You were set up to struggle

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 did not create the CSM identity crisis. You did not cause it by a lack of talent. You did not cause it by not working hard enough. You did not deserve it because you chose the wrong profession or joined the wrong company.

It was created by a profession that spent a decade building accountability without the infrastructure to live up to it.

That handed you the responsibility for retention and expansion without the strategies, tools, or systems to deliver either consistently.

That taught you to measure activities and customer sentiment, but your leadership does not see it as evidence of your revenue impact.

That is a structural, not a personal failure. But here is the hard part. The crisis is not your fault, but the solution is your responsibility.

It’s not fair, but it’s the only version of the story that ends well. In today’s post, you’ll learn what you have to do to solve the crisis.

I’ve seen this hundreds of times over the years. CS professionals are posting on LinkedIn about the hardships they are facing. Blaming their leadership and their ignorance for it, and calling on them to be rescued.

And I fully confess - I’m guilty of it too. For years, I could not wrap my head around why they are not getting CSM. Dedicating a lot of my content to “illuminating” executives.

But after more than 5 years, I know that the change has to come from within CSM. Waiting for someone else to save you is pointless.

Every week you spend waiting is a week the crisis becomes worse.

Your confidence erodes a little more. Your Sunday anxiety get a little heavier. The gap between how hard you are working and what you have to show for it gets a little wider.

Nothing will change unless you make it happen.

This is not motivational speech. If you want to see the change you desire, you need to take active responsibility.

Taking ownership of the change does not mean working harder. You are already working hard enough.

It means working on different things going in a different direction. Specifically, there are 3 things that permantently resolve the crisis you need to do:

The profession will never agree on what CSM is. You have to clarify it for yourself. That has nothing to do with the your job description. Most of the time they are far from reality anyway.

You need to make this decision based on what actually drives the outcomes that matter. In 2026 the purpose of a CSM is pretty clear by the circumstances surrounding you

Your job is to:

Everything else serves that purpose. Product adoption, building relationships, QBRs, etc. None of it is the purpose itself.

When you have this kind of clarity you can test everything to do. Does it serve the purpose or does it not? That test eliminates a lot of the noise that fills your week.

And it creates the space for the work that actually matters.

How to get started:

Write down the purpose of your role in one sentence. In your own words. Based on what you know drives retention, expansion and commercial credibility.

Then look at your calendar for last week and the tasks you completed.How many hours were spent in service of that purpose? How many were not? That gap is your starting point.

Most CSMs were trained for the wrong job. Attending “accredited” courses that gave them shiny certifications. Creating the illusion of being enabled to deliver, demonstrate and monetize outcomes.

Where they learned how to

while their actual job requires understanding how to

All of these skills can be learned. They don’t require specific personality traits. They don’t require a special kind of talent or a particular background.

What they require is deliberate development. Y

How to get started:

Pick one skill from the list at a time. Ideally, you start with the one that would have the biggest impact on your book of business right now. For most CSMs, that would be uncovering customer needs.

Then identify one specific thing you can do differently in your next customer conversation to develop that skill. Like asking open question and otherwise let the customer do the talking.

This is the hardest part. Because it requires building something when the week is already full of things demanding your attention. But it is also the most important one.

Because taking ownership of the role without a system creates insights but not actions. And applying new skills without a system produce inconsistent results. The system is what makes the change permanent.

Here is what the system needs to contain:

✅ A customer discovery framework that makes every account start with documented goals, problems and capability gaps instead of assumptions

✅ A success planning process that captures the insights from the discovery and transforms them into a roadmap to visualize and track customer progress

✅ A success enablement program that builds the skills and knowledge customers require to complete the tasks and accomplish the milestones of the success plan

✅ A metric system that captures customer outcomes with the KPIs they care about and builds a value story (or flags the lack of)

✅ A stakeholder map to understand what value means to every stakeholder that matters and a framework to translate and demonstrate it in their own language.

✅ An expansion process that outlines how to identify growth opportunities, build business cases and quantify additional customer value

✅ An evidence trail that makes your work visible and undeniably prove your revenue impact to your leadership

None of it takes months to build. The discovery framework takes one afternoon to create and one conversation to deploy. The evidence trail takes 5 minutes per day after every meaningful customer interaction.

The system does not have to be perfect to start working.

It has to exist.

How to get started:

Start with one element from the list. Pick the one that is currently missing the most. Similar to skill building, it’s most likely the customer discovery.

Build the simplest possible version of it for starters. What are the 3 most important questions you need to ask. What is the required quality of the answers? Quality means specific.

The crisis is not your fault. It’s caused by a profession who has been ill-defined from the beginning. You have every right to be frustrated by it.

But that’s not going to change it. The CSMs on the other side of the crisis have grown tired of the waiting. Waiting for change coming from the outside.

They are not waiting for a better job description or a more enlightened leadership team or a profession that finally agrees on what it is.

They have built clarity on the role. They have acquired the skills they need. They have built the system that makes their best performances repeatable.

One step at a time.

And you can do it to.

If you decide to start building it.