Transforming Customer Success Management

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, deliver more value for your customers, and turn it into revenue for your company every week.

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Customer Success Management faces the most critical crossroads in its history. What began as a response to customer churn has evolved into the most misunderstood function in modern business operations.

Leading to two extremes: The 1% of companies that have turned CSM into a growth engine. And the other 99% that are doing everything customer-related that is not covered by traditional support.

Their days are filled with

Their calendars are tightly packed with meetings, their Email inboxes are buzzing overflowing and their Slack channels are non-top buzzing.

They are working insanely hard but here comes the plot twist: Despite all the sweat, blood and tears

And the saddest part: CSM is continued to be viewed as a necessary cost center and not a revenue growth engine.

👉 In today’s post, I want to take you on the journey of transforming CSM from fire extinguishing to printing money.

The challenge facing Customer Success today isn't a people problem; it’s a systems problem. Even the most talented and dedicated CSMs end up in reactive cycles if their organizations lack the operating system for proactive, value-driven work.

If you are looking at the typical (fully packed) CSM day, each activity feels important to keep customers engaged. But they are rarely leading to predictable, measurable outcomes. This reactive approach creates major problems:

Unpredictable Value Delivery: Without a system that defines what inputs are required, when, and for whom, success depends on individual CSM capabilities and customer-specific circumstances, rather than a repeatable process.

Inconsistent Growth Outcomes: Expansion opportunities emerge randomly instead of following predictable patterns resulting from value realization and customer maturity.

Resource Inefficiency: High-touch efforts are wasted on customers who don’t need them, while there’s inadequate coverage for customers who require more.

Measurement Challenges: Activity-based metrics (such as meetings held, response times, and satisfaction scores) don't correlate with customer retention and expansion.

The solution isn't better CSMs or more sophisticated tools - it's a fundamental reimagining of how Customer Success operates as an organizational system.

Transforming Customer Success Management from reactive (extended customer support) to growth engine requires to build an operating system. A comprehensive framework that defines how to deliver, grow and monetize value.

Across every customer interaction and lifecycle stage. From making a lasting first impression to identifying and capturing expansion opportunities. The transformation requires 4 fundamental shifts in how you think and execute.

Traditional Customer Success operates in response mode. You wake up each day asking, "What do my customers need today?" While it puts the customer at the center, a request-driven approach limits the potential for business impact.

The transformation begins with reframing the fundamental question: "What outcomes do my customers need to achieve to justify their investment and create expansion opportunities?”

Example: A customer asks for help configuring a new dashboard. The traditional response would be to share a help article or schedule training. Success would be measured by feature adoption and satisfaction with the provided support.

The outcome-focused CSM approaches the same request differently:

This approach ensures that every customer interaction contributes to measurable business outcomes rather than simply completing a task.

It also enables CSMs to identify when customer requests are not aligned with their goals. Instead of wasting time on both sides by simply fulfilling every request, they can guide customers to the activities that drive real business value.

Measuring effort rather than impact is still common among CSM teams. They track

But none of them accurately predict customer business outcomes. In some cases, there’s no correlation at all. Value-based measurement requires completely different metrics.

Time to Value: Speed of delivering the first measurable results for customers after the initial implementation? This metric shows the quality of the customer onboarding.

Adoption Depth and Breadth: Value-based adoption metrics don’t track statistics like the number of logins or dwell times. They measure whether customers are running the workflows critical for success.

Value Milestone Progression: Tracking customer results across defined stages in their success journey to identify bottlenecks, delays, and deviations based on defined intermediate goals.

Quantified Business Impact: Directly measuring revenue influenced, costs saved, efficiency gained, or other success metrics tied to product usage defined by the customer.

Example: Customer A has weekly calls, gets prompt email responses, completes all QBRs, and leaves a positive CSAT score. But adoption remains limited to a small team, workflows have barely changed, and no measurable impact has been achieved.

Customer B has occasional calls, does not reach out proactively, attends a QBR once a year, and skips the CSAT survey. But they have achieved significant improvements across all KPIs, expanded multiple times, and their business processes have been rebuilt around the product.

Traditional activity-based assessments would consider Customer A as healthy and Customer B as a churn risk. The value-based assessment would come to the complete opposite conclusion and would be correct.

Strong customer relationships make it easier to deliver customer value. But they can’t replace it. Customers can genuinely like and trust their CSMs, but they still churn if the product does not move the needle.

Dependency is when customers can’t accomplish the same outcomes without your product. It creates a lasting barrier to churn and expansion opportunities as customers businessess grow.

Building dependency requires strategic thinking about how solutions integrate into customer workflows:

Process Integration: The product does not simply help your customers to do their job, but their activities are built around it, making its removal disruptive and costly.

Data Dependency: Important business metrics and insights flow through the product, making it indispensable for decision-making.

Stakeholder Reliance: Multiple stakeholders from different departments use the product for their daily jobs, creating organizational resistance to change.

Performance Measurement: KPIs are directly tied to using the product, which makes the results visible and attributable.

Example: A CSM has built an excellent relationship with a mid-market customer. Regular calls are friendly and productive, issues are resolved quickly, and the main contact consistently praises the support received. From an outside perspective, there’s not the slightest clue that there might be an issue.

But during the renewal discussion, the customer mentions that they are exploring alternatives. While the product is helpful, it isn’t critical to their core operations and could be easily replaced with one of the many alternatives.

Talent and effort can create success occasionally, but it can’t create predictable and scalable business outcomes. Even exceptional CSMs are reduced to reactive grinding without a system enabling proactive and prescriptive work.

A Customer Success Management Operating System provides the structural framework that enables consistent value delivery regardless of individual CSM capabilities.

Customer Discovery: Structured conversations with a clear definition of the information that is required from customers.

Success Planning: Converting the information from the customer discovery into actionable milestones, tasks, and required inputs.

Customer Enablement: Providing dedicated content and services that help customers build the skills and knowledge to succeed.

Measuring Success: Building a metric system that measures results with the metrics they care about and detects visible and hidden churn risks.

Value Demonstration: Highlighting the outcomes according to stakeholder demands and effective distribution to ensure ongoing awareness.

Value Monetization: Identifying customer expansion opportunities on clear signals and converting them with a structured approach.

With an operating system, delivering, growing, and monetizing value not only become predictable, but improvements can be systematically implemented and measured.