the customer success motion was all about encouraging renewals and adding seats. But keeping customers happy isn’t enough anymore—today’s teams have to add value and grow accounts to hit ambitious NRR goals.”

The AI era demands a performance-oriented post-sales model

AI is redefining every business function—including post-sales.

Romeen, who has spent years running and investing in fast-moving SaaS companies, saw this shift happen quickly. “As soon as the AI boom hit, the world started moving much faster,” he says. “Suddenly, you couldn’t just hire a great GTM team for acquisition and a good CS team for retention and call it a day.”

Romeen attributes the decline of old-world models to several compounding factors. “AI made everyone great at outbound,” he notes. “The mark of success is no longer how many leads you can reach, but how personal you can get with each one—what unique business problems you can solve for them.”

But the pressure to deliver more value isn’t just a result of higher customer expectations. With AI automating so many human tasks, it doesn’t make sense to measure value realization by seats. “Companies are increasingly having to price based on usage,” Romeen says. “The emphasis has shifted from how many people are using the product to how much value is being unlocked within it—and what new features will accelerate that value.”

This pivot toward usage and outcomes makes annual renewal cycles irrelevant, forcing post-sales teams to constantly look for new ways to help customers grow within their products.

These pressures have also led to increased growth targets. “Teams have to do so much more work to retain and expand customers at the level the current SaaS climate demands,” Romeen says.

While post-sales workflows remain a moving target—especially in the early stages of agentic AI— one thing remains clear. “The only way to keep pace is to move from customer success to customer performance,” Romeen stresses. That insight became the basis for Workstreet’s next decision.

“AI has dramatically upped the stakes for post-sales teams. Now that so many manual functions have been automated, staying competitive requires giving each customer a highly personalized experience.”

How Workstreet knew it was time to pivot

It didn’t take long for these AI-driven trends to impact Workstreet’s customer success team.

After successfully expanding several accounts across industries, Romeen and his team realized it was time to improve performance for the rest of their customers. “We were moving many accounts from the initial SOC 2 certification to engaging Workstreet for ongoing security and compliance management,” he says. “And when you’re seeing some customers hit 3–5x year-over-year growth, you start to wonder what’s possible for everyone else.”

But after Romeen discovered additional expansion opportunities, he realized they weren’t scalable across Workstreet’s customer base of over 1,000 accounts. “Like most old-world success teams, we were only meeting with most customers for scheduled QBRs or support issues,” he notes.

“Our whole mindset was off,” Romeen explains. “We were focused on making the customer experience smooth instead of moving each partnership forward.”

To drive expansion at scale, Workstreet’s success team needed a way to gauge each customer’s unique path to value. From there, they could make personalized recommendations and product updates to help customers grow. And Romeen knew that if they didn’t, they’d leave NRR on the table.

“Once we had successfully expanded several customers, we had a very different understanding of what ‘best-in-class’ performance looks like. The question became, ‘How can we scale these wins across our customer base?”

Inside Workstreet’s best-in-class customer performance motion

When Romeen heard how Trig was rethinking post-sales, he knew a Head of Customer Performance was the missing piece he’d been looking for.

Because Workstreet is a tech-enabled service provider, this shift made even more sense. “Unlike pure software companies or pure service providers, we have a robust service delivery organization and a robust service innovation organization,” Romeen explains. “This means service delivery, success, and research teams must work toward a holistic vision of value delivery.”

“Triaging helps Nicole benchmark customer performance to understand what best-in-class outcomes are supposed to look like,” Romeen says. “Then, she can determine what’s needed to drive the next outcomes.” With this holistic understanding, Nicole can set concrete objectives for each segment or churn non-ICP customers without growth potential.

In other words, she consistently prioritizes both the tactical, day-to-day issues that grow relationships and the strategic product developments that ensure future growth.

Across every function, Nicole always treats NRR—not NCR—as her north star. “If you’re focusing on the right customers, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to significantly grow every account,” Romeen explains.

While this transformative new workflow has already driven early wins for Workstreet’s post-sales team, Romeen stresses that this shift is applicable to teams across departments. The way he sees it, every team can work smarter and more strategically by shifting from a success model focused on maintaining the status quo to a performance model built on unlocking consistent growth.

“I see account management as just one use case for this performance shift. Every organization, from product to engineering to finance, is going to have to pivot from just trying to keep the lights on to strategically driving hard outcomes.”

Join the future of post-sales revenue generation

As the first AI agent platform for account management, Trig makes it easy to embrace a performance-driven post-sales philosophy.

With Trig, you can:

1. Rapidly accelerate each account’s time to value with tailored and targeted onboarding
2. Instantly identify and act on every expansion opportunity across your customer base
3. Automatically detect and act on churn risk in real time

And you can do it all without adding headcount.

See what Trig can do for your customer performance by booking a demo today.