Most of the Work Happens After the Sale

We have written before that product teams ship fast while customers take months, sometimes years, to deploy what they buy. We went looking for data on that. Here is what we found.

What buyers actually regret

Gartner surveyed more than 3,400 technology buyers. 60% regretted a purchase. Here is what they blamed.

Reason for regret	Share
Problematic handoff between sales and implementation	43%
Mismanaged expectations	42%
Higher-than-expected total cost	33%
Slow or difficult implementation	32%

The top two both happen after the contract is signed. Nobody here is saying the software did not work. They are saying the handover from the people who sold it to the people who deploy it went badly, and that deploying it was slow and hard.

The product gets years of engineering. The handoff gets a kickoff call.

What customers ask for, and what they get

Bain’s Technology Report 2024 asked customers and vendor practitioners the same question: rank the four most important things customer success can do.

Rank	Customers	Practitioners
1	Assisting with technical implementation or deployment (46%)	Aligning on objectives and building a success plan (53%)
2	Aligning on objectives and building a success plan (43%)	Regular assessments of satisfaction and outcomes (51%)
3	Regular assessments of satisfaction and outcomes (41%)	Initial sale handoff and product onboarding (51%)
4	Initial sale handoff and product onboarding (41%)	Product education and training (43%)
5	Product education and training (40%)	Coordinating across internal teams (41%)
6	Resolving support tickets (38%)	Assisting with technical implementation or deployment (33%)

Customers put technical implementation at the top. The people doing the work put it dead last. Bain’s explanation is that vendors “often provide general assistance but have abdicated too much technical implementation to systems integration partners.”

The satisfaction numbers follow. About 65% of software customers say their post-sales needs are only moderately addressed or worse. Money is not what is missing: net revenue retention fell for 75% of software companies in the same research, even as nearly 60% of them spent more on customer success.

More people and more budget, aimed at the wrong thing.

Even done well, it takes years

Salesforce deprecated Platform API versions 21.0 through 30.0 in the Summer ’22 release, with retirement planned for Summer ’23. A year of notice, a hard deadline, and one of the best-resourced developer relations organizations in software behind it.

Then they moved the date. Retirement landed in Summer ’25, which Salesforce explained as following “consultation with the community and our partners” to ensure a smooth transition. They also shipped tooling so customers could switch retirement on early and find out whether their own migration was really finished.

Salesforce did not handle this badly. They handled it about as well as it can be handled, and customers still took three years.

That is worth separating from the deprecation windows other platforms publish. Those are promises about how long an old version keeps working. They tell you what the vendor committed to, not how long anyone took. Salesforce is useful precisely because they moved the date, which tells you what really happened.

This is not a documentation problem

It is tempting to read this as a docs or SDK problem. Salesforce, Stripe, Meta, Google and Shopify all have good docs, versioned SDKs, migration guides and changelogs, and the gap is still there.

The work is not in the API. It is in the customer’s environment: their data model, their business logic, their release process, their approvals, their security review, and everything else competing for their attention. A vendor cannot see any of that from outside, so it gets handled one account at a time.

So the industry hired for it. Forward Deployed Engineers, TAMs, Professional Services, Implementation Engineers, Solutions Architects. Those roles work, and they are some of the most valuable people in a B2B company. They also scale linearly. Every new customer needs another slice of a person, and the headcount curve and the revenue curve start to look uncomfortably similar.

What we build instead

ArchAgents packages that work so it can be reused. Your team builds an Agent Solution once, for whichever migration, integration or upgrade pulls your engineers back most often. Each customer installs it and runs it in their own environment, under their own credentials and approvals, with your brand on it. When the agent hits something it cannot finish, it comes back to your engineers with the context attached instead of failing quietly.

We are not trying to take the humans out. We are trying to stop spending them on the same migration a hundred times.

You can watch a customer run one end to end, or book time with us.

A note on the sources

We read the Bain figures in the Technology Report 2024 itself. The two rankings are its Figure 4, from the Bain Customer Success Customer Survey, June 2024 (n=149) and the Bain Customer Success Practitioner Survey, June 2024 (n=150). The 65% is Figure 3, from the same customer survey.

We could not read Gartner’s press releases. They sit behind bot protection and return an error even in a normal browser, so those numbers come to us secondhand, through TechInformed, TechRepublic and The Register, which all report the same figures.

The Salesforce dates are from its developer blog.

One number we left out: implementations running seven to ten months longer than planned. It gets quoted a lot, but it comes from a different Gartner survey than the one above, and the two are getting mixed together in the coverage.