The Commercial CSM

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

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Let me tell you what is happening in Customer Success right now.

Not the polished version you hear on LinkedIn or in conference talks. Where everything is an opportunity, and the future is bright if you adopt AI.

The real version.

A line is being drawn. Right now. This quarter. Inside your company, inside your leadership team, and inside every budget meeting happening across the SaaS industry in 2026.

On one side of that line: CSM teams that can prove what they are worth in the only language that has ever mattered in a boardroom. Revenue protected. Expansion driven. Forecast accuracy that makes the CRO trust the number. A function that does not have to defend its budget because it generates a return that makes the conversation unnecessary.

On the other side: CSM teams that are still trying to justify their existence with NPS scores, health score dashboards, and relationship stories that land beautifully in a QBR and evaporate completely the moment a CFO asks one question:

"What did CSM actually return last quarter?"

The teams on the wrong side of that line are not failing because they are not working hard enough. They are not failing because they do not care about their customers. They are not failing because the work is not good.

They are failing because nobody can see the work.

And in 2026, invisible work does not get protected. It gets cut.

Today’s episode is about the gap between the CSM teams that learned to speak money and the ones that are still speaking a language nobody cares about, and how to close it.

Talented, exhausted, and running out of time. If you are a reactive CSM, you care deeply about your customers. You work harder than anyone else in the company. You know your accounts better than anyone. You are trusted, liked, and appreciated by the people you work with closely. And you are running out of time.

Your day is built around responding to

Monday morning starts with your inbox. Not your accounts. Not a dashboard. Not a priority list built from data. By the time you have handled the first escalation, it’s already 10 am. By the time you handled all of them, the day is (almost) over.

All while

You are busy every single day. Exhaustingly busy. By the end of the month, you ran dozens of customer calls and cleared hundreds of emails in your inbox. But you have nothing that translates into a number a CFO can hold in their hands.

The reactive CSM is not the villain of this story. You are the victim of a profession that spent a decade measuring the wrong things and wondering why it kept losing the budget conversation.

And in 2026, the reactive CSM is not just losing the budget conversation. You are getting replaced by an AI agent because this is the work they handle best - fast, consistent, and 24/7 - for a fraction of the cost.

The other side starts at the same point. You have the same raw material. The same genuine care for your customers. But somewhere along the way, you made a decision that changed everything about how you operate and how you are perceived.

You decided to stop measuring what was easy and start measuring what mattered. Your Monday mornings start with an account dashboard. Not your inbox. The dashboard tells you where every account stands.

Not based on gut feel or sentiment from the last conversation. Based on outcome progress, stakeholder engagement, and a health score that measures whether customers are getting closer to the goals they committed to at the kick-off.

You instantly know which accounts

Your customer conversations are completely different. They don’t start with “how are things going?” followed by talking about open tickets and other random topics.

They start with "here is where you are against your goals. Here is what we committed to last quarter. Here is what we achieved. Here is what we need to do next." The value story becomes stronger with every conversation.

The commercial CSM is not working harder than the reactive one. In many cases, they are working less. They are just working on completely different things. The things that compound in value, build the revenue story, and make their function impossible to cut.

And here is the thing that matters most: Commercial CSMs are not a different breed. They are not naturally more commercial, more strategic, or have financial literacy.

They are CSMs who made a specific decision and then built the system that made that decision visible to the people who needed to see it. That decision is available to anyone.

There is one skill at the centre of everything the commercial CSM does differently. Commercial fluency. The ability to take your work and translate it into the financial language that is understood by your leadership.

Most CSMs have never been taught commercial fluency. It’s not in the job description. It’s not part of a new employee onboarding program. It’s not coming with any shiny certification (to my knowledge).

And because nobody teaches it, CS professionals learn it the hard way. When they are continuously questioned about the ROI of the work they do.

Commercial fluency is not a personality trait. It is not something you either have or do not. It is a set of specific, learnable capabilities that change how you measure your work, how you capture it, and how you present it.

Most CSM teams measure what is easy to count. Calls held. Emails sent. QBRs completed. NPS scores. Health scores are built on login frequency and support ticket volume.

While these metrics have some use internally, they become irrelevant as soon as you cross the borders. Because neither of them connects directly to financial outcomes that determine whether the company is growing or shrinking.

The commercial CSM is represented in a leadership meeting with 3 numbers:

The CFO does not have to ask what CSM returned. Because they can clearly see it.

This is the money that was genuinely at risk of leaving the business, which did not happen because you identified the signals and intervened successfully.

Not every renewal is revenue protected. The renewals that happen without any intervention, where the account was never at risk, do not count. Protected ARR is specifically the revenue that would have churned without deliberate CSM action.

Example:

You are running an account review and notice that a mid-market account worth $100k ARR has not accomplished a milestone they were supposed to hit 4 weeks ago. You schedule a progress review with the champion and identify that a primary user has left the company, and nobody has replaced their key workflows. You spent 3 days rebuilding it with the new team to catch up.

That is $100k of protected ARR that belongs on the dashboard and leadership meetings. Without a system to surface the signal, that account churns quietly, and nobody in leadership ever knows you could have saved it.

This is the growth that came from existing accounts because you built relationships, delivered outcomes, identified an opportunity, and held the commercial conversation. Not every expansion is influenced by CSM, but the ones that are should be tracked, attributed, and reported consistently.

Example:

During customer conversations, you notice your champion keeps referencing a bottleneck in collaboration with another team that is currently not using your product. You log it, run a discovery over the following weeks, and build a business case that shows how your product can eliminate it. You bring it to the champion with a specific recommendation to expand the deployment. A few weeks later, the expansion closes at $50k.

That is $50K of expansion influenced. It would not have happened without you acting on the signal and capturing additional demand. It belongs in the expansion pipeline and the leadership meeting.

This is the degree to which you can predict renewal outcomes in advance. Forecasts matter to the CFO because they determine the funds that can be invested into the business. If they are built upon more or less random numbers, they are unreliable.

In this scenario, they have to plan for a worst-case scenario. The downside of keeping unnecessarily large cash reserves instead of investing in opportunities. A CSM team that can forecast renewals with high accuracy repeatedly gets noticed and included in financial planning.

Knowing what to measure is the easy part. The hard part is building the discipline and the infrastructure to capture it consistently. Not last-minute under high pressure the night before the leadership meeting. Something that builds itself automatically, from every intervention and every outcome documented throughout the year.

This requires three things:

Not a document filed in onboarding and never opened again. A working document that captures the customer's goals at kick-off, the specific milestones agreed upon, the timeline committed to, and the current progress against each one.

Every QBR starts with this document. Every milestone hit is documented as evidence. Every goal achieved is captured as a line in the value story.

Every time you identify an (accurate) at-risk signal and act on it, record the action and the outcome. Not in a call note that nobody reads. In a structured log that runs into your protected ARR report.

It’s the evidence that you do not just build and maintain customer relationships but actively protect revenue that would otherwise leave.

Every strategic account has a map that shows

When the champion changes, the map is updated. When a new VP joins, the map is updated. When the economic buyer goes quiet for more than 90 days, the map triggers an intervention.

The commercial CSM does not just have the metrics. You also know how to present it in a story and language that moves decision-makers from skepticism to conviction.

The story always follows the same structure.

Expectations: “Here are the goals you committed to at kick-off, the outcomes you were trying to achieve, and the timeline you agreed to.”

Actual: “Here are the milestones you have hit, the outcomes you have achieved, and the value you have created against your original goals.”

Evidence: “Here are the specific actions, conversations, and decisions that moved the needle.”

If you are telling this story with the economic buyer in the room, you are not only protecting the next renewal. You are building a commercial relationship that makes every future expansion conversation easier and renewal seamless.

And telling it internally, with the full portfolio data behind it, it does not just protect CSM from budget cuts. It changes the entire conversation about what CSM is and what it is worth.

There’s no shortage of conversations about becoming a commercial CSM. But what nobody is talking about is how you actually get there. A description of the destination without a roadmap.

CSMs and CS leaders leave the discussion panels and keynotes inspired. Only to return to an inbox and reactive work without a clue on how to get out of it. And when the first hype is gone, everything stays exactly as it was.

The transition is more achievable than it feels. But it requires having the right sequence, the right pace, and the right understanding of what makes change stick.

Before you build anything, spend one week being completely honest about where you actually are. In terms of measurement, infrastructure, and internal credibility. Ask questions like:

Assess the materials and tools you are currently using. Go through your current QBR deck slide by slide and count how many slides contain business outcomes. How many contain specific actions tied to customer results? How many of them are relevant for a CFO?

You’ll be uncomfortable with what you find. That discomfort is the point. It creates the recognition that the current approach is not working. And that’s the foundation for any change to actually stick.

Everything starts with understanding your customers’ needs. If you don’t understand them, you can’t deliberately help your customers to become successful. Your customers’ needs are determined by the

The customer discovery is not a task you only do once in the beginning. Customer goals are evolving, and the problems they need to solve are changing with them.

In week 2, your mission is to build the structure for the discovery you are, at first, running with every new customer. It contains the questions you need to ask and the quality of answers that are required (like a description of the problem).

Customer enablement is the systematic process of helping customers to build the skills, knowledge, and confidence to achieve their desired outcomes using your product.

Start by defining the capabilities your customers need to possess. Then create another list that contains all the content and education you currently provide. Connect both lists to identify what gaps are currently uncovered.

Outline the inputs that would close the gaps and create them. If they require some time to build, like a training program, provide cover with a temporary solution.

With the insights from the customer discovery and the completion of your content and service catalogue, you can now create dedicated customer success plans. Your success plans are covering the gap between your customers’ status quo and their desired outcomes.

They are outlining (top down) the

to it. The success plan becomes your working document. Shared with your customers to get their buy-in and create accountability. Used in all your conversations. Adapted if something is changing.

You need to measure customer outcomes according to the plan. You need to be able to clearly say whether customers are on track, have fallen behind, or exceeded expectations.

Because it is shaping the nature of your conversations and triggering actions. If customers are behind, you need to intervene. If they are on track, you need to ensure they stay the course. If they have accomplished their annual goal within 6 months, they are hot contenders for an expansion.

Map out the data you require, the sources, and how to access them. Yes, tracking outcomes could require sourcing them manually from your customers. But these are the metrics customers use to make decisions.

Customer outcomes that are invisible are useless. You must never rely on your customers’ being aware of the value they get, especially economic buyers who are not in touch with the product.

Map out all stakeholders and their version of success. Translate the outcomes into different languages accordingly. Tell the value story at every QBR/EBR and every other opportunity that presents itself. Build a short deck (1-5 slides) around these outcomes.

If economic buyers are not participating, you need to demonstrate value remotely. Create an ROI report every quarter (or monthly if possible) to ensure they recognize the value before the renewal decision is made.

If you are continuously demonstrating value throughout every quarter, the customer renewal becomes a mere formality. More so when you can show them unused potential within their current tier.

Identify customer growth opportunities and build business cases around them that require additional resources, features, or products (depending on what your company offers). Quantify the additional value they get from increasing their investment.

Create a framework (AI prompt) for identifying those opportunities across your customer portfolio. Build a template for business cases with a before-and-after arch that shows a clear ROI for the economic buyer.

All of the tools and templates you initially built are first versions. Built based on the knowledge you have at this point. When you start using them with your customers, you’ll (likely) uncover

That’s completely normal because this is not a switch-off-switch-on exercise. It’s a transition that takes time - the biggest one you’ll ever make in CSM. Keep refining based on customer feedback and your experiences.

The gap between the reactive CSM and the commercial one is not fixed. It is not determined by talent, experience, or which company you work for.

It is determined by a decision. That decision is uncomfortable. It requires building habits under pressure. It requires having conversations that feel unfamiliar. It requires investing time in infrastructure when the urgent work of the day is screaming for attention.

But here is what is on the other side of it.

The commercial CSM prints money. The reactive one gets replaced. The difference is not talent. It is a decision and a system. Both are available right now.

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