Inside the CSM Identity Crisis 1:

Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

I help CSMs to show their C-suite what they are really capable of. To grow from invisible to irreplaceable with the CSM Operating System.

The first and only training program that integrates with your tight schedule. 2-minute micro lessons and 1 task per day. Giving you small wins that add up to big results.

You are set up for failure before you’ve ever met the customer. It happens in customer discovery. Or more precisely, in what gets passed to you as “customer context”.

On paper, everything looks ready. Sales has done the discovery, taken notes, and passed it on to you. The use case is defined, and pain points are listed.

But there’s something critical missing: Clarity and Depth.

When you are taking over, you are not working from a true understanding of the customers and their needs. You are working with a compressed version of it. And that changes everything that comes after.

Many CSMs don’t experience this as a problem. They experience it as normal that the customer discovery is a sole sales responsibility.

This is another symptom of the CSM identity crisis. You are responsible for making customers successful without having the full context.

In today’s post, you’ll learn why it is happening and what the consequences are.

The lack of context does not happen because sales is running a poor discovery. It’s that sales and CSMs are different jobs. The sales discovery is optimized for one thing: Closing the deal (fast). It’s not to fully understand the customer’s reality.

Enough to buy. Not enough to realize the outcomes. If you are solely relying on the information you get from the hand-off, you are operating based on assumptions - across the whole customer journey.

Customer goals are not verified. Are they achievable with the product? Are they realistic given the status quo? Are they making sense to pursue this particular customer? And quite often, they are not clearly defined, but something like “we want to improve operational efficiency”?

Customer success plans become use-case documentations. The critical part of your success plans is not the goals, problems, KPIs, etc. It’s the steps that customers need to take to go from the status quo to the desired outcome. Without context, the customer journey becomes a black box.

If the customer journey becomes a black box, you can’t track progress. And you can’t intervene in time. You only identify issues when they are already at your doorstep. And you are (often) out of time to turn the tide.

Customer enablement does not work. If you don’t know the gaps, how could you provide the required education and training? Your only options are trial and error or one-size-fits-all.

And yet it looks like everything is working. This is the part that makes it dangerous. Because nothing looks broken on the surface.

If customers are not actively asking for help or complaining, you might only find out when they “suddenly” churn. This is one of the most overlooked symptoms of the CSM Identity Crisis.

You are operating in a system that feels complete, but is missing the depth required to produce outcomes intentionally and consistently.

And this is important. It’s not about you doing something wrong. Most likely, you are compensating for the gap extremely well. You are highly responsive, engaged, and organized.

This is a CSM identity problem. For years, the profession has treated customer discovery as a Sales responsibility. While you were taught to obsess about creating the perfect handover.

And nobody asked the most fundamental question: Why should the (arguably) most important input in CSM be something that does not come first-hand?

Think about the consequences:

Those are not execution failures. They are downstream consequences of a profession that accepted inherited customer understanding as best practice.

This is one of the gaps the CSM Operating System was built to close.