The Engagement Trap

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

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There is a metric that lives on almost every CSM's dashboard. It shows up as evidence of a job well done. It’s not customer retention. It’s not expansion revenue. It’s customer touchpoints.

In many CSM organizations, it’s (still) the center of performance measurement. Born from the idea that more engagement equals more value delivered. That if you are in front of your customers often enough, success is inevitable. It’s not.

It is one of the most seductive lies in Customer Success Management. And it’s costing your team its credibility, annoying your customers, and your company revenue.

In today’s episode, I’ll talk about why it’s so hard to break the engagement trap and what high-performing CSM teams do instead.

The engagement trap doesn't come from bad intentions. It comes from a completely logical response to an ambiguous problem. When CSM first emerged as a discipline, it was absolutely novel.

Companies were figuring out what the role should look like, what it should measure, and how it should operate. Due to a lack of clear outcome metrics, CSM teams measured what they could - the number of activities.

And to this day, when customers churn, the post-mortem analysis often reveals low engagement. The CSM wasn't in front of them enough. Calls weren't happening. The customer felt abandoned.

The conclusion: Engage more often. It’s not exactly wrong because engagement matters. A customer who never talks to their CSM is at risk. But the logic breaks down when you start treating engagement as the goal and not the means to an end.

The trap is reinforced at many levels. CRM systems are built to log activities, so that’s what you do. Leadership reviews activity dashboards, so you optimize for it. QBRs are built around engagement data, so you fill them with it.

Put simply, the system rewards visible effort, whether or not it translates to customer outcomes. Over time, a culture forms where being busy is worn as a badge of success.

The engagement trap isn't just a philosophical problem. It has real, measurable costs on your team, your customers, and your business.

Customer Success Manager is already one of the most emotionally demanding roles in a SaaS organization. You are expected to be advisors, project managers, technical consultants, and relationship builders - across dozens, if not hundreds of accounts.

When your work is rooted in high-volume outreach with no clear purpose behind it, you create a grinding sense of busyness without progress. CSMs who are caught in the engagement trap feel busy all the time, but never like they’re getting ahead.

Your days are full, but you struggle to see any concrete wins. You are essentially treading water instead of swimming.

Customers are busy. They have their own KPIs to hit, their own teams to manage, their own challenges to deal with. When you reach out for the 4th time in a month with a check-in that has no agenda, no new information, and no specific ask, your customers notice.

They begin to feel that you reach out for the sake of it and not for their benefit. It’s triggering what sounds like a paradox: An increased churn risk.

Their CSMs are wasting customers who feel their time is less likely to take calls, less likely to engage with QBRs, and less likely to advocate internally for renewal. You can engage your way into a churn.

This is arguably the most damaging cost of all. CSM leaders go into budget reviews or board meetings, presenting their team’s impact with engagement metrics. But CFOs and CEOs don’t care about them.

What they care about is how much revenue has been retained and expanded because of all that engagement. If you can’t answer that question clearly and comprehensibly, CSM looks like a cost center. And cost centers get cut.

That does not mean engagement does not matter. Because it does. Relationships matter. Presence matters. Being accessible and responsive to your customers matters. The question isn't whether to engage, it’s when and how.

High-performing CSM teams operate based on a simple but powerful principle: Every touchpoint must help customers to move forward toward their desired outcomes.

Every single interaction - calls, emails, reviews, and training sessions- is supposed to enable and support progress. That changes everything about how you structure CSM motion.

Instead of scheduling calls because it's been two weeks since the last one, CSMs ask:

If the answers are clear, you schedule a call. If they are not, your outreach must wait. That does not necessarily mean less engagement. But what it means is that your outreach is more targeted, more prepared, and more valuable.

Customers who only hear from their CSM when there's something genuinely useful to discuss respond very differently from customers who hear from their CSM because their cadence said so.

The calendar-based cadence is useful for quarterly business reviews and annual renewal conversations. But otherwise, sticking to it often leads to missing the moments that actually matter.

Milestone-based engagement is different. It means being in front of the customer when their priorities shift. When they are struggling to adopt a key workflow. When their business has gone sideways.

These are moments where CSMs can demonstrate genuine strategic value and where customers are most receptive to meaningful conversation.

The most prominent symptom of the engagement trap is Customer Health Scores that heavily weigh engagement. If a customer is red because their CSM hasn't called them in three weeks, but green because they're logging in daily and seeing proven ROI, something is misconfigured.

Accurate health scores are built around signals that actually predict retention and expansions, like

Engagement metrics can be included as one signal, but they should never be dominant.

Breaking free from the engagement trap requires a mindset shift. And it requires a different operating model that is built from the ground up around outcomes instead of activities. Here's what that looks like:

Every customer relationship should begin with a clearly defined and documented goal and mutually agreed-upon success metrics. “Improving team productivity” does not meet the criteria. “Reducing time-to-clos on support tickets by 30% within 90 days” does.

If your customers don’t know what they want to accomplish, it’s up to you to guide them. This goal is the North Star that everything you do is connected to.

After the success criteria are defined, you co-create a success plan that maps the customer’s journey from the current state to the desired outcome. This plan must include milestones, tasks, and inputs (and optional timelines).

It’s a dynamic document that gets updated after meaningful touchpoints. And it becomes the agenda for every customer interaction. No more “I wanted to check in and see how things are going.” outreach.

Replace activity dashboards with outcome dashboards.

This shift is forcing you to think differently about the work you do. It gives your leader the metrics they need to tell a compelling story to their boss.

You need to quantify and demonstrate the value your customers have already received before the renewal conversation. Before executives ask and before customers start looking for alternatives.

Share monthly or quarterly (QBRs) ROI reports that connect product usage to business outcomes. They are not nice-to-haves. They are a tool to secure retention and trigger expansion.

The best CSMs don't ask “How can I sell more to this account?” They ask, “What else can we help this customer to achieve?” Customers don’t care about your quota. What they care about is value.

If your expansion conversations are rooted in (further) growing customer value, they are easier to have, easier to close, and more durable in their outcomes. They don’t even feel like sales conversations. They feel like the natural next steps.

CSM leaders must change how they report to the executive team. Stop leading with engagement and sentiment metrics. Start leading the conversation with

and share the behind-the-scenes stories that demonstrate how your CSMs’ efforts correlate with the business impact. This is how CSM becomes perceived as a growth engine instead of a cost center.

Making the shift from activity-based to outcome-based CSM is not simply flipping a switch. It requires deliberate change management, especially if you have been operating in the engagement trap for a long time.

Here's how to approach it without breaking what's working:

Start by looking at the activities in the last 90 days across your book of business. For every logged touchpoint, evaluate its impact. Identify the patterns behind the activities that helped customers advance and those that did not.

This audit can be quite uncomfortable when you realize how much time is wasted. But it’s necessary as a starting point for building something better.

The goal is not to stop engaging with customers. It’s to make every engagement earn its place. Keep your cadences as the backbone, but change the agenda.

Replace catch-up calls with milestone reviews. Replace check-ins with success plan updates. The frequency might stay the same; the purpose becomes completely different.

One of the fastest ways to shift the dynamic is to talk with your customers about what you're trying to do together. Share the success plan. Walk them through the milestones. Ask them to confirm that the outcomes you've defined together still reflect their priorities.

This kind of transparency elevates the relationship from vendor-to-user to strategic partner. Customers who experience that kind of engagement don't churn.

Outcome-based CSM is cognitively demanding. It requires CSMs to understand their customers' businesses deeply, to think strategically about what value looks like in each context, and to prepare for conversations with real substance.

If your CSMs are managing 80 accounts and spending 4 hours a day logging activities in the CRM, they don't have the space to do it. Realistic portfolio sizes and helpful tools are prerequisites to outcome-based CSM work.

You cannot run an outcome-based CSM model on activity-based metrics. Invest in building the dashboards, reports, and data pipelines that make customer progress visible

These metrics take time to build, but they are the foundation for everything else.

Engagement is the road and not the destination. The engagement trap is seductive because it feels like diligence. A full calendar feels like accountability. A high touchpoint count feels like coverage. An active CRM feels like a healthy book of business.

But customers don't renew because you called them twice a week in the last quarter. They renew because they are achieving outcomes they couldn't achieve without you.

They expand because you've shown them new ways to create value. They advocate because you've made their lives measurably better.

The CSMs and CSM leaders who understand this distinction are the ones who build teams that survive budget cuts because they can prove their revenue impact. Teams that earn real seats at the executive table because they speak in outcomes.

The path out of the engagement trap starts with one question: Does this help customers to move forward? If the answer is yes, go for it. If it’s not or you don’t know, postpone until it does.