Getting Your CS Team to Sell /w Steve Popp
Building Your Sales Engine
Getting your CS team to sell starts with mindset, not skill — Steve Popp breaks down how customer success and service teams are being handed revenue responsibility, and how to make the transition stick.
Getting your CS team to sell is one of the biggest shifts happening in sales right now. Revenue responsibility is moving away from traditional selling roles and landing on customer success, customer service, account management — even engineering. In this episode of Building Your Sales Engine, host Mark McGraw sits down with Sandler's Steve Popp to unpack why organizations are doing it, why it works, and where it breaks down.
Steve explains that CS professionals are often *better* positioned to expand revenue than salespeople. They have more touch points, deeper rapport, and a level of trust you simply can't buy. What they don't have is the expectation, the skill set, or — most importantly — the mindset. Steve boils the transformation down to four buckets: strategy, operations, talent, and enablement, and argues that leaders should control the controllables and start with the one thing they own: their people.
Mark and Steve get practical about the fear that shows up in every room — fear of cold calls, fear of not knowing the answer, fear of the word "sales" — and share the reframes that dissolve it: qualification as a two-way street, and selling as service. As Mark puts it, "I'm calling to see if they have problems that I have medicine for."
About Steve Popp
Steve Popp is a member of the Sandler team and a longtime collaborator of Mark McGraw's — and, notably, the show's first-ever guest back when he was a client. Steve works with CROs, CEOs, and COOs navigating the shift of revenue responsibility into client-facing service roles, helping them align strategy, operations, talent, and enablement. His core conviction: will before skill, mindset before technique. Connect with Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevejpopp/
Host: Mark McGraw — Building Your Sales Engine
Guest: Steve Popp — Sandler
In This Episode
Why revenue responsibility is shifting from traditional sales roles to customer success, service, and account management
The four buckets of every CS transformation: strategy, operations, talent, and enablement
Why CS people are uniquely qualified to sell — more touch points, deeper problem-solving, and trust you can't buy
"Head trash" and the mindset barrier: will first, skill second
How we got here — all-hands-on-deck revenue pressure and the hunter/farmer split
"We moved the cheese on you" — leading people through a change they never asked for, including the reality that you may lose talent
The fears that surface in every room: cold-call reluctance, process anxiety, and "what if they ask something I don't know?"
The qualification reframe that takes the pressure off — they have to qualify to you, too
Selling as service: "problems that I have medicine for," and why not reaching out is a disservice
Why this is a two-to-three-year initiative, not a two-month one
Links
Sandler: https://www.Sandler.com
Episode page: https://www.BuildingYourSalesEngine.com/
Show links: https://linktr.ee/buildingyoursalesengine
Mark McGraw on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmcgraw/
Steve Popp on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevejpopp/
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