I have an interesting conundrum that I wanted to put out to a wider group. We have a large customer base made up of mid to enterprise level customers that a large portion of which are running older versions of product that are losing their value slowly as the market shifts. To compound the issue, the newer product is not the market leader. We are seeing high churn rates in the old product and having trouble moving customers up to the new product. The bigger issue in this case is who owns the movement of these customers? Is it sales or is it CS?





A quick example to illustrate the point:





Customer spends $1.5M ACV on us and comes up for renewal. CS drive the initial interest in the new product. The customer comes back and says they are interested only if we swap out the new product for the old at no additional cost. From an incentive perspective in this case, sales has no incentive because there is no growth on the contract which they get paid. They do get comp based on the value of the renewal but it is small compared to a new deal so there is some interest but it takes them away from chasing the new deals where they make the money. At least in our case, CS does not have the cycles to run point on the whole sales cycle nor do they have the right skill set.





What have others done in this case? We are considering a specialized sales team that is goaled on flipping the customers that need to be upgraded but I wanted to see if anyone else had dealt with this and had done anything else.





Thanks,





Jeff