From 10% to 7%: the CS budget shift

Abbas Haider Ali is Vice President of Customer Success at GitHub, where he leads a 550+ person post-sales organization supporting a $2B+ ARR business serving over 150 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100.

Previously, Abbas was VP of Customer & Partner Success at Twilio following its acquisition of Segment, and has held executive roles at xMatters, Opnet Technologies, Managed Objects, and IBM. He is also a General Partner at GTM Operators Network, investing from seed through growth, and is deeply committed to mentorship and advancing underrepresented leaders in tech.

Discussed in this episode:

• Why “AI-led growth” can hide churn and value erosion
• Lagging vs leading indicators for retention endurance
• Why the CS investment benchmark is shifting from 10% → ~7%
• A simple “waterfall” for allocating post-sales budget: support → onboarding → outcomes
• How to “lever up” the envelope with premium support + professional services
• Why expansion (not renewals) is the early signal of product-market fit
• The rise of AI-powered specialized generalists in post-sales
• When forward deployed engineers make sense (and when they’re just a fad)

Episode highlights

00:00 — Why customer expansion is the real signal of product-market fit

00:50 — Lagging revenue vs. leading indicators of endurance

04:11 — Why the CS benchmark dropped from 10% to 7%

08:41 — How AI moved from internal efficiency to customer-facing leverage

11:41 — Why retention cost matters more than CAC in the AI era

14:17 — The simplest framework for allocating the 7% CS budget

18:53 — Founder-led CS, design partners, and early-stage PMF myths

23:16 — The rise of AI-powered specialized generalists

30:00 — When forward-deployed engineers actually make sense

49:31 — The one rule for building a durable SaaS company

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor: HockeyStack

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Follow Abbas Haider Ali

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbashaiderali
• X (Twitter): https://x.com/abbashaiderali
• GitHub: https://github.com/AbbasHaiderAli

Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
• X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
• Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com

The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

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