Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.
I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM who delivers more value to your customers and revenue to your company every week.
Need additional help? Check out these resources 👇
You Are Not Alone
There are so many CSMs who feel lost right now. It’s not because you are not talented enough. It’s not because you do not work hard enough - on the contrary.
You did not choose the wrong profession or join the wrong company, either.
It is because you work a job that has never been properly defined. And now you are held accountable for outcomes that nobody gave you the tools, the training, or the systems for.
It has always been this way. The only difference is that it has only recently become painfully obvious. Now it’s bursting through the surface like a volcanic eruption.
The CSM identity crisis is here. Caused by a structural failure. And almost nobody is talking about it honestly. Not on LinkedIn. Not in CS conferences. Not in leadership meetings.
And it’s costing you more than you probably realize. Not just professionally but personally. The way Sunday night feels. The way a difficult quarter lands. The way your confidence erodes.
Today’s episode is about the CSM identity crisis. What it feels like, what’s waiting on the other side, and how to get there.
What the Crisis Feels Like
If you have been in Customer Success for more than two years, you know this feeling.
You work harder than (almost) anyone in the company. You genuinely care about your customers’ success. You have built many strong customer relationships.
And yet you
Dread the question "so what does CSM actually do?" because your answer always feels too vague
Saved a key account last quarter through three weeks of heroics and received a polite thank-you email
Have a customer who loves working with you and churned anyway because the CFO never understood the ROI
Took a course, felt briefly inspired and motivated, but changed nothing that matters afterwards
Get blindsided by unidentified churn risks despite having an early-warning system in place
Prepare QBR decks with data that you know the economic buyer does not care about
Find yourself hard negotiating customer renewals again and again
Don’t feel confident talking to customers about expansion opportunities
Walk out of a leadership meeting where every other function presented revenue numbers while you talked about NPS scores and adoption rates.
That is not a list of failures. It’s the fingerprint of a profession in an identity crisis.
The gap between how hard you are working and how its value is received is the crisis.
It’s the inevitable result of being in a profession that has spent a decade arguing about what it is and never agreeing on a single thing.
Are CSMs relationship managers? Revenue drivers? Product educators? Change management consultants? Strategic advisors?
The answer changes depending on which conference you attend, which thought leader you follow, which company you work for, and which week it is.
Most CSMs are trying to be all of these things simultaneously. With no clear priority order. No system to support any of them. And no shared language to explain to the people who control their budget why all of it matters.
It’s insanely exhausting, and it’s the root cause of almost every professional frustration CSM leaders and their team carry every single quarter and struggle to fix.
What It Is Costing You
The identity crisis has a price. Most people pay it without recognizing the invoice.
Sunday anxiety
You know the feeling. It is 7 pm on Sunday. You are not doing anything work-related. But suddenly you are thinking about tomorrow. And feeling the anxiety rising. It’s not about a specific task.
It’s knowing that your intent to do more strategic work ends with opening your inbox. That you will spend another five days grinding, but end Friday afternoon with nothing that has clearly moved forward. And you’ll be feeling an awful lot behind again.
That anxiety is not a productivity problem. It is what happens when the job has no clear definition of what moving forward actually looks like.
Loss of confidence
You keep wondering whether what you do is working. Is anything moving forward? Are the conversations you have the right conversations? Are the things you are prioritizing the things that matter?
You do not know. Not because you are not paying attention. Because there is no system to tell you. That uncertainty compounds. It shows up in important moments. Like when you are in a customer conversation and should push back on a decision that feels wrong, but you remain silent.
And over time, they add up to painful losses. That is not who you are. That is who the job made you without the right infrastructure underneath it.
It costs you the career you deserve
You think about leaving the profession. Like you’ve seen other people do. To roles where:
Success criteria are clear and measurable
Enablement matches the expectations placed on them
Work compounds in ways that are visible to everyone, including the people who decide on promotions and salaries
You are not thinking about leaving because CSM is not valuable. You do because your hope that the identity crisis ends before you are burned out is fading.
What the Other Side Looks Like
Here is what I want you to hold onto: The identity crisis can be resolved.
Not through changing the title. Not through joining a new employer. Not through a complete reinvention of who you are.
It changes the moment you stop defining yourself by what you do and start defining yourself by what you deliver.
That shift sounds simple. It is not. But when it happens, everything changes. Not gradually but suddenly. Like your vision has been blurred all the time, and now you see clearly.
Here is what the other side actually looks like:
Monday mornings feel different
Before: You open the inbox. Seventeen unread Emails. Complaints, requests, repetitive questions, and an escalation from Friday. The week has already started without you.
After: You open a dashboard. Every account's status is visible before the inbox demands anything. The week has a shape before it starts. You know:
Which accounts need intervention this week, and why
Which ones are ready for an expansion conversation
Which renewals are approaching, and where the value story stands
What are your three most important actions before 10 am
There’s still some urgent work to do because no system is perfect. But it no longer dictates your entire week.
Customer conversations are different
Before: "Hi Sarah, just checking in to see how things are going.”
After: "Sarah, I noticed you are at 73% of the next defined milestone. Here is what I think is causing the gap and what I recommend we do about it in the next 30 days."
The customer stops treating you like a vendor who manages their account. They start treating you like someone who understands their business.
That shift from check-in to strategic conversation is what makes renewals inevitable and expansion conversations natural.
The career feels different
When the identity crisis resolves, and you know exactly what you are, what you deliver, and why it matters in a language anyone understands, something changes in how you carry yourself professionally.
The specific things that disappear:
The Sunday night dread
The feeling of being undervalued in leadership meetings
The anxiety before a renewal conversation, you are not sure you can win
The sense that your career is dependent on whether the right people happen to notice you
What replaces them is not confidence in the motivational sense.
It’s the certainty of a professional who knows their value, can prove it on demand, and is building something that compounds in worth every single quarter.
What Creates the Transition
The identity crisis does not resolve through insight alone.
You can listen to every CSM podcast, follow every thought leader, or read every newsletter ever written (including this one).
And still walk into Monday morning with the same kind of anxiety and the same gap between how hard you are working and what comes out of it.
The transition happens when 3 things change simultaneously:
1. Clarity on what the job actually is.
I’m not talking about what the job description says. I’m talking about the job purpose.
In 2026, the purpose of a CSM is to:
Systematically deliver the business outcomes that the customer bought the product for
Make that value visible to every stakeholder who influences the renewal decision
Grow the investment by identifying and converting expansion opportunities
Prove all of the above in the language your leadership understands
Everything else, like the relationships, the check-ins, the QBRs, the adoption metrics, happens to aid that purpose.
When you have that kind of clarity, your job becomes simpler (not easier). Because everything you do can now be measured against the question:
“Does this move the customer closer to the outcome they bought the product for?”
If the answer is yes, you do it. If it’s no, you question it and either stop doing it or change it so that it matters.
2. The skills to match the purpose.
Most CSMs were never trained for the job the profession actually needs them to do.
What they were trained for:
Managing relationships
Responding to escalations
Presenting usage data in QBRs
Being available and responsive
What the job actually requires:
Discovering actual customer needs (not what they say they need)
Building roadmaps that outline the journey to success
Enabling customers (incl. change management) to accomplish their goals
Tracking progress and building a compounding value story
Demonstrating value to every stakeholder that matters in their language
Uncovering growth opportunities and turning them into revenue
These are learnable skills. Every single one of them. But they require deliberate development. They are not a byproduct of accumulated experience.
3. The system to make it repeatable
Clarity and skills without a system produce inconsistent results. Success depends on the right person working the right account on the right day. Failure happens everywhere else.
A system makes the right outcomes repeatable. Independent of who is the CSM, who is the account, and the constellations.
That system needs to contain
A customer discovery framework that guides the conversations and defines the specificity of the gathered information.
A model that defines how customer success plans are structured around customer goals to create visibility and accountability.
An enablement program that arms customers with the skills and knowledge to build excellence on the job
A metric system that is telling you whether customers are succeeding at any point of the journey
A structure to map stakeholders, translate value into their language and demonstrate it.
A process to identify customer growth opportunities, quantify additional value and build business cases
That system is what makes the identity crisis resolved permanently instead of temporary relief.
Final Thoughts
The CSMs on the other side of this crisis are not more talented than you.
They just stopped waiting for the profession to figure itself out.
They stopped waiting for the title change. For the leadership team that finally gets it. For the CFO who suddenly understands what CS is worth.
And they started building something that did not depend on any of it.
The clarity. The skills. The system.
One decision at a time.
The profession will keep debating what CSM is.
You do not have to wait for the answer.
Start your transition 👇